Using Reflective Tools

As an early intervention provider, you are likely very used to there being a shortage of tools meant just for us. Most of the reflective practice tools focused on culturally responsive home visits are targeted to Head Start or teachers in other school-based programs and the reflective practice we have for early intervention doesn’t explicitly address how to reflect specifically on the cultural responsiveness of your interactions with families. The most helpful resources I’ve found for reflective practice are from Elena Aguilar (2018, 2020), a teacher coach who specializes in moving teachers and schools toward more culturally responsive pedagogy. Some of the most effective tools from her books are the sample scripts and banks of example reflective questions and coaching stems. Aguilar’s resources are targeted at school-age practitioners, so in collaboration with one of the communities of practice I facilitated, I’ve curated a reflective question bank and created a reflective supervision preparation tool tailored to early intervention. These tools were developed as a response to supervisors and EI staff wanting to address culturally responsive practices in their monthly reflective supervision sessions but being unsure of what to ask or sometimes how to identify situations that needed to be analyzed. If you don’t work for an agency that provides reflective supervision, don’t have a secure and trusting relationship with your supervisor, haven’t yet found your critical friend, or are someone who processes best in writing, these tools can be used along with the challenging interactions reflective tool to guide reflective writing.

Additionally, I’ve adapted a continuum of culturally responsive family partnerships from Clarke-Loque et al. (2020) to align with what we do in early intervention. This continuum is a tool to support our growth. As you’ll learn in chapter six, the first steps in change implementation are understanding the problem, assessing readiness to change, and identifying what needs to change. The continuum is a reflective tool meant to help you determine where on the continuum your current beliefs and practices fall so that you can identify what you need to move closer to your goals of cultural proficiency.

This continuum isn’t a grading rubric, and it shouldn’t be used to rate anyone’s performance. Performance reviews around culturally responsive practices create anxiety, shame, and resentment, emotions that are not helpful when doing the hard work of changing our practices. This work is messy and ongoing, and it pushes back against 400 years of American history. We have to give ourselves and others grace to stumble through it. It’s quite likely that once you commit to being a culturally responsive EI practitioner, you will move back and forth along the continuum as the demographics of your community change or you experience personal or career challenges.