Reference Catalog

Competency Alignment for Pre-Service Home Visitors

Bridget A. Walsh, Carla Peterson, Jennifer Mortensen, and the Collaborative for Understanding the Pedagogy of Infant/Toddler Development (CUPID)

The purpose of home visiting programs is to provide family-centered support for pregnant women, infants, and toddlers in the family’s home, particularly for families facing challenges (Weiss, 1993). Home visiting programs promote secure parent-child relationships and help parents provide high-quality learning experiences across developmental domains (Walsh, Mortensen, Edwards, & Cassidy, in press; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [HHS], 2016). In 2017, at least 3.5 million home visits were provided to families with pregnant women or young children (National Home Visiting Resource Center, 2018), and in February 2018, federal early childhood programs were reauthorized for five more years of funding. A variety of outcomes are targeted by home visiting models, including child development and school readiness, linkages and referrals, parenting practices, maternal health, among others (Sama-Miller, Akers, Mraz-Esposito, Zukiewicz, Avellar, Paulsell, & Del Grosso, 2018). As support and enthusiasm for home visiting have grown, so too have the expectations for home visits and home visitors. It is not surprising that workforce development is a top agenda item in evidence-based home visiting programs (Home Visiting Applied Research Collaborative, 2018; West et al., 2018). One important area of home visitor workforce development is promotion of high-quality pre-service training in higher education. This poster aligns the Collaborative for Understanding the Pedagogy of Infant/Toddler Development (CUPID) home visitor competencies (CUPID, 2017; Roggman et al., 2016) with the Certified Family Life Educator (CFLE) competencies as a framework for high-quality pre-service home visitor training with the hope that the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) can use this alignment to better support the growing and important work of home visitors. This comprehensive alignment may inform the scholarship of teaching and learning in home visiting coursework and FLE content area coursework. This alignment may also promote developing new courses on home visiting, enhancing existing courses to address home visiting competencies, or modifying existing pedagogy. (author abstract)

Finished

• Home Visiting Workforce Characteristics and Workforce Development