Helping the Helpers Sylvia Kennedy-Godin March 14, 2019

How do we encourage, enhance, and empower the human relationships around children and youth in adversity. Real and lasting change can start with finding what ordinary people do extraordinarily well with children in simple, everyday moments. In this workshop session, we practice an approach to understand practice, program, and policy that rely on capturing and learning from everyday, “simple interactions”, in a variety of child development settings. We explore how this approach may complement and support the larger work of professional development and system change in early childhood education. Learning Objectives 1. Using the “simple interactions tool” identify four inter-related elements of development human interactions in everyday practice. 2. Expand the concept of “simple interactions” to imagine how it applies to system-level thinking about programs and policies. 3. Learn to apply the relationship-focused theory of change to practical and policy questions in serving children and families.