Leveraging Joint Planning in Early Intervention: Documenting with Intentionality and Specificity

A family-capacity building approach to coaching, where providers support caregivers to embed identified strategies into daily routines and activities, is commonly embraced in Part C Early Intervention (EI). EI providers use several coaching strategies within this approach, yet few studies have reported process features, and coaching strategies are not well defined in the literature. We partnered in this Participatory Action Research (PAR) with current EI providers engaged in a year-long self-study process to provide an empirical account of one coaching strategy, joint planning, and related documentation. Our results indicate both providers and caregivers view documentation of joint planning as beneficial, highlight supports and challenges, and suggest that joint planning documentation holds significant promise for improving practice, data-based decision making, and progress monitoring of child and family outcomes including changes in caregiver capacity.

Contribution tracing for organisational-wide planning, improved collaboration and evaluative thinking

In 2015, The Wellcome Trust launched a new strategic approach to its work and created a framework to measure success. This article focuses on a particular dimension of this framework: research impact linked to the Trust’s pool of research award holders. This article describes why contribution tracing was chosen as an evaluation approach. It also describes how it was used in innovative ways to handle a large number of cases with potential for impact and develop an organisation-wide evaluation plan that makes the most out of data science techniques while increasing understanding of evaluation and facilitating collaboration and joint planning with colleagues across the organisation.