Crosswalk Tool Office Hour

Moderator: Welcome to this Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership Office Hour. Be sure to download all handouts, videos, and slides prior to viewing the Office Hour. During the presentation, you may be asked to pause the Office Hour and complete an activity, such as viewing a video, reviewing a handout, or reading a resource. Once you complete the action, return to the Office Hour and continue viewing. Now, let's get started with this Office Hour.

Sheri Fischer: Welcome to this Office Hour about the National Program Standards Crosswalk Tool. My name is Sheri Fischer and I am a Technical Assistance Specialist at the National Center on Child Care Quality Improvement. The Quality Center is a service of the Office of Child Care at the Administration for Children and Families. I will be showing you a demonstration of the National Program Standards Crosswalk Tool that was developed by the Quality Center with support from the Office of Child Care. We collaborated with several national organizations and some states that had created their own crosswalk tools.

One of the reasons we developed this tool was to save states from having to use their resources to create one of their own. This online tool allows users to start to compare the content of several sets of national program standards. Program standards describe the conditions for learning in early childhood settings, as opposed to early learning standards, which describe what children need to know and be able to do.

The Crosswalk Tool was developed with a specific purpose, as this statement describes. It is a way to compare the content of standards and should not be used to determine if a program is meeting a particular set of standards. There is a section of the Crosswalk Tool that describes the set of standards that are included in the Tool. I will show you that page when I open the Tool for the demonstration. There is a description of the organization that developed the Standards and direct links to the Standards document. Contact information is also provided. These are the Federal and national standards that are included in the Crosswalk Tool.

We have Caring for Our Children: the National Health and Safety program standards; and the Stepping Stones to Caring for Our Children, which is a subset of the full set of Care - for Our Children Standards are identified within the tool. We have the Department of Defense Instruction, which is the general requirements for Department of Defense programs, and we have the Head Start Program Performance Standards.

These are the six sets of accreditation standards that are included in the Crosswalk Tool. All of the Federal, national, and accreditation organizations reviewed the standards as they were entered into the Tool. They also alert us to updates in their standards. As you can see, we have included all of the major national accrediting bodies' standards in the Crosswalk Tool. The Tool is organized by a framework of 10 topic areas, each with multiple subtopics that can be searched. There's also a keyword search function. These are the key functions of the tool. First, there's no limit on the topics and subtopics chosen for a search.

There is a keyword search function, as I mentioned earlier. Counts of indicators found for each of the standards are displayed in the results, and I will show that to you during the demonstration. You can choose up to three sets of standards to compare. You can get a printer-friendly version of the results. The results can be downloaded to an Excel file, and in that Excel file, you can add your state's licensing or QRIS standards to the results and be able to compare them with the national standards.

So, now I'm going to go to the actual tool itself on the Web, and this is the link to get there directly. One thing about the Tool is that you need to have an account in order to use the Tool. So, you can click here to register for a new account, and it takes you to a form to fill out with your email and name and title, organization, and then to register. That statement of intended use shows up here again, and we just ask that you agree to that while registering for a new account.

I'm going to type in my username and password, and log in. Here we are on the homepage. First thing I want to show you is the About the Standards section that I mentioned earlier. I'm going to click here on About the Standards, and you can see that all the standards documents — we are — that are used in the tool are listed here. It includes links to the documents themselves, as well as information about the organizations that manage or have developed the Standards. So, for example, here is the information about the Head Start Performance Standards, and if we scroll down, you'll see that all of the sets of standards that I mentioned are listed here.

So, back to the homepage, and here is just an introduction about the tool and how it was developed, the Statement of Intended Use again. Here is a set of instructions on how to use the tool. If you click on that blue bar, it opens it up and it shows, first of all, how to do a search, choosing topics and subtopics, or how to do a keyword search. Then, it talks about how to review standards by organization after you've chosen your topics and subtopics or done the keyword search. Then, how to choose the standards to view, and also when you compare the standards, you can then print them or export the results to an Excel file.

So, let's go to the Search page. This is the Search page, and here are the 10 large topic areas that I mentioned earlier. I'm going to click on some, and you'll see that, for example, Health and Safety has several subtopics underneath that could be searched; Family and Community Partnerships also has several. For today's demonstration I'm going to choose the Learning Environment and Practices.

I'm going to click on Guidance and Behavior, Learning Environment-Indoor, and Teacher/Child Interaction. Then, the next step is to just click on Select Topics. What that brings up is the table that I mentioned earlier where you can review the Standards Policies. This table provides an overview of how many indicators are in the standards that address the topics I've chosen, and can be used to determine whether to include particular standards in my crosswalk. For example, the number 18 appears for Guidance and Behavior in the NAEYC Standards column. That means there are 18 separate indicators in the NAEYC Accreditation Standards that address that subtopic. So NAEYC would be a good choice for my crosswalk. If there is a zero, for example, under the Afterschool Accreditation, then that would not be a good set of standards to choose for my crosswalk.

So, I'm going to choose three sets: I'm going to choose Head Start, National Association for Family Child Care, and NAEYC, because there are several indicators in each set of these standards. Now, I will click the Compare Standards button. This is the Results page. For each topic and subtopic, it shows the three sets of standards across the page with indicators underneath. As I scroll down the Results page, you will see that the indicators are in order by standard number. There is no alignment across the page. So, as you can see here for NAFCC, they are just in a numerical order by the way that the standards themselves are organized within that particular document, and the same with NAEYC.

So, I'm going to scroll down. You'll see that there's multiple indicators under those different sets of topics. Here's our Learning Environment and Practices, the Indoor Learning Environments, and it shows all of the different indicators for the three sets of standards that I chose. I'll just scroll down further, and here is the Teacher and Child Interaction Standards.

So, we know that it's difficult to read this on the screen, so we've provided a couple of options to use the results. First is, you can print. So if I click on the Print button, it brings up my computer's print menu, and you can choose Printer and print that, or which is one of our most exciting features, is the fact that you can download the results to an Excel spreadsheet. I'm going to click on that and open it up. You'll see that we have populated an Excel spreadsheet with all of the standards that were chosen during the crosswalk. So, go across here and you'll see the Head Start, NAFCC, and NAEYC. And at the top here is the bar that shows the subtopic that I chose, which was Guidance and Behavior. Then we scroll down, and here's the Learning Environment-Indoor. And scroll down further is Teacher/Child Interaction. Everything that was found during the crosswalk is populated into this spreadsheet.

Now, this tool was developed so that states can compare national standards to their state program standards. So there are columns for adding a state's licensing and QRIS standards for comparison to the national standards. The columns with the national standards, however, are locked and cannot be edited. But, these columns — text can be added into them to put in a state's standards. I'm going to close that, and you'll also see that there are buttons up here. There's one to modify the search. That means you can go back to the Search screen that you used before and modify the search that you'd just done. I'm going to click this button, which will take us to a new search, and it'll clear out what you had chosen before.

So, what I'm going to do next is show you how to do a keyword search. So I'm going to click New Search, which will clear out the search I did before on the topics and subtopics, and enter in a keyword here in this box. I chose the word Allergies because that's a topic that's of interest, and I'm going to click Search. You will see that the Review Standards tables come up again. This time it shows all of the different topics and subtopics in which the word Allergies appears or addresses that topic in some way.

So, as I scroll down, you'll see that there are several subtopics within Health and Safety that include something about allergies. If we go down here to Nutrition, there is actually a whole subtopic related to allergies, and as you can see, several sets of standards address that there. So, as you can see, it seems as though the Caring for Our Children standards, they have several places in which allergies appear. So, I am going to choose that as what we're going to look at. This tool can be used just to look up a topic within one set of standards or, as I showed earlier, you can choose up to three sets of standards.

So, I'm going to click the Compare Standards button, and this provides the full text of all of the standards from Caring for Our Children that are related to allergies. If we scroll down, you'll see that there are several, and including one that is specifically about allergies and within allergies and other special needs. There's one here about feeding plans and dietary modifications, and the care for children with food allergies is its own standard there. So these results, like the others, can be printed in the same way and can be also downloaded to an Excel file.

So that's basically how the Crosswalk Tool works, and I'd like to invite you to explore the Tool on your own and let me know if there's any questions during the Office Hours. This again is the direct link to the Crosswalk Tool.

So, I want to say thank you for participating in this demonstration of the National Program Standards Tool and wish you best wishes in the successful development of your partnerships. Thank you.

Moderator: Thank you for participating in this Office Hour. Be sure to post your questions and comments in the chat room to the right to connect with your colleagues, as well as the content area experts.

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