An AEPS Success Story: 6 Questions with Jennifer Grisham of the EC Laboratory

The Early Childhood Lab is an inclusive program for children with and without disabilities that are between the ages of birth and six years. All our teachers at the ECL are certified in interdisciplinary early childhood education, and most of them have a master's degree. We also support graduate students who serve as our teaching assistants, and we provide them with a stipend and pay for their graduate education.

Our philosophy at the ECL is that all children can learn, and that they can learn within hands-on active play activities . We want to address the individual needs of our children and also their group needs. We actively involve our families, and we serve as a child care program for the campus and the community.

Our services for children with disabilities are provided by the local public school and by our early intervention programs. They don't pull children out—instead, they offer an integrated therapy model where children are provided the services in the classrooms.

First, AEPS is sensitive to a child's progress. For each goal, there are objectives that fall under it. If there are children who have not reached the goal, we can look at those earlier prerequisite skills to see what they are missing.

AEPS also allows for adaptations, accommodations, and modifications. If a child has a specific disability, we can modify AEPS items to allow children to perform the item in a different way. For example, if a child is using a wheelchair to move around the environment, we can still say that the child “walks avoiding obstacles,” because the child is performing the function of that skill: to be able to move around your environment.

Finally, within AEPS, we have something called foundation steps. These are even earlier skills than the objectives. These foundational steps can be used to task analyze a goal or objective for children with disabilities, especially those with more significant delays. We can use those foundational steps for teaching and goal development.

Assessment is important because it should guide everything we do with children. If you don’t have good assessment, you can't have a good curriculum. Our teachers at the ECL will tell us that they don't really feel like they're teaching until after they complete AEPS, because AEPS helps guide their instruction. They identify those goals for children so that when they're implementing activities, those activities have a specific purpose. Because there's intentionality behind the activities, they know they’re meeting the goals of the children that they're working with.

It's also important to do assessments so we have information about children's developmental status. It's crucial to see how children are progressing over time. With AEPS, we can see if there are any concerns or struggles that a child might be having that we need to address.

First, I'll talk about the benefits of having an MTSS, or multi-tiered system of support, curriculum. We believe AEPS is one of the first and only MTSS curricula for children in early childhood programs. Our teachers and providers are working with highly diverse groups of children, and we see children who are functioning at a wide range of development. We also see children who need universal strategies in some skill areas, while other children will need more focused or systematic strategies for learning. AEPS provides that.

AEPS is also an activity-based curriculum—within each of the curriculum guides, we have 18 activities and routines that could be embedded into a classroom or home. This helps us provide supports to children on the specific goals they need to learn in those environments.

We have strategies that the providers and teachers can access, and we can share those with families, too. For example, if a family says that a child needs to work on their bath time routine, we can look in the curriculum and find which AEPS skills can be embedded into that routine. We can share strategies at the universal, focused, and systematic tiers to help support that child while they’re engaging in that routine.

Well, we have a strong belief with our AEPS work that families need to be actively involved in all aspects. First, we provide families with information on what the AEPS system is about, what areas that it assesses, and how they can be engaged in the system.

We also get information from families to help set our priorities, and the AEPS system has two tools for doing that. The first is the AEPS-3 Family Report. This tool gives us information about the routines and activities families might be struggling with, so we can offer support in those areas when we're working with the child.

The second tool is the AEPS-3 Family Assessment of Child Skills . This form allows us to gather information from families about their perceptions of their child's development in the areas they have concerns about. At the end, we get overall priorities we can use when we're developing the IFSP or IEP. In our school, we develop individual plans for every child, so it’s important to have the family voice at that stage. [Download samples of the forms here.]

We also want the family's voice in selecting curriculum activities to engage the child in. Again, what are the activities or routines that they're struggling with? What activities and routines do they know their child really likes to do? Those are the activities we would choose for instruction.

Finally, we want family voice in progress monitoring. We can re-administer the Family Assessment of Child Skills and the Family Report, and we can share the Child Progress Record, a visual report that shows how children are making progress and where their gaps in development are.

I think what we're doing for children is what is best for children . I believe AEPS supports high quality assessment, so we can get good assessment information for children with and without disabilities. I believe it helps us write functional goals that can be embedded into activities and routines that are part of a child's daily life. I believe that family-focused programming is important, and AEPS allows us to do that. And I believe we've developed a curriculum that can be used in highly diverse classrooms or home-based programs.

All the things I just described are recommended practices for how we should support young children and their families. And I'm very proud to be a part of a system that allows us to do those things.

Jennifer Grisham is a co-developer of AEPS and an early childhood consultant and trainer. This interview was completed prior to her retirement as Faculty Director of the Early Childhood Laboratory.