Hopefully Spring is here for most of us…along with the newness and change the season brings. As the grass turns green and the flowers begin to bloom, it seems like the perfect opportunity to announce the birth of a new product from GKI. It’s official…GKI will be releasing our new Tier 2 Premium(T2P) this month!
We are SO excited to share this product with home visitors and their supervisors. It has been under development for quite some time and we know that several of you have anxiously awaited the release. Today, we’ve decided to use this blog to share with you some more information about the new Tier 2 Premium. It is our hope that after reading today’s post, you will feel comfortable with what you can expect and curious to begin your explorations of T2P.
When developing T2P, GKI wanted to strongly focus on what it takes to be an effective and skilled home visitor and to provide you with a deeper understanding of the ways that the Growing Great Kids™ and Growing Great Families™ curricula support that. We know…as do each of you know how important your job is as a home visitor! You are given the honor of entering homes and creating opportunities for joyful parent-child interaction all while being able to take part in each family’s unique culture.
Considering this, our goal was to design a product that would further your professional development by providing you with an in-depth exploration of GKI’s 8 Competencies for Effective Home Visiting. As you begin your work in T2P, you will see that GKI wanted the exploration of these 8 Competencies engage you with excitement and a thirst for learning more. Hopefully, you will experience this as you read content, view videos, challenge your understanding with reviews, play around with virtual flip-cards, and participate in interactive exercises. Speaking of interactive, we also worked to provide home visitors the opportunity to interact with their learning experience. In T2P, you will find yourself completing a variety of tasks within each competency to keep you engaged and motivated to learn more. Did we mention that all this learning gets to take place on online? That’s right! All of the T2P content is presented online through the GK Academy.
With T2P living in our online environment, GKI wanted to offer home visitors a wholistic approach to learning. Once you dive into T2P, you will learn that we talk about a variety of topics. Some of these topics include: curricula, activities, Attachment Boosters, Daily Do’s, and Action Tools. GKI believes in you, the home visitors we to serve, so we wanted to take T2P one step further. We wanted you to do more than explore the depths of the curricula, we wanted to challenge your critical thinking skills as an individual and a professional. As you begin T2P, you will learn quickly that we give home visitors the opportunity to review the research that guides GKI’s products. You will find yourself engaging with research on a variety of topics such as cultural humility, serve-and-return interaction, and adverse childhood experiences. Even though all the T2P content is available as an online learning experience, GKI still wanted to ensure that home visitors received a chance to put this content into practice in a real-world way.
You will receive a hard copy T2P Home Visitor’s Guidebook allowing you to view your assignments. Though these assignments are printed in this guidebook, you will be able to record your work with these assignments in the Academy. We recognize that all home visitors are busy and may fear the thought of another task, so let’s take time to discuss the assignments.
GKI wants to provide home visitors with an interactive learning experience, while keeping in mind the chaotic schedule that so many home visitors face every day. As a result, we developed assignments that allow you to explore each of the 8 Competencies while being able to complete most of them during your home visits. After you complete each Competency, you will locate the assignments in your guidebook. These assignments include tasks like completing a module or using a specific Daily Do. Once you finish these tasks, you will reflect on your experiences. Your reflections will be entered online in the Academy and then printed out for you to discuss your thoughts, feelings, and experiences with your supervisor. We did not develop these assignments so that you would feel you have extra work on your plate, but rather we created these assignments to give you a chance to enhance your skillset as an effective home visitor.
You will have plenty of time to complete these tasks and you will find that many of the tasks are things you already do during home visits. This is just a method of organizing your efforts in an intentional way to deepen your understanding of how our curricula support the crucial work you do each day.
T2P is a new way to expand your learning as a home visitor. As you dive into the content of each Competency, it is our hope that you will broaden your knowledge base. After completing each Competency online, you will have the opportunity to turn newly learned knowledge into skills. As you venture into your T2P journey, you will be exposed to many ideas, theories, and concepts. You will bring this all to life in the way that matters most…with the children and families you serve!
More information will be available about this product as we get closer to our actual release at the end of this month. Stay tuned!!
