Dr. Haring has served as a practitioner and researcher in the field of education for more than 20 years. For the past 13 years, she has collaborated on federally funded grants measuring the impact of coaching and related interventions on outcomes for educators, students, home visitors, and families. As National Director of Education and Research for one of the nation'e(tm)s home visiting models, she oversaw professional development and supported staff for more than 120 home visiting chapters across the country. In this role she was primarily responsible for evaluating the efficacy, effectiveness, and feasibility of early language and literacy interventions implemented to improve interactions between children and caregivers. She also oversaw the identification and implementation of assessment tools to capture changes in attitudes, beliefs, and practices of parents, children, and childcare providers. Dr. Haring currently supports and trains regional literacy coaches who support more than 60,000 teachers across the state of Virginia.
Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, she served as a speech-language pathologist, special educator, curriculum writer, research scientist, and university professor. She holds a Ph.D. in Special Education with an emphasis in learning disabilities and behavior disorders from The University of Texas. As a mother who benefited from home visiting, she believes strongly in programs that support children and families and the potential these programs have for strengthening families and communities. Angela Rau is the owner of ACTT consulting. Her professional focus is on home visiting, family engagement, workforce development, and coaching. She informed the Parent as Teachers (PAT) relational approach to home visiting.
The first virtual home visiting program, Parents as Teachers @ USC Telehealth, was co-designed by Ms. Rau. This program was selected as the winner of the Gary Community Investments/OpenIDEO Early Childhood Innovations Prize. As PAT Director of Program Innovations and Professional Development, Ms. Rau led training design and the professional development of national trainers. During her term, she drove transitions into virtual training and home visiting. She is an active consultant for The Rapid Response-Virtual Home Visiting (RR-VHV) collaborative. She actively participates in the Start Early Communities of Practice-Professional Development: Pathways to promoting home visitors'e(tm) competence through coaching.
Dr. Innocenti is Director of the Research and Evaluation Division at the Center for Persons with Disabilities and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services, Utah State University. Dr. Innocenti has over 30 years of experience working with infants and young children at-risk and with disabilities and their families in multiple research and model demonstration projects. Using an interdisciplinary model that recognizes the contribution of different disciplines and stakeholders, his research is conducted in and for communities. Recent projects focus on assessment and curriculum, home visiting effectiveness, and preschool intervention to prevent later special education. Dr. Roggman is Professor in the Department of Family, Consumer, &Human Development at Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services, Utah State University.
Dr. Roggman''s research focuses on parenting and children''s early development. She has extensive experience in home visiting research, integrating theory-based inquiry with program evaluation, and training practitioners. She is a strong methodologist with expertise in observational data collection and longitudinal analysis and has authored several observation instruments used extensively by researchers and practitioners. She was principal investigator of a local research team for the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project. Kimberly Allen, Ph.D., BCC, CFLE, is Interim Associate Dean and Director of Academic Programs and Professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State University as well as co-creator of the Family Life Coaching Association.
Lori Bass, Ph.D., is a child language researcher and speech-language pathologist. As a researcher, she has a long-standing interest in the academic outcomes of children from CLD backgrounds, developing classroom-based instructional programs that benefit all children, and supporting the pragmatic development of students who are neurodiverse. Dr. Bass has more than 20 years of clinical experience supporting children and families from birth to young adulthood. Currently, she is the sole proprietor of Outside the Box Therapy Services. She provides home visiting support to children with complex communication needs in a large, urban city in the Southwestern United States.
Rebecca S. Beegle, M.Ed., began her career in education as a teacher in the 1980s. She transitioned to Reading Coach in 2003, then to Reading Technical Assistance Specialist with the University of Texas System a year later. In 2007, UT Houston''s Children''s Learning Institute invited her to become a Coordinator of Education Outreach. There, she developed and presented training on topics like research-based literacy instruction and effective coaching strategies, and then became Program Manager for the development and study of a reading intervention program. She retired from UT Health in 2020.
Currently, Ms. Beegle consults for the University of Virginia and is the Early Childhood Coach for Midlothian ISD in Texas. Joanne Bielecki, Ph.D., is Director of Training and Implementation for the National SafeCare Training and Research Center. She has experience in prevention education and curriculum development. Prior to joining NSTRC, Dr. Bielecki was Director of Guidance at a school in Corpus Christi, Texas.
She also worked as a Behavioral Specialist for the U.S. Marine Corps. Dr. Bielecki was a SafeCare Consultant, evaluating the program''s curriculum and recommending improvements prior to joining the SafeCare team in 2018. Michaela Cotner, M.A., is a Research Associate at Georgia State University''s School of Public Health and the National SafeCare Training and Research Center where she conducts studies on the implementation of interventions to prevent child maltreatment and to address secondhand smoke exposure.
Previously, she worked as a Research and Evaluation Coordinator at a public health center in New York City. Ms. Cotner received her BA and MA in Psychology at the University of Georgia and New York University, respectively. Her research interests include race, gender, masculinity, and their impact on the mental health and body image of marginalized populations. Arshya Gurbani, M.A., is a Ph.D.
student in epidemiology at Georgia State University and a graduate research assistant with the National SafeCare Training and Research Center. She is a health communication specialist whose research interests lie at the intersection of chronic disease prevention, health equity, and statistical modeling. Mary Louise Hemmeter, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Special Education at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on effective instruction, social-emotional development, challenging behavior, and on coaching teachers. She has been a principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on numerous projects funded by the U.S.
Departments of Education and Health and Human Services. Through her work on the National Center on Social Emotional Foundations for Early Learning and Institute of Education Sciences (IES)-funded research projects, she was involved in the development of the Pyramid Model for Supporting Social Emotional Competence in Young Children and practice-based coaching, a model for supporting teachers in implementing effective practices. She is currently the PI on on an IES-funded development project on programwide supports for implementing the Pyramid Model , a co-PI on an IES developmental project on implementing the Pyramid Model in infant-toddler settings, and a co-PI on an IES efficacy study examining approaches to supporting teachers in implementing embedded instructions. She is a co-author on the Connect4Learning Early Childhood Curriculum and the Teaching Pyramid Observation Tool (TPOT(tm)). She was a coeditor of the Journal of Early Intervention and President of the Council for Exceptional Children'e(tm)s Division for Early Childhood (DEC). She received the Merle B. Karnes Service to the Division Award and the Mary McEvoy Service to the Field Award. Adam Holland, Ph.
D., is a technical assistance specialist at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His interests include motivation in early childhood, promoting cognitive development in young children, equity, and understanding the effects of proximal processes on children''s social and emotional competence. Currently, Dr. Holland serves as the Chair for the International Early Childhood Inclusion Institute, an annual conference hosted in Chapel Hill, NC, and works as a co-investigator on the U.S. Department of Education-funded STEM Innovation for Inclusion in Early Education (STEMIE) Center. Hyun-Joo Jeon, Ph.
D., is a professor of Human Development and Family Science at the University of Nevada, Reno. She received her Ph.D. from Iowa State University. She has been involved in a number of large research projects that include Project HOME, a part of the National Early Head Start Program Evaluation, and the Midwest Child Care Research Consortium Project, which is a collaboration inv.