Improving quality in early childhood environments through on-site consultation

The implementation of early childhood inclusion has been challenged by the lack of adequate staff development and high-quality community programs. Alt hough consultation is a viable option for providing teachers with new knowl edge, skills, and support to facilitate inclusion, few models use as their foundation assessing and improving global program quality. This article pre sents one model for preparing community-based consultants to work on-site a longside the staff of early care and education programs to improve the qual ity of their early childhood environments. We provide measures of global qu ality in the participating community-based programs, including infant-toddl er, early childhood, and family childcare home settings, to determine the q uality of care that children were receiving before and after consultation.