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The Children’s Learning Institute Collaborates with The Harlem Children’s Zone

Landry on Panel at Harlem Children’s Zone Summit

Harlem Children's Zone presented a two day conference, “Changing the Odds: Learning from the Harlem Children’s Zone Model.” The sold out conference attracted over 1,400 leaders from non-profit, community, government, and philanthropic organizations who wanted to learn more about HCZ's holistic model, which is breaking the cycle of generational poverty for thousands of children and families in Central Harlem.

The Director of the Children’s Learning Institute, Dr. Susan Landry, participated in this summit as a member of a panel that discussed the challenges and successes of developing effective early childhood programs. Such issues included the importance of involving and educating parents, establishing high standards, defining key components of best practice programs, and linking programs. Dr. Landry also spoke about the successful development and statewide implementation of the Texas School Ready! Program and the Playing and Learning Strategies developed at CLI.

The CLI-HCZ Connection

Harlem Children’s Zone is an innovative community-based organization, offering education, social service and community building programs to children and families since 1970. During the 2008 presidential campaign, the work of HCZ was recognized as being an “all-encompassing, all-hands-on-deck, anti-poverty effort that is literally saving a generation of children.” HCZ is directed by Geoffrey Canada, a nationally recognized advocate for education reform.

In the summer of 2009, Dr. Susan Landry was invited by Canada to collaborate with his agency, resulting in the integration of some CLI programs into HCZ.

In August, Landry and CLI PALS trainer, Ursula Johnson, worked extensively with ten parenting coaches to teach them how to implement Playing and Learning Strategies (PALS) with parents of infants. PALS focuses on critical aspects of parent-child interactions that are linked to better outcomes in a child’s development. The coaches guide parents toward changes in specific behaviors and help them integrate the behaviors into daily interactions. This highly successful program was developed at CLI and has since been expanded to parenting different age groups of children. PALS II training will be offered at HCZ in the spring.

In September, CLI staff trained approximately 80 teachers in New York City at HCZ. Teachers, teacher assistants and many school support staff received two days of high energy training and learning fun for CIRCLE (Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education) training. Four members of the TSR! (Texas School Ready!) project management staff from CLI were partnered with the teachers at the training. This training was conducted at the National Black Theater in the heart of Harlem. Tracy Osborn and Linda Morgan shared the best practices portion of the training. Pauline Monseque-Bailey and Layne Waxley also conducted training.

In October, CLI was again called upon to provide training at HCZ. This time the training was to facilitate observations utilizing the Teacher Behavior Rating Scale (TBRS). This measure was developed at CLI to measure the quality of teaching in preschool, kindergarten and first grade settings. At HCZ, CLI’s April Crawford trained ten staff members to administer this instrument.

CLI has a strong history of successful collaborations with other universities, agencies and organizations. This latest collaboration with HCZ is one more example of how our work is improving the lives of children.

Photos provided by Marty Lipp.