Bring LENA Grow to your organization with excitement and intentionality.
Congratulations!!! You are getting started with LENA Grow!
You may be in the early stages of learning the program or expanding to reach more children and providers in your area. Either way, this is a good time to start building knowledge and excitement among your team. Even if you don’t have your plan fully developed, it’s good to give the people who will be involved a head’s up about what’s coming.
The goal is to have program managers and coaches feeling supported and engaged in the training process so they feel confident and convey that energy to center directors and teachers in the early stages of the program and beyond.
We suggest introducing LENA Grow at a team meeting where you can share your plans and goals and let people know what their role may be. If that is not possible, an email could be effective too. Here are some resources and sample language you may use to start bringing your team up to speed:
Resources to share in a meeting:
- All About LENA Grow video
English | Spanish - Introducing LENA Grow to Your Community presentation
English | (Spanish)
Sample intro email:
Dear Team,
I’m excited to share [PROGRAM NAME] is adding LENA Grow as a tool to enhance our approach to coaching and supporting classrooms. You may already be familiar with LENA, or this may be the first time you are hearing about it.
At its simplest, LENA Grow is a practice-based professional development program designed to increase interactions between teachers and the children in their care. It’s unique because it uses a “talk pedometer” tool to gather information about the language environment in the classroom and then provides coaches and teachers with objective data that they can use to set goals and ensure that each child in the room is having enriching experiences during their day. This is especially important to us as an organization because we’ve been following the research about how early engagement has long-term impacts on brain development. Check out a quick video about the program here.
Our goal with LENA Grow is [PERSONALIZE THIS: to provide this tool to all Infant/Toddlers rooms by the end of the year/try it out in 10 rooms and then see how we could expand it to all rooms/use it in all classrooms as a regular part of the coaching process.]
We don’t have all of the details determined at this moment, but if you are receiving this email we think that you will be a contributor to this effort either as a coach or through some other capacity. You will likely be asked to participate in the training process for LENA Grow over the coming weeks.
If you have questions as more information comes out, please don’t hesitate to contact:
[Insert Program Manager info.]
We are looking forward to working together to elevate the experiences of the teachers and kids in our programs! Thank you in advance for your partnership in this innovative work!
Good luck! Don’t hesitate to reach out to your LENA Grow Partner Success Manager for support!