In the next section of this module, you will learn about the Early Steps IFSP Team Process.

As you learned in Early Steps Orientation Modules One and Two, the foundation of the IFSP team process is built around family-centered practices, interactive, integrated teams, and a primary service provider for each child and his or her family. These three components support providing services in natural environments and reflect the core mission of early intervention, which is to support families to provide learning opportunities for their children within the activities, routines, and events of everyday life.

Click all of the segments of the circle to explore the Early Steps IFSP team process. Enlarge the picture in each segment by clicking on it.

Natural Environments
Providing early intervention within activities that occur in natural settings offers opportunities for the child to learn and practice new skills to enhance growth and development. As Carl Dunst explains in a 1999 report from the Everyday Children's Learning Opportunities Institute, "things that are interesting to children engage them in interactions with people and objects. Engagement in turn provides children opportunities to express existing abilities, learn new skills, and explore their social and nonsocial environments. Opportunities to practice, learn, and explore are conditions promoting children's sense of mastery about their own capabilities and the actions and responses of people and objects. An increased sense of mastery in turn strengthens children's interests, setting in motion once again the development enhancing cycle."

Family-centered
The term "family-centered" refers to a rich constellation of beliefs, philosophies, policies, and practices that define the way we work with families of infants and toddlers that are based on relationships and that are competency-enhancing. At the core of family-centered practice is the recognition that the family, with its unique culture, beliefs, expertise and priorities, is at the center of a child's life and it is the family that is the child's constant support, decision maker and advocate. Within this constellation, the child has many opportunities for learning within the context of their participation in their community, extended family, early childhood services, and their daily living activities.

Integrated, Interactive Teams
Providing family-centered early intervention services in natural environments also requires a change in how teams function. All IFSP team members, professionals and family members, work together to develop the IFSP. Team members share and build upon each other's observations and information. The professionals rely on their conversations with the family and caregivers, and observations of the child to come to an understanding of how to support the family. The family, based on their resources, priorities, concerns and interests, as well as information gathered throughout the initial planning process, determines the outcomes for their child and family. The IFSP team identifies the strategies, activities, supports and services that will be used to achieve the outcomes. The completed IFSP is a result of information sharing and consensus building.

Primary Service Provider
When using a primary service provider approach, the selected provider from the IFSP team uses consultation and coaching as the intervention strategies to foster parents' and other caregivers' abilities to enhance child learning opportunities in existing and desired activity settings. Caregivers can exert much influence on how children turn out, because they spend many hours with the child every week. Providers in turn can have a profound influence on caregivers' competence and confidence, because adults can learn in small time spans and can generalize. One of the most effective routes to achieving child outcomes, therefore, is through caregivers. The IFSP process focuses on expanding the child's engagement, independence, and success in typical daily activities and routines by building on family and child resources and identifying the necessary services and supports to attain identified outcomes. Therefore, it's the regular caregivers who influence the child, and professionals can influence those caregivers.