Quintessential Jonathan

It was only a year ago, but many worlds away, Jonathan and I took a few hours off from a conference to hike in the hills above Las Cruces, New Mexico. The conversation wandered around people we know in common, those we have lost, and ideas we shared over 25 years as friends and colleagues. We kept returning to the topic of legacy, however, based on Jonathan’s recent reconceptualization of the term (Silin, 2020) and my interest in thinking more about it. As I listened to him explain his more generative version of this venerable notion, I remember thinking how these ideas were so quintessentially Jonathan

Introduction to the Guttman Articles

The Guttman Center for Early Care and Education came about through a 2016 grant from the Guttman Foundation to provide a quality professional development and support system to child care providers and practitioners in East New York, Brooklyn. The program paired coaching with Saturday workshops delivered in the community to address local community needs. Following participants’ graduation, the program initiated a learning network to promote continued peer learning (see the articles in this issue by Robin Hancock and Marjorie Brickley). Although the project has ended, the learning network—and thousands of interactions from the many relationships that were formed—remain and continue to evolve. Children, practitioners, parents, and Guttman program staff have changed for the better as a result of the work in which we all were deeply engaged

What We Bring With Us and What We Leave Behind: Six Months in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The authors, a family, reflect on their experiences living, volunteering, and going to school in South Africa for six months. They sought to live in a society in which white people were not the majority and to experience the transformation of the new South Africa, not as tourists, but as participants

Infant Toddler Care and Education: Speaking Up for Young Children and Their Caregivers

Much of the policy-and practice-focused research on infant-toddler care and education has been concerned with the issue of program quality. That is, what elements constitute a quality program for infants and toddlers that ensures their ongoing developmental success? Researchers have sought to identify the structural and process indicators necessary for young children to receive the kinds of responsive interactions that contribute to positive developmental outcomes

I Want To Know Why

In this article, an early childhood coach and her mentor coach tell one story of their year of joint reflective work together. They follow the topic of outdoor play in birth-to-three and early childhood family-based care programs as it surfaced at the beginning of the year. This inquiry expanded into the coach’s burgeoning understanding of the meaning of experience for very young children, which became a parallel process in the coach’s work with practitioners. Together, the coach and mentor coach describe the ways in which they created a more authentic and meaningful way to think about outdoor time and environments for young children and how Bank Street’s developmental-interaction approach could inform the coach\u27s practice with early care practitioners

A Framework for Coaching in Early Childhood Settings: Drawing on Bank Street College of Education’s Developmental-Interaction Approach (DIA)

Coaching helps teachers activate and better articulate their previous knowledge, skills, values, and belief systems, along with new concepts, to construct and continually refine an approach that is meaningful in their everyday work. This framework captures some commonalities of a positive coaching stance across contexts while allowing enough flexibility to make use of these ideas in ways that will serve that setting and teachers best.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/bsec/1009/thumbnail.jp

Effect of high-dose simvastatin on brain atrophy and disability in secondary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS-STAT): a randomised, placebo-controlled, phase 2 trial.

BACKGROUND: Secondary progressive multiple sclerosis, for which no satisfactory treatment presently exists, accounts for most of the disability in patients with multiple sclerosis. Simvastatin, which is widely used for treatment of vascular disease, with its excellent safety profile, has immunomodulatory and neuroprotective properties that could make it an appealing candidate drug for patients with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis. METHODS: We undertook a double-blind, controlled trial between Jan 28, 2008, and Nov 4, 2011, at three neuroscience centres in the UK. Patients aged 18-65 years with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis were randomly assigned (1:1), by a centralised web-based service with a block size of eight, to receive either 80 mg of simvastatin or placebo. Patients, treating physicians, and outcome assessors were masked to treatment allocation. The primary outcome was the annualised rate of whole-brain atrophy measured from serial volumetric MRI. Analyses were by intention to treat and per protocol. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT00647348. FINDINGS: 140 participants were randomly assigned to receive either simvastatin (n=70) or placebo (n=70). The mean annualised atrophy rate was significantly lower in patients in the simvastatin group (0·288% per year [SD 0·521]) than in those in the placebo group (0·584% per year [0·498]). The adjusted difference in atrophy rate between groups was -0·254% per year (95% CI -0·422 to -0·087; p=0·003); a 43% reduction in annualised rate. Simvastatin was well tolerated, with no differences between the placebo and simvastatin groups in proportions of participants who had serious adverse events (14 [20%] vs nine [13%]). INTERPRETATION: High-dose simvastatin reduced the annualised rate of whole-brain atrophy compared with placebo, and was well tolerated and safe. These results support the advancement of this treatment to phase 3 testing. FUNDING: The Moulton Foundation [charity number 1109891], Berkeley Foundation [268369], the Multiple Sclerosis Trials Collaboration [1113598], the Rosetrees Trust [298582] and a personal contribution from A Pidgley, UK National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) University College London Hospitals/UCL Biomedical Research Centres funding scheme

Corrigendum to: community-based health workers implementing universal access to HIV testing and treatment: lessons from South Africa and Zambia-HPTN 071 (PopART).

In the originally published version of this manuscript, the spelling of the co-author’s name was incorrect. The name should be “Mubekapi-Musadaidzwa” but is listed as “Mubekapi-Muzadaidzwa”. This error has now been corrected online

Community-based health workers implementing universal access to HIV testing and treatment: lessons from South Africa and Zambia-HPTN 071 (PopART).

The global expansion of HIV testing, prevention and treatment services is necessary to achieve HIV epidemic control and promote individual and population health benefits for people living with HIV (PLHIV) in sub-Saharan Africa. Community-based health workers (CHWs) could play a key role in supporting implementation at scale. In the HPTN 071 (PopART) trial in Zambia and South Africa, a cadre of 737 study-specific CHWs, working closely with government-employed CHW, were deployed to deliver a 'universal' door-to-door HIV prevention package, including an annual offer of HIV testing and referral services for all households in 14 study communities. We conducted a process evaluation using qualitative and quantitative data collected during the trial (2013-2018) to document the implementation of the CHW intervention in practice. We focused on the recruitment, retention, training and support of CHWs, as they delivered study-specific services. We then used these descriptions to: (i) analyse the fidelity to design of the delivery of the intervention package, and (ii) suggest key insights for the transferability of the intervention to other settings. The data included baseline quantitative data collected with the study-specific CHWs (2014-2018); and qualitative data from key informant interviews with study management (n = 91), observations of CHW training events (n = 12) and annual observations of and group discussions (GD) with intervention staff (n = 68). We show that it was feasible for newly recruited CHWs to implement the PopART intervention with good fidelity, supporting the interpretation of the trial outcome findings. This was despite some challenges in managing service quality and CHW retention in the early years of the programme. We suggest that by prioritizing the adoption of key elements of the in-home HIV services delivery intervention model-including training, emotional support to workers, monitoring and appropriate remuneration for CHWs-these services could be successfully transferred to new settings

A communal catalogue reveals Earth’s multiscale microbial diversity

Our growing awareness of the microbial world’s importance and diversity contrasts starkly with our limited understanding of its fundamental structure. Despite recent advances in DNA sequencing, a lack of standardized protocols and common analytical frameworks impedes comparisons among studies, hindering the development of global inferences about microbial life on Earth. Here we present a meta-analysis of microbial community samples collected by hundreds of researchers for the Earth Microbiome Project. Coordinated protocols and new analytical methods, particularly the use of exact sequences instead of clustered operational taxonomic units, enable bacterial and archaeal ribosomal RNA gene sequences to be followed across multiple studies and allow us to explore patterns of diversity at an unprecedented scale. The result is both a reference database giving global context to DNA sequence data and a framework for incorporating data from future studies, fostering increasingly complete characterization of Earth’s microbial diversity