RBPD Train-the-Trainer
Solving a facilitator shortage for Colorado's early childhood coaching workforce
The Relationship-Based Professional Development (RBPD) course is the Colorado Department of Early Childhood's (CDEC) foundational training for early childhood coaches. It's a strong program, but only a small team of coaches was certified to facilitate it, and demand was greater than their capacity. Participants waited on a long list, and the coaching team could not run enough sessions to meet it.
I led the project to solve that: design a Train-the-Trainer program, which prepares people to facilitate a course, that would expand the pool of qualified facilitators, shorten the waitlist, and eventually eliminate it.
Organization: Colorado Department of Early Childhood
Role: Instructional designer and project lead. I worked directly with the regional coaching team, who were my subject matter experts and stakeholders, and my manager supported project planning.
Timeline: Through August 2025
Deliverables: Training analysis, course design plan, instructor-led training (ILT) slide deck, facilitator guide, participant guidebook, eLearning storyboard, and a set of self-study guides for the standard RBPD course
Tools: PowerPoint, Word, Acrobat, CommonLook
What I did
From analysis to a full set of training materials
I facilitated meetings with the coaching team and coordinated with them throughout the project. Those conversations helped me understand what made RBPD effective and what a new facilitator would need to learn to run it well. I also attended live RBPD sessions to experience the course firsthand, and I conducted a full training analysis to guide the build.
Analysis
I designed the full Train-the-Trainer curriculum.
Design
I developed the ILT materials myself: a slide deck in PowerPoint, and a facilitator guide and participant guidebook in Word. For the self-paced portion, I completed a full storyboard for an eLearning course designed to be built in Storyline 360. I left to start JHaus Training before it moved into development.
Development
A second problem: the self-study guides
Helping participants make up a missed session on their own.
While working on the Train-the-Trainer program, I noticed a related problem in the standard RBPD course. When a participant missed a session, the facilitator had to meet with them one-on-one to cover the material, which was a large time commitment for a small coaching team. I worked with the team to build a set of self-study guides, one for each instructor-led session, that facilitators can give to a participant who misses one. Each guide outlines the key points from the session, tells the participant exactly what to read, watch, and review, lists the homework assignments, and includes questions to answer directly in the document, in place of in-class discussion.
The guides are fillable PDFs, and making a fillable form accessible takes extra steps in Acrobat. I built everything for this project to be accessible, and I checked my work with the built-in accessibility checkers in Word, PowerPoint, and Acrobat, and also with CommonLook, a dedicated accessibility checking tool.
Want to see more of my work?
Head back to my portfolio, or tell me about your project.