COS Classroom Foundations course goes directly to the educator. They enroll, work through the material on their own terms, and in their own time, and learn as they engage directly with the course.
That's a deliberate choice, and it matters. COS Classroom is a landmark approach that integrates the field of infant mental health into early care and education. The structure of the Foundations course reduces barriers and gets attachment science directly into the hands of educators. An educator might be an early care professional working in a home based center, an agency, a school. They might be a paraprofessional who can't find coverage, a classroom team that wants to develop an unified approach, a center director working to build capacity for an entire staff on a professional development day. The direct-to-educator format is the first step at getting the information to educators that allows flexibility and makes all of that possible.
But professional development isn't the same as change. The research is consistent on this point. Knowledge transfer alone, however well-designed, produces limited and often short-lived shifts in how teachers actually interact with children. What moves the needle on the quality of teacher-child relationships over time is reflection, structured, supported, and rooted in what's actually happening in a specific classroom with specific children. How do we apply the learning in the heat of the moment when a child is dumping milk on the table?
That's where coaching helps.
What professional training can't do on its own is help an educator figure out what to do with what they notice. The moment of recognition, the child who doesn’t respond, the interaction that keeps going sideways in the same way, that recognition needs somewhere to go. It’s one thing to recognize the struggle and something completely different to figure out how to offer a different response. This is hard work, and a coach can help turn the professional learning of COS into something actionable in a specific classroom with a specific child.
Why Professional Training Alone Doesn't Hold
The research has caught up with what many in the classroom have known experientially for years. A 2018 meta-analysis by Egert, Fukkink, and Eckhardt examined in-service professional development programs across early childhood settings and found that while training improved quality ratings, effects were substantially stronger when coaching was built into the model. A follow-up meta-analysis by Egert, Dederer, and Fukkink in 2020 reinforced this: coaching that incorporates self-reflection, structured feedback, and direct classroom support is what meaningfully shifts the quality of teacher-child interactions over time.
Training changes what educators know. Without ongoing support, that knowledge rarely has the conditions it needs to take root in daily practice. Coaching provides those conditions, specifically a coaching relationship with a sustained focus, and a place to bring the moments that don't resolve neatly.
That distinction matters for anyone deciding whether to formalize their coaching practice, and what kind of model to build it around.
The Coaching Experience
Coaching is where the COS Classroom learning becomes personal and practical. In individualized sessions, educators bring the specific relationships, recurring patterns, and classroom moments that professional training surfaces but can't fully resolve. With a coach, those moments get examined rather than set aside. Educators work through what they're noticing, set goals grounded in real interactions, and return to those goals over time to see what's shifting.
The coaching relationship provides what the course alone cannot: consistent, responsive support that helps COS move from something an educator knows to something they can actually use in the room, with the children in front of them.
Want to Become a Coach?
COS Classroom Coach Training is designed for professionals from early childhood, mental health, and educational backgrounds who want to support educators implementing COS Classroom into their settings. The training is hybrid format, awards 4.0 IACET CEUs (40 clock hours), and includes the COS Classroom Foundations Course in a coach's edition, with supplementary content from Bert Powell (COS co-originator) crosswalking the theoretical underpinnings of attachment science with the COS model of change. No prior completion of the Foundations course is required before enrolling.
Upon completion of the training requirements, coaches receive endorsement and are listed on the COSI registry. Endorsement is maintained through a minimum of two coaching support sessions annually, which keeps coaches connected to the practice, to the current evidence base, and to one another.
If you're a mental health professional, educator, or early childhood specialist ready to formalize your coaching practice, learn more about COS Classroom Coach Training and how to support change in early care settings one relationship at a time.
References
Egert, F., Fukkink, R. G., & Eckhardt, A. G. (2018). Impact of in-service professional development programs for early childhood teachers on quality ratings and child outcomes: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 88(3), 401–433. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317751918
Egert, F., Dederer, V., & Fukkink, R. G. (2020). The impact of in-service professional development on the quality of teacher-child interactions in early education and care: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2019.100309
