Like most early care and education providers during the COVID-19 pandemic, Annette Fernandez, PhD, and her staff at Meadowbrook Child Garden in Marlborough found themselves in uncharted territory as they struggled to serve children and families in a safe and sustainable manner despite the fear and uncertainty they dealt with daily.
“It was curveballs left and right,” said Fernandez, who owns and runs the program.
Merely gathering for staff meetings was a logistical nightmare, she said, noting that the meetings basically devolved into “emergency problem solving conversations, wherein all the problems were brought to the table and I was the keeper of all the answers — and Heaven help us, because I don’t have all the answers!”
Fernandez became concerned that a dysfunctional dynamic was developing in which her teachers saw her as the only person who could offer solutions. Worse, they were losing the confidence to act as problem-solving partners.
In the midst of struggling to find a stable, sustainable path forward, Fernandez learned of the Early Childhood Support Organization (ECSO) and decided to enroll.
“I was looking for any kind of professional development that would help me personally in my leadership role, and then I could leverage it for the team,” she said.
The ECSO offers by Early Education Leaders, an Institute at UMass Boston, is a multi-year program for center-based program leaders that is organized around the Essential Leadership Model, an evidence-based approach for continuous quality improvement. It is one of three ECSOs offered to early education programs in Massachusetts through a partnership between the Commonwealth’s Department of Early Education and Care and New Profit, a venture philanthropy firm that backs social entrepreneurs who are advancing equity and opportunity. The others are administered by the Children’s Literacy Initiative and the Flamingo Early Learning at the Lastinger Center.
ECSO participants build their capacity to cultivate high-quality teaching and learning; create new routines to support educators’ learning and practice and create a culture of continuous quality improvement; learn to use data to inform program improvement; deepen engagement with families to support cohesive home, school, and community connections; increase CLASS scores and child attendance; and focus on curriculum and practices that positively impact child outcomes.
“It’s a process. Follow the process and you will see results.”
Annette Fernandez, ECSO participant and owner of Meadowbrook Child Garden in Marlborough
Fernandez embraced the Root Cause Analysis (RCA) method of problem-solving that she learned in the ESCO. It is a process of discovering the underlying causes of problems to identify effective solutions that will bring about longer-term systemic change. She appreciated the results-oriented approach of identifying a problem, illuminating its causes and then tackling just one of those causes with an easily implemented solution, evaluating the results after a fixed period of time, and building on those results to attack the other causes of the problem.
“That was a huge, huge learning for me to deploy with my team,” said Fernandez.
To do that, Fernandez created a structure that facilitated the process for both her and her four classroom teams. She met with each team every two weeks and simply asked, “What’s working well? What’s not working well?” After some discussion, she encouraged the team to settle on a problem of practice, identify a root cause, and come up with a solution to implement—with Fernandez’s help and support if they needed it. In the off week, Fernandez observed the classroom and was able to see how the solution was working. That way, when she met with the team the following week, she already had her questions and feedback prepared.
Putting her four classrooms on a two-week trajectory to implement things that were working created a process of continuous improvement—including changing strategic direction, if necessary—that was easy to implement, said Fernandez. Her staff have used this system to resolve challenges related to a child who had suddenly become overly dependent on her teachers and to improve the implementation of curriculum across classrooms.
“Every time there’s a new problem, there is a Root Cause Analysis,” Fernandez said.
Fernandez credited the RCA process with empowering her staff to take a greater leadership role in improving program quality.
“What is very interesting is at the start of the whole process, it was me doing a lot of the talking,” she said. “And now, after about two years of pure implementation, it is the team that is saying, ‘This is what happened, this is what I found out.’ I’m doing very little of the talking, and doing more of the facilitating, which I truly enjoy.”
In this environment, Fernandez has observed, her staff has become more comfortable sharing their opinions, brainstorming, and showcasing their strengths as they work to solve problems collaboratively. That has led to greater peer-to-peer learning, which Fernandez is fostering in the current school year by giving each of her 10 teachers an opportunity at their monthly staff meeting to offer instruction in a practice area in which they excel.
“So if one teacher has great strengths in curriculum planning, they get to showcase their talent for one hour at a staff meeting. So, you’re learning from your peers, you’re sharing about your experiences, and you are also sharing things that don’t work for you,” Fernandez said. “I really like that component of them learning and sharing. It also builds camaraderie and teamwork, because otherwise the four classes can be very isolated.”
Fernandez said she would recommend the ECSO to other ECE providers with the caveat that they must be disciplined about consistently using the tools and implementing the strategies the program provides.
“There has to be a commitment. When there is, what you get with this program is a lot of tools and a method to make them work,” she said, adding, “It’s a process. Follow the process and you will see results.”
