Early Education Leaders, an Institute at UMass Boston | provides the leadership development opportunities and infrastructure that early educators need to support thriving children and families.

March 25, 2021
by Anne Douglass
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With one-on-one coaching, help is just a phone call away

A rapidly expanding early education program is a nice problem to have—but it’s still a problem. Just ask Deanna Donnelly, the director of education for the Gurukul Learning Center in Chelmsford.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic and not long after Donnelly began working at the center, she became overwhelmed by new demand for spots in her program. The phone was ringing off the hook with calls from prospective parents, and Donnelly was giving so many tours that she had a hard time keeping up with her other administrative duties. Over the span of just six months, Gurukul Learning Center’s enrollment ballooned from 22 to 68 children—necessitating an expansion from three classrooms to six and the hiring, training, and teambuilding of new staff. Continue Reading →

March 18, 2021
by Anne Douglass
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Learning from others

With three years of experience running the Learning Tree Experience, a family child care in Dorchester, Jasmine Cox knows a lot about what it takes to create a successful ECE business: building trusting relationships with families, the importance of structure and professionalism, transparency and good communication with parents, licensors and other colleagues.

Such practices, said Cox, “speak for your program. They show that your program is a place where children will not only be cared for, but they will learn.”

But at this early stage in her ECE career, Cox is also thankful for the chance to learn from more experienced peers in the Professional Learning Community (PLC) she joined shortly early last year, shortly before the pandemic hit. The PLC is facilitated by Cox’s regional StrongStart Professional Development Center (PDC), which covers the Metro Boston region. Continue Reading →

March 11, 2021
by Anne Douglass
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StrongStart Professional Development Centers Are There To Help

It’s safe to say that Keira Durrett has earned the title of “expert.” She’s worked in early care and education for over 30 years, 21 of them as director of the Williston North Hampton Children’s Center in Easthampton. Even so, she credits the Western Mass StrongStart Professional Development Center (PDC) with providing her with much needed resources this past year.

Shortly before early care and education programs in Massachusetts were suspended from operating in response to the COVID-19 public health emergency, Durrett had joined a professional learning community (PLC) run by the Western Mass StrongStart PDC. Comprised of other directors of ECE programs in her region, the PLC was set up to provide structured support for directors working through typical problems of practice: improving curricula, supporting staff, strengthening relationships with families, and streamlining back-end operations.

But as programs prepared to reopen, directors had numerous questions about maintaining health and safety, understanding the reopening guidance issued by the state, and managing finances with dramatically reduced enrollment. (For example, at the start of the year, there were 53 children enrolled in Durrett’s center. Now there are just 35.) Continue Reading →

December 15, 2020
by Anne Douglass
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Meet our Statewide Training and Industry Navigation Manager

Teddy Kokoros

For Teddy Kokoros, collaboration, connection, and information sharing come naturally. He maintains a blog that shares news of relevance to early educators and also gives a platform for early educators to share their research and ideas. He uses his Twitter and Facebook accounts to do the same. And in 2019, he ran for (and won) a seat on his hometown’s board of library trustees because he wants to encourage collaboration among early educators and the town’s library.

“I think something the ECE field should be doing is finding ways to build partnerships with people in the community because these partnerships, whether they’re with K-12 schools, summer camps, museums, or libraries, makes the early education community stronger,” Kokoros says. Continue Reading →

November 23, 2020
by Anne Douglass
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Maryland re-invests in Leading for Change curriculum

As the Leadership Institute wraps up its first year implementing its Leading for Change curriculum in the post-baccalaureate program of the Maryland Early Childhood Leadership Education Program (MECLP), the Maryland State Department of Education has announced that it will invest an additional $150,000 in the program.

MECLP is an early education leadership program of the Sherman Center for Early Childhood Learning in Urban Communities at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Below: Leadership Institute Executive Director and Professor Anne Douglass (fifth from right) and Leadership Institute Deputy Director Amanda Wiehe Lopes (fourth from right) with MECLP's first cohort of Early Education Leadership Fellows.

Leadership Institute Executive Director and Professor Anne Douglass (fifth from right) and Leadership Institute Deputy Director Amanda Wiehe Lopes (fourth from right) with MECLP’s first cohort of Early Education Leadership Fellows.

November 22, 2020
by Anne Douglass
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Meet our Director of Leadership Programs

Director of Leadership Programs Lynne Mendes

In her role as Director of Leadership Programs for the Institute of Early Education Leadership and Innovation, Lynne Mendes is much more than an educator, trainer, and facilitator. She is an evangelist for the field.

“We already have leaders working throughout early care and education. They might not think of themselves as leaders. But they’ve worked in every setting you can imagine,” says Mendes. “They come from all over the world and they’re so talented, so we just draw from that.”

One of the first things Mendes teaches the family child care and small business owners in the Leadership Institute’s Small Business Innovation Center program is that that they are, in fact, business owners. Through the course, which is anchored with the Leadership Institute’s curriculum on entrepreneurial leadership, participants go through a shift in mindset where they begin to see that their work is just as vital to the life of local neighborhoods as the pizza shop, hair salon, or insurance agency. Continue Reading →

November 19, 2020
by Anne Douglass
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Charting the path to a post-pandemic ECE system

Advocates for early care and education (ECE) reform gathered Nov. 13 for a virtual conversation about the state of the ECE workforce in MA, the challenges they’re facing during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the path to creating a more sustainable, racially equitable ECE system in which early educators are valued for their expertise and experience, and compensated accordingly—ideally with public funding.

The Leadership Institute’s Executive Director Anne Douglass, PhD was among the presenters who delivered hard truths about working in ECE at The Early Childhood (Virtual) Coffee & Conversation: The EC Workforce, which was hosted by The Boston Foundation and moderated by Brian Gold, the foundation’s early childhood program officer.

Douglass was joined by presenters Arazeliz Reyes, PhD Candidate, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Binal Pitel, chief program officer at Neighborhood Villages. ECE providers Joycelyn Browne and Alicia Jno-Baptiste, both graduates of Leadership Institute programs, also addressed attendees, sharing their experiences of working amid the pandemic and what is needed to alleviate the burdens on ECE professionals.

Douglass began on a positive note by pointing out the assets that the ECE workforce brings to the profession and the current child care crisis. She did so by presenting findings from the Leadership Institute’s pre-pandemic workforce survey (conducted with UMass Boston’s Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy and the Center for Social Policy) on which Reyes is also a co-author. Continue Reading →

October 29, 2020
by Anne Douglass
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What we learned from our webinar series on reinventing child care in Massachusetts

The COVID-19 pandemic has widely exposed what early care and education (ECE) professionals have long known: our ECE system is not sustainable in its current patchwork configuration. Yet it is also vital to the functioning of our economy and must therefore be prioritized for systemic change.

This summer, we launched a webinar series, “Reinventing Child Care in Massachusetts” to facilitate a detailed discussion of what the sector needs, and we’re eager to share what we learned. More than 700 ECE professionals and other stakeholders participated and attendees gathered online to share ideas for reinventing an ECE system that is high-quality, accessible to all families, provides professional compensation to educators based on their skill and experience, has sufficient resources for professional and leadership development, and addresses racial inequities. Continue Reading →