This is a guest blog post by Anne Douglass, professor of Early Care and Education at UMass Boston and the founding executive director of the Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation.

Anne Douglass

Early educators are smart, kind, engaging, and supportive and dedicated.

Here at UMass Boston, we also know that early educators are entrepreneurial leaders. That’s why our programs provide an education that boosts their leadership, creativity, and innovation – all to create a better early learning experience for children.

Examples of early educators’ entrepreneurship abound. Last month, the Cape Cod Times featured a front page story about Nature Preschool Explorers, a nature-based preschool at the Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary in Barnstable. The four-year-old school was touted as an example of the wave of educational programs focused on the outdoors that are popping up across the country.

The school was cofounded by Diana Stinson, an alum of UMass Boston’s Post-Master’s Leadership Certificate in Early Education Research, Policy, and Practice (PMC) offered by our Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation (Early Ed Leadership Institute).

Stinson, a longtime preschool teacher, is living proof of what early educators can accomplish when they have been trained in entrepreneurial leadership. Other innovators who are making quality improvement innovations after being trained in Leading for Change, the Early Ed Leadership Institute’s entrepreneurial leadership curriculum, include Christine Heer who, like Stinson, opened a nature-based preschool after graduating from our PMC program. Emilee Johnson, the educational coordinator at Boston Children’s Hospital Child Care Center, wrote “Our New Normal: A Children’s Social Story for Post-Pandemic Lives” (available on Amazon) to address the COVD-19-related concerns of children and parents.
 

Screenshot for the video “Our New Normal: Reading and Discussion”

 
Alicia Jno-Baptiste, owner of WeeCare JP, overhauled her small business administration practices after going through our Small Business Innovation Center, making her business more profitable and sustainable, as did Joycelyn Browne, owner of Little Ones Child Care in Dorchester, and Dorothy Williams, owner of Dottie’s Family Childcare in Dorchester.

Jno-Baptiste, Browne, and Williams also all served as emergency childcare providers during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. And Williams advocated on behalf of the sector during the pandemic by offering testimony before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Education about how the pandemic was affecting family child care providers. Today, she is a doctoral candidate in early care and education at UMass Boston.

The Leading for Change curriculum, which is offered for free to all licensed early educators in Massachusetts through the StrongStart Professional Development Centers—which the Early Ed Leadership Institute coordinates in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care—anchors nearly all of the programs offered by the Early Ed Leadership Institute, including the Small Business Innovation Center course in ECE business leadership.

A research-based curriculum, Leading for Change has been rigorously tested and iterated with multiple cohorts of racially and linguistically diverse participants. It teaches entrepreneurial leadership, which seeks adaptive solutions to complex problems and is required in situations for which there are no existing or predefined solutions. This style of leadership is also relational, which recognizes the expertise or authority of each person within an organization who exercises leadership at multiple levels, regardless of formal titles or roles. Alumni of this program join our Leadership and Innovation Network.

In addition to the research upon which Leading for Change is based, the Early Ed Leadership Institute also designs and implements applied research-practice-policy partnerships that contribute new knowledge about how entrepreneurial leadership can catalyze change at individual, organizational, and systems levels. This original research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals, books, and news media.
 

 
None of this scholarship and innovative programming would be possible without UMass Boston’s early and on-going investments in the early care and education workforce. In 2009, the university launched a bachelor’s degree program for early educators in response to calls from the local ECE community for an accessible and affordable program. The program is designed for early educators who work in birth-to-age-five programs. Today, there are over 300 students currently enrolled, and a majority are women of color.

In 2012, UMass Boston designed the post master’s leadership certificate program, funded by the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care. In 2016, it launched the Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation as a home for the growing leadership development programs and research.

Today, the Early Ed Leadership Institute is staffed by racially diverse early educators who have a combined 300 years of experience working in the field. In addition to our programs for early educators in Massachusetts, we have grown nationally, offering Leading for Change in Maryland and launching a partnership to make Leading for Change available to early educators in California.
 

 
Policymakers and funders who understand that early educators are agents, not objects, of change, want evidence-based pathways to leadership and innovation made widely available to the field’s racially and linguistically diverse workforce. Yet as of this writing, the Early Ed Leadership Institute is one of the few entities anywhere in the country that offers rigorous, research-based professional development and leadership training for early educators that is also grounded in a foundation of equity and inclusion.

As we continue to grapple with an early care and education sector that has been seriously weakened by the pandemic, it will be vital to ensure the availability of entrepreneurial leadership training for early educators working at every level of the field so that we can cultivate and retain talent in the workforce and stabilize the sector. To do this, we need to tap more of early educator’s entrepreneurial energy.