Over the last several years our team has been exploring the integral role of early learning leaders, both elementary school principals and center directors. In this guest post, Anisha Ford discusses new research on how these leaders impact their program climate. In 2019 we’ll continue digging into this important topic, including exploring how to best prepare center directors.
A new study says programs with strong organizational structures hold the key to effective early-childhood education, and lists exceptional administrators and collaborative teachers as the two most important components of those structures.
The study was conducted by researchers with the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) and the Ounce of Prevention Fund, or Ounce, a Chicago-based nonprofit that advocates for and provides high-quality early-childhood education...
Ten years ago, Elizabeth Dozier, an assistant principal at Harper High School in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood, took a big risk. She hung a giant board in the main hallway showing each ninth-grader’s academic progress under three headings: green for on-track, yellow for close to on-track and red for off-track.
That was a violation of Chicago school board policy. Many educators and parents would have been aghast to see students publicly labeled like that...
When I was a prekindergarten teacher, my young students always provided an exciting share of challenges. There were children who cried when their parents left in the morning and those who were always last to be picked up. There were loud children and shy children, potty mishaps, and naptimes that left me exhausted. But the issues that concerned me most weren’t the things that happened inside my classroom, but what happened outside – especially when children regularly missed days of school.
Read some of the resources we provide to help teachers improve the capacity of their students.