2.4 Making Personal Changes

Feeling the Rhythm

How do I help myself respond to change—and grow through it?

Now, let’s address what it might look like to respond to a different kind of change, the kind in which you learn something new and realize you need to make some changes in who you are as an educator. This is hard, but there are steps you can take to make sure you keep moving forward:

• Work to understand your own feelings. Write about them. Talk them through with your teams—personal and/or professional.

• Take a look in the mirror, strive to see where you are at, and then be kind to yourself!

• Gather your tools! Get out that dog eared copy of the NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct, and look for other tools that are relevant to your situation. Root yourself in the values of early childhood care and education.

• Examine your own practices in light of this change.

• Examine the policies, structures, or systems that affect your program in light of this change.

• Ask yourself, where could change happen? Remember your spheres of influence.

• Who can you collaborate with? Who is on your team?

• How can you make sure the people being affected by this change help inform your response? Sometimes people use the phrase “Nothing for us without us” to help remember that we don’t want to make decisions that affect a group of people (even if we think we’re helping) without learning more from individuals in that group about what real support looks like).

• Make a plan, including a big vision and small steps, and start taking those small steps. Remember that when you are ready to bring others in, they will need to go through some of this process too, and you may need to be on their team as they look for a safe sounding board to explore their discomfort or fear.
• Realize that you are a courageous advocate for children. Give yourself a hug!

To make this real, let’s imagine you just learned about expulsion rates among children of color (and maybe you just did!). This has struck a chord with you and you wonder if this is reflected in your own classroom or program or even your own practice. What do you do?

• Work to understand your own feelings. Write about them. Talk them through with your teams—personal and/or professional.

This might be a good time to freewrite about your feelings—just put your pencil to paper and start writing. Maybe you feel guilty because you’re afraid that too many children of color have been asked to leave your program. Maybe you feel angry about the injustice. Maybe you feel scared that this topic is politicized and people aren’t going to want to hear about it. Maybe you feel scared to even face the idea that bias could have affected children while in your care. All these feelings are okay! Maybe you talk to your partner or your friends about your fears before you’re ready to get started even thinking about taking action.

• Take a look in the mirror, strive to see where you are at, and then be kind to yourself! Tell that person looking back at you: “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

Yep. You love children and you did what you believed was best for the children in your program. Maybe now you can do even better by them! You are being really really brave by investigating!

• Gather your tools! Get out that dog-eared copy of the NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct, and look for other tools that are relevant to your situation.

Okay! This would be an excellent time to bring out the equity lens and your other tools. Read them over. Use them.

• Examine your own practices in light of this change.

Do your practices affirm the dignity of every child and family? Ask yourself these hard questions while focusing on, in this case, how you look at behavior of children of color. Do the choices you make affirm the dignity of each unique child? Use your tools—you can pull out the equity lens here! Are you acknowledging the home realities of each child when you are having conversations that are meant to build social-emotional skills? Are you considering the needs of each child during difficult transitions? Do you provide alternative ways for children to engage if they have difficulty sitting in circle times?

• Examine the policies, structures, or systems that affect your program in light of this change.

And…Do your policies and structures affirm the dignity of every child and family? Use those tools! Look at your behavioral guidance policies—are you expecting children to come into your program with certain skills that may not be valued by certain cultures? What about your policies on sending children home or asking a family to leave your program? Could these policies be unfair to certain groups? In fact—given that you now know how extremely impactful expulsion is for preschoolers, could you take it off the table entirely?

• Ask yourself, where could change happen? Remember your spheres of influence.

Let’s say you’re a teacher, and you can look back and see that over the years you’ve been at your center, a disproportionately high number of children of color have been excluded from the program. Your director makes policy decisions—can you bring this information to him or her? Could you talk to your coworkers about how to bring it up? Maybe your sphere of influence could get even wider—could you share this information with other early educators in your community? Maybe even write a letter to your local representatives!

• Who can you collaborate with? Who is on your team?

Maybe other educators? Maybe parents? Maybe your director? Maybe an old teacher of your own? Can you bring this up at a staff meeting? Or in informal conversations?

• How can you make sure the people being affected by this change help inform your response?

Let’s say your director is convinced that your policies need to change in light of this new information. You want to make sure that parent voice—and especially that of parents of color—is heard! You could suggest a parent meeting on the topic; or maybe do “listening sessions” with parents of color, where you ask them open-ended questions and listen and record their responses—without adding much of your own response; maybe you could invite parents to be part of a group who looks over and works on the policies. This can feel a little scary to people in charge (see decentered leadership?)

• Make a plan, including a big vision and small steps, and start taking those small steps. Remember that when you are ready to bring others in, they will need to go through some of this process too, and you may need to be on their team as they look for a safe sounding board to explore their discomfort or fear.

Maybe this plan is made along with your director and includes those parent meetings, and a timeline for having revised policies, and some training for the staff. Or—let’s back it up—maybe you’re not quite to that point yet, and your plan is how you are going to approach your director, especially since they might feel criticized. Then your plan might be sharing information, communicating enthusiasm about moving forward and making positive change, and clearly stating your thoughts on where change is needed! (Also some chocolate to reward yourself for being a courageous advocate for every child.)

• Realize that you are a courageous advocate for children. Give yourself a hug!

And, as I may have mentioned, some chocolate. You are a leader and an advocate, and a person whose action mirrors their values. You are worth admiring!

Maybe you haven’t had your mind blown with new information lately, but I’ll bet there’s something you’ve thought about that you haven’t quite acted on yet…maybe it’s about individualizing lesson plans for children with differing abilities. Maybe it’s about addressing diversity of gender in the classroom. Maybe it’s about celebrating linguistic diversity, inviting children and parents to share their home languages in the classroom, and finding authentic ways to include print in these languages.

Whatever it is—we all have room to grow.

Dancing Your Dance: Rocking Leadership in Times of Change

There will never be a time when we as educators are not having to examine and respond to “Current Issues in the Field.” Working with children means working with children in a dynamic and ever-evolving landscape of community, knowledge, and personal experience. It’s really cool that we get to do this, walk beside small human beings as they learn to traverse the big wacky world with all its potholes…and it means we get to keep getting better and better at circling around, leaping over, and, yep, dancing around or even through those very potholes.

In conclusion, all dancers feel unsteady sometimes. All dancers bruise their knees along the way. All educators make mistakes and experience discomfort.  All dancers wonder if this dance just isn’t for them.  All dancers think that maybe this one is just too hard and want to quit sometimes. All educators second guess their career choices. But all dancers also discover their own innate grace and their inborn ability to both learn and to change; our very muscles are made to stretch, our cells replace themselves, and we quite simply cannot stand still. All educators have the capacity to grow into compassionate, courageous leaders!

Your heart, your brain, and your antsy feet have led you to become a professional in early childhood care and education, and they will all demand that you jump into the uncertainty of leadership in times of change, and learn to dance for the sake of the children in your care. This, truly, is your call to action, and your pressing invitation to join the dance!

Citations

Brown, B. (2018). Dare to lead. Vermilion.

Broughton, A., Castro, D. and Chen, J.  (2020).  Three International Perspectives on Culturally Embraced Pedagogical Approaches to Early Teaching and Learning.  [Conference presentation].  NAEYC Annual Conference.

Crum, T.  (1987).  The Magic of Conflict: Turning a Life of Work into a Work of Art.  Touchstone.

Meek, S. and Gilliam, W. (2016).  Expulsion and Suspension in Early Education as Matters of Social Justice and Health Equity.  Perspectives: Expert Voices in Health & Health Care.

Scott, K., Looby, A., Hipp, J. and Frost, N. (2017).  “Applying an Equity Lens to the Child Care Setting.”  The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 45 (S1), 77-81.

Adaptation Credit

Adapted from Chapter 5 in Leadership in Early Care and Education by Dr. Tammy Marino; Dr. Maidie Rosengarden; Dr. Sally Gunyon; and Taya Noland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.