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Helping organizations recover the energy, confidence, and joy to do their best work.
Collaboration Without Silos: A Promising Foundation for Calvert County’s Young Children
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to participate for the first time in the annual strategic planning meeting of the Calvert County Early Childhood Advisory Council. As someone relatively new to Calvert County—but certainly not new to early childhood systems—I arrived...
What Early Childhood Leaders Are Talking About Across Borders
Conversations with early childhood leaders in other countries often begin with differences—policy, funding, culture, training, and expectations. But they quickly reveal how much the field shares. Across recent conversations in Kuala Lumpur, the same concerns surfaced...
A Decade Later: What the Early Head Start–Child Care Partnerships Taught Us
Editor’s note, July 17, 2026: Nearly a decade after this reflection was written, the central lesson still holds: program models succeed or fail less because of what they are called or where they originated than because of how relationships, expectations, resources, and accountability are structured. The observations below remain relevant to partnerships, delegate relationships, and […]
Looking Back at the Designation Renewal System: Intended Goals and Unintended Consequences
Editor’s note, July 17, 2026: This article was written during an earlier phase of the Head Start Designation Renewal System. Specific thresholds, procedures, and policy details have changed over time. The broader questions raised here—about incentives, workforce strain, organizational behavior, community impact, and the difference between accountability and improvement—remain relevant. The article is preserved as […]
Lessons from Rwanda: Risk, Trust, and the Boundaries of Supervision
Have we over-regulated our Early Childhood programs? Lessons I may have learned during my travels through Rwanda… Or maybe I am just longing for the good old days of play with more risk and where supervision was not defined as never allowing children to problem solve their way out of challenging situations and navigating natural […]
When One Person Changes the Culture: Hiring, Accountability, and Workplace Health
My team and I travel across the country visiting and working with Head Start and Early Head Start grantees and several themes common to many programs emerge as we conduct a gap analysis to help program’s identify their strengths and their vulnerabilities, their risks under Designation and Renewal if they have a pending on-site review […]
Why Willow Tree: The People, Values, and Journey Behind the Work
It seems an appropriate theme for the first Willow Tree Early Education Team blog to be a reflection of the incredible journey that is the reason the company exists and to pay tribute to the many people and programs that have been a part of this journey, the first step of which occurred when I […]
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