Building a Foundation: Our Approach to Training Early Childhood Educators

The earliest years of a student’s education set the foundation for everything that follows. What happens in a pre-K classroom, the relationships, the environment, the quality of instruction, shapes a student’s entire educational journey. Investing in the educators responsible for that foundation is one of the most important things a community can do, and it takes someone who has truly lived in that world to do it well. 

The Person Leading This Work

Belinda Baker has worked as a facilitator on our team since 2024, and brings 38 years of experience in early childhood education. Belinda began her career as a classroom teacher, spending years in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms in parochial schools across the Archdiocese of New Orleans. Over time, she took on supervisory roles leading early childhood programs through curriculum development, instructional design, and professional learning.

Tasked with building early learning centers from the ground up, Belinda developed much of the expertise she brings to this work today. Along the way, she studied child development philosophy deeply, including the Project Approach and Reggio Emilia, and built a practice grounded in what research says about how young children actually learn. She also earned her certification to offer Pathways professional development credentials, which adds meaningful value for the educators participating in the sessions she leads.

When Belinda works with early childhood educators, she centers a few core ideas that shape everything else:

• Every child communicates their needs through how they participate. An educator's job is to notice.
• Effective early childhood instruction is not about adding more. It is about being intentional with what you already do, so that every child can participate and feel a genuine sense of belonging.
• Lived experiences have a profound impact on a child's ability to learn, and educators who understand that shift how they interpret behavior.
• Brain growth happens when children feel safe, connected, and appropriately challenged through meaningful interactions with caring adults.

Expanding Early Childhood Professional Learning

Building on earlier work with communities like Caldwell Parish, our work in the early childhood professional learning space has expanded this year. Recently a large Louisiana school district reached out to our team because they wanted to deepen their investment in this focus area. The district had already built meaningful infrastructure, including a behavior support team, two dedicated coaches, and a coordinator supporting classroom plans across 170 pre-K classrooms. What they needed was professional learning that would create a cohesive vision for access for students with disabilities in an early childhood setting and the capacity of all educators and paraprofessionals to meet it. 

Our team designed and delivered a series of professional learning workshops for school-based general and special educators, paraprofessionals, and school principals across the district, as well as a separate track of Saturday workshops for childcare center staff, structured to maximize participation and offer Pathways credentials for completion.

The results from participants were consistent across the series:

• 97% agreed the sessions would positively impact their ability to meet the needs of students with disabilities.
• 96% agreed the strategies covered applied directly to their role.
• 96% agreed the facilitator positively impacted their understanding of how to meet the needs of students with disabilities.
• 97% agreed they felt meaningfully included as a participant.

Early childhood educators are ready for this kind of support. When professional learning is built around the realities of their classrooms and delivered by someone who has lived in that world, it transforms how educators show up for their students.

Next week, we will share the story of our early childhood work with St. Angela Merici School in Louisiana, and what that partnership looked like up close.

Ready to Bring This to Your Community?

If your district or early childhood program is looking for professional learning built around your educators and your context, we would like to hear about it. Click here to schedule time to meet with someone from our team.

‍