I have a fresh and rich understanding of the current state of Early Childhood Education gained as I spent the past two years visiting early childhood classrooms across the country as an assessor for the National Association of the Education of Young Children. Putting my feet in that many classrooms gave me a practical, grounded understanding of the post-Covid realities of teaching young children.

Before that, I worked as a Program Implementation Specialist for an Early Head Start Partnership grantee in New Orleans. There, my theoretical and abstract beliefs developed into an edgy recognition of the struggles Head Start families experience every day. It was eye-opening work that often shocked me to the core and left me with a deep compassion and appreciation for the value of comprehensive early childhood education.

As a reliable Teachstone CLASS observer, I used CLASS to assess preservice teacher education students in the PK-3 teacher certification program I developed and led. As program leader, I had all student supervisors use the tool to evaluate students in their field experiences and two semesters of student teaching. This practice facilitated consistent, profound preservice teacher growth because all supervisors used consistent language and measurement. Later, I worked for three years assessing toddler and preschool classrooms using the CLASS tool as an external evaluator for the state.

I taught undergraduate, honors, and graduate students at the master's and doctorate levels in a land-grant university for a number of years. I taught Early Childhood Education, Child Development, Family Studies, Methods and Materials, Research Methods, Assessment, and Critical Thinking. I collected, analyzed, and disseminated data in many projects as a researcher. I assessed young children’s knowledge of hurricanes after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita with the support of an NSF grant awarded to me immediately following the disasters. My primary research focus is on developmentally appropriate teaching, particularly as it relates to the learner's culture and is modeled by teacher-educators and administrators.