The Visionary Director, Third Edition

A Handbook for Dreaming, Organizing, and Improvising in Your Center

Margie Carter, Luz Maria Casio, Deb Curtis

• Publisher: Redleaf Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781605547299
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Administración de la educación

Create a larger vision in your child care program and perform your job as a center director with motivation and creativity. Early childhood leaders Deb Curtis, Margie Carter, and Luz Casio provide inspiration and support in this newly updated edition of The Visionary Director. The third edition

• reflects new requirements and initiatives in early childhood programs
• adds QR Code access links with short video stories and print resources that further illuminate the ideas under consideration
• has a stronger focus on creating an organizational culture that is shaped by more diverse perspectives with an anti-racist, anti-bias, equity lens
• updates content to address current early childhood education trends and leadership for an expanded definition of quality
• 
  Find a concrete framework for approaching and organizing your work, as well as principles, strategies, and self-directed activities to support your vision for building a strong learning community for your staff and the young children in their care.

CHAPTER 1

GUIDING YOUR PROGRAM WITH A VISION

Before you begin reading our ideas about being a program director or supervisor, take a minute to consider yours. Which of the following answers best matches your thinking regarding the purpose of an early childhood program? Highlight the statement that represents your highest priority.

To provide a service for parents while they work

To give children early intervention or a head start to be ready for school and academic success

To give children a sense of belonging, confidence, and resiliency as they grow

To enhance children’s family and cultural identities and social skills as they learn to get along in the world

To ensure that children have a childhood full of play, adventure, and investigation

To create a community where the adults and children experience a sense of connection and new possibilities for making the world a better place

___________________________________________________ _______________________________________(add your own words here)

We start this book where we hope you will start—being aware of how you understand the primary purpose of your work. There is no right or wrong answer in the choices above. Your view of your work may encompass some version of each of these ideas. Most likely you go through your days with a general sense of purpose. We recommend taking the time to be specific about your purpose and vision because your image of an early childhood program shapes the way you guide your program, consciously or unconsciously. Your vision plays the same role in your program as your breath plays in your body—distributing life-giving oxygen throughout your system, exploring where things are tense and need some attention, and providing a rhythm for your muscles to do their collaborative work.

How often do you pay attention to your breath? Right now, for instance, have you noticed how you are breathing? As you read these words, does your breath feel rushed, tight, or maybe even hard to detect? Are you aware of where your breath is in your body? Take a minute to check this out. Likewise, consider how frequently you do your job as a director with a vision flowing through your mind. Developing a regular awareness of your breath in your body cultivates mindfulness for all parts of your life. Similarly, when you move through your days with a vision of how things could be, you’ll approach directing tasks and decisions in a thoughtful manner, with the mindset of a leader rather than administrator.

You may have come to this book searching for answers, for solutions to the stresses and strains of directing an early childhood program. We suggest you start your search by finding your breath, not only because this is literally a good thing to do but also because this action symbolically represents the essence of what this book can offer you. With all the pressures surrounding a director’s job, no doubt you barely have time to catch your breath, let alone read a book. This means you probably spend most of your time reacting to how things are, rather than developing new ways of being. Consider the cigarette smoker who relies on cough drops to soothe a scratchy throat and neglects to find support for changing habits and healthier living. This is akin to directors who rely on management tips to survive instead of taking stock, reorienting their approach, and claiming their power to create something different.

SEARCHING YOUR HEART FOR WHAT’S IMPORTANT

When it comes down to it, looking for quick answers and formulas to run a child care program is like turning to diet pills and beauty products to improve your health. It’s just not that simple. To be sure, it’s important to acquire skills and learn the how-to’s of developing a well-functioning management system, and a growing number of resources can help you with this. The Visionary Director suggests something books on supervision rarely discuss:

finding the heart of what brought you to the early childhood field

understanding your work as contributing to a vibrant democracy

seeing yourself as a leader beyond management tasks and compliance issues

remembering your actions with adults should parallel what you want them to offer children

creating an organizational culture and systems that support your vision

Considera la democracia cultural

Consider Cultural Democracy

Preferiría el término “democracia cultural”. Tú puedes tener un aula democrática cuando eres justo con los niños. Pero en el contexto de la diversidad, el término democracia cultural sugiere acoger, honrar, dar el mismo valor a todas las culturas e idiomas. Cuando se promueve la democracia cultural, ustedes crecen personas empáticas y ansiosas por aprender sobre las diferencias y los puntos en común. También es importante no asumir que todos los del mismo grupo cultural o lingüístico son iguales. Tienes que hacer un punto de aprender acerca de los valores y metas de cada familia para sus hijos.

I would prefer the term cultural democracy. You can have a democratic classroom when you are fair with children. But in the context of diversity, the term cultural democracy suggests welcoming, honoring, and giving equal value to all cultures and languages. When cultural democracy is promoted, you grow people who are empathetic and eager to learn about differences and commonalities. It’s also important not to assume that everyone of the same cultural or linguistic group is the same. You have to make a point of learning about each family’s values and goals for their children.

As you take time to find your breath, literally and metaphorically, you will begin to discover deeper longings that live in your body, such as these:

a desire for meaningful work that makes a difference in the world

a focus on the joys of childhood and joining with children in exploring the wonders of the world

a work life that is sustainable, with time for joy, tears, laughter, and celebrations

a place where you have genuine connections with others, alike and different

a way to learn from mistakes and setbacks, without a sense of failure

a community where you feel safe, have history, and enjoy a sense of belonging

an experience of seeing aspects of your vision come alive and take hold

When you embrace rather than ignore your longings, they can shape a vision to guide your work as fundamentally as your breathing guides your body.

Around the country, directors are reading blogs, attending conferences, and sitting in on webinars in search of ways to improve their work. We’ve discovered that although at the surface this appears to be a search for some quick ideas, a much deeper need often brings them together. Directors long for a place to unload the heavy burden they carry. The reality of their work is often different from what they imagined it to be. People usually come to the work of directing early childhood programs eager to make a difference in the lives of children and families. Faced with the current conditions, many directors are aware of a lot of “if only” feelings lingering below each breath—if only we had more money to pay the staff a decent salary, if only we could improve the facility, if only there weren’t so many regulations and so much paperwork, if only we could offer more scholarships, if only we could just get parents more involved, if only people understood the importance of this work.

Beyond the need for a steady paycheck, most of us seek jobs in early childhood education because it is work with real meaning and real people, and it offers the possibility of making a difference in the world. Yet all too quickly, external pressures and the demands of this work make us lose sight of our original motivation. Budgets, regulations, required meetings and reports, shrinking substitute lists, and the traumas and dramas of people and our planet soon overwhelm our hearts and minds. There is hardly time to get to the bathroom, let alone attend to that stack of reading to be done and documents to be filed. Before long we find ourselves moving from crisis to crisis, too frazzled to remember all those time-management techniques and exhausted down to our bones. The original dreams we brought to our job can easily fade or seem totally out of reach.

This book is meant to rekindle a sense of new possibilities. Rather than help you get better at working with how things are, The Visionary Director offers you a framework and beginning strategies for transforming the limitations of your current mindset and conditions. In the language of the business world, we want you to “disrupt and innovate,” redirecting your energy and redesigning your work to honor the lives of the children, families, and staff, and the precious gifts of the green planet that sustains our lives.

At the heart of this book is a vision of early childhood programs as places where people practice democratic principles—actively participating in communities where children, adults, and the natural world have mutual respect and reciprocal gifts to offer. In this way, we view democracy as a verb. It’s easy to talk about your problems and the things that bother you in your work, but too often directors neglect to describe how they would like their work to be, the specific elements of their vision. Letting your mind spin out new possibilities when you are so used to adapting and accommodating yourself to how things are can be a challenge. Breaking out of these confines can stir up old longings and remind you of how little you’ve settled for, how much more is possible, and the greater gifts you have to offer.

Author Alice Walker inspires us when she says, “Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet” (Parmar 2013). How might we reimagine our early childhood work with this lens, for ourselves and for the enculturation of the next generation we are privileged to work with? With so much damage, so much at risk in our world, we can step away from the place of being an overwhelmed victim or bystander and into the broader active role of what Samantha Power and two high school students, Monica Mahal and Sarah Decker, call being an “upstander” (Power 2013). We can choose to guide our work on behalf of standing up for a better, more equitable world, rather than just learning to cope with how things are. This includes going beyond the prevailing “white-centered” way of thinking and, indeed, going beyond human-centered thinking. In today’s work, there is ample evidence of the limitations of both of these. Our early childhood programs can begin to shift these old, destructive paradigms.

IMAGINING HOW IT COULD BE

The vision we have for early childhood programs replaces the institutional feel of items from an early childhood catalog. Lifeless descriptions of standards are replaced with natural materials that keep us in touch with the life cycle of living, growing, and dying and with ...