Unfortunately last week’s live was postponed due to technical difficulties. So this week I’m hosting two live discussions. Join me at 6 pm EDT this Wednesday, July 1, at 6 pm EDT for a discussion on ECEC Value 7: Supporting children’s development through Cari g and meaningful relationships with families and caregivers. ECEC Value 8: Strengthening collaboration and communication between families, caregivers, and educators. 🌸Who gets to be an expert on a child? 💮In too many early childhood settings, that question has one answer: the credentialed professional. Families are informed, updated, and occasionally consulted. But rarely are they treated as essential partners whose knowledge is irreplaceable. 🏵️If they’re not seen as partners they easily become the problem. 🪻Children live in families, communities, and cultures that shape who they are long before they arrive in any classroom. Educators who ignore that context are working with an incomplete picture. Families who feel excluded from their child's learning experience disengage and children feel that disconnection. 🌻Genuine collaboration between families, caregivers, and educators is not a best practice checkbox. It is a developmental necessity. 🌼I believe in building that collaboration. Not as a program or a policy, but as a professional stance rooted in respect. 🍂If this is how you approach your relationships with families, or how you wish you could, Free to Teach = Liberated to Learn is your community. Scan the QR code to join! 🦋And I’m thrilled to announce I will be joined by special guest Kisa Marx for my live discussion on how to embrace this value as a form of resistance at 7 pm EDT Wednesday, July 1st!

I'm having technical difficulties and have to postpone tonight's live.

ECEC Value 7:Supporting children's development through caring, meaningful relationships with families and caregivers. 💐What if the most important thing you do as an early childhood educator has nothing to do with curriculum? 🌹Research is unambiguous on this point. The quality of relationships between educators and children, between programs and families, between caregivers and the communities they serve, is the single most powerful factor in early childhood outcomes. 🥀Not the curriculum. Not the assessment tool. Not the literacy program. The relationship. 🌺And yet professional development, policy mandates, and program evaluations continue to prioritize everything but relationships. Educators are trained to deliver content, manage behavior, and document progress, while the relational work that actually drives development is treated as instinct rather than craft. 🌷Meaningful relationships with families and caregivers are not peripheral to early childhood practice. They are the practice. 🪷If you know this and you are tired of systems that don't, Free to Teach = Liberated to Learn is your community. Scan the QR code to join! Join me at 7 pm EDT on Wednesday, June 24th, for a discussion on how to embrace this value as a form of resistance.

Celebrating and affirming diversity as a vital asset in the lives of young children. 🖤Diversity is not a challenge to manage. It is an asset to celebrate. 💙Children come into the world with racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identities that are already forming, already meaningful, and already shaping how they experience everything around them. Those identities are not complications to navigate, they are gifts to honor and affirm. ❤️And yet early childhood settings routinely flatten diversity. Through color-blind color-evasive approaches that pretend not to notice difference. Through curricula that center one story, one family structure, one way of being. Through environments that reflect some children back to themselves and render others invisible. 💚Children cannot thrive in spaces that do not see them fully. 🩶Healthy racial, ethnic, and cultural identity development begins in the early years, not adolescence. What educators do now, in these earliest settings, matters profoundly for how children come to understand themselves and the world. 💞If you are committed to building spaces where every child is fully seen, Free to Teach = Liberated to Learn is your community. Scan the QR code to join! 🤎Join me on Wednesday, June 17th, at 7 pm EDT for my live discussion on how to embrace diversity as a value and use it as a form of resistance. As a special collaboration, this live stream will also stream to the DEY Facebook page. This value is based on the Framework for Fostering Healthy Identity in the Early Years. Watch the live here: https://www.instagram.com/djonesconsultant

Hello all. As I work to grow this community, I need to make changes to streamline what I can offer. For those who subscribe to my Mini-Reflective Courses at the Platnium ($10 a course) or VIP ($100 for all 12 courses), they receive a pre-recorded video lesson, reflective workbook, and access to a live guided discussion. Starting next month subscribers will have to register for the Live Guided Discussion via a Zoom link. If no one registers, then I will cancel the discussion. For this month, I'm adding another video to the classroom to make up for the live discusion. Once we get more subscribers, we can change the format, but we will try this for now! Let me know if you have any questions and upgrade your membership today!