Collaborative Continuous Improvement as Leadership Development in Early Childhood Programs

• In Event: Advancing The Teaching and Learning of Collaborative Continuous Improvement in Education

Abstract

Purpose: We examine the impact of structured support for collaborative continuous improvement in early childhood education (ECE) programs. We focus on Head Start leadership teams and the relationship between their circumstances, their engagement with improvement processes, and their development as leaders.

Perspectives: ECE leaders work in environments that include significant resource limitations, high accountability expectations, and high staff turnover. ECE leaders typically receive little formal leadership preparation, instead gaining necessary skills and dispositions through practical, on-the-job experience. They are tasked with implementing complex policies and constrained by numerous regulations, affording them limited latitude to exercise discretion or to innovate. Thus the approach of many ECE leaders is best described as managerial, technocratic, and oriented toward compliance with government regulations (Aubrey et al., 2012; Ford et al., 2024b).

Supporting teams to implement CCIE comes with its own set of organizational and interpersonal challenges, which influence teams’ ability to sustain momentum for change (Co-authors & Organizer, 2024; Mintrop, 2016). ECE leadership teams face many demands on their time and energy and thus are cautious when considering significant changes to their programs’ practices (Movahedazarhouligh et al., 2022).

This study explores the dynamics surrounding leader’s engagement with CCIE, drawing from research on job demands and job resources (Farewell, et al., 2022; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004) as well as “improvement science fluency,” as described by Leger and colleagues (2023).

Method: This poster reports on research into the implementation of CCIE in a network of ECE programs located across the US, over the course of four years, focusing on nascent leaders in two of these programs. These in-depth case studies are supplemented by an analysis of data across all programs.

One typical approach to introducing and encouraging engagement with CCIE is to employ coaches who instruct, support, and sometimes do a significant amount of the work for, school teams (Grunow et al., 2024; Henrik, 2025). Both authors serve as coaches to the ECE programs described in this study.

Data Sources: Data for this study include observations of and contemporaneous notes from coaching sessions, observations of training sessions, interviews with participating ECE program leaders and their respective coaches, and analysis of data on program implementation and outcomes.

Preliminary Results: Preliminary findings indicate that most ECE leaders characterize professional development as a didactic exercise: they learn new skills by listening to an “expert” or a more experienced colleague.

Leaders’ perception of organizational capacity was the most influential determinant of engagement with CCIE. For example, if a program had to make changes due to findings from a government review, they took a very solution-oriented approach, abandoning some of the principles of CCIE. The sense of urgency that leaders attached to many of their challenges caused them to react quickly, eschewing the more deliberate approach of CCIE.

Significance: This paper contributes to the evolving literature on CCIE and leadership development, enumerating the affordances and challenges associated with twinning these two endeavors. In addition it highlights the unique conditions that influence leadership in ECE and the role CCIE can play in developing ECE leaders.

Authors

• John J. Hall, Independent Researcher

• Shannon M. Calderone, Washington State University