Don’t Become a Gossip Girl at Work
We have all been victims or participants of gossip at work, and sadly, this is no different in an early childhood education setting. Maybe it’s something you overheard in the hallway about a co-worker’s romantic...
Leah Shapiro loved being in an early setting. “I loved arranging the classroom,” she recalls. “I loved getting down with the kids in the block area of the room. I loved researching new books and reading them to the children. I also enjoyed working with the kids, many of them from low-income families in Chicago. I was very committed to the children’s families and the communities from which they came. And I was an advocate who often marched to advance their needs. The two went hand in hand because I’ve always had this sort of save-the-world mentality,” she laughs. “And I’ve wanted to act on it serving young children.”
This mission has guided her during 50 years in the early childhood profession. She has a master’s degree in child development and an advanced certificate in infant studies, along with a wide range of experience in her field. Besides working as a preschool teacher in Head Start, she has served as an administrator, trainer and mental health consultant, as well as an education, mental health and disabilities coordinator for federal- and state-funded programs. She has co-scripted and directed a Magna System series on authentic assessment and school-age programs, and taught college courses on human growth and development. She has worked in the early intervention system as a development therapist. And she is also certified as a Professional Development Specialist who serves CDA candidates at center-based, family child care and home visitor programs.
Leah’s involvement with the CDA goes way back to the 1970s when the credential was still in its infant stages. “I was in in charge of CDA training in Chicago and trained many Head Start teachers,” she recalls. “I wrote a widely used CDA assessment instrument and taught CDA courses in a community college where I geared the courses to meet candidates’ needs. We had assistant teachers who were reading at the seventh-grade level, so we gave them the help they needed to bring them to the point where they could take a course like human growth and development. We also tailored the academic courses to fulfill the 120 clock hours required for the credential. So, by the time they took three courses, which led to an associate degree, they had the hours they needed for the credential. Then most of them kept going with their education.”
But Leah’s focus wasn’t just on the classroom requirements for the credential. “The CDA makes sure you don’t just talk the talk, you also have to walk the walk,” she explains. So, she placed CDA students in model sites where they could see best practices in action. “This also gave us a chance to see how they interacted with children, and that was important to us. You can get an A in all these courses, but that doesn’t mean you’re good with children.”
You also need specific training and skills to work with different age and demographic groups, as Leah understood. And she was instrumental in adapting the CDA to meet the needs of various early childhood programs. “When Early Head Start was developing in the nineties,” she recalls, “a lot of people who’d been trained to work in preschools didn’t have a clue about how to work with infants and toddler, so we wrote two courses that still exist about teaching infants and toddlers. We were the first to accept bilingual CDA portfolios and serve as observers for bilingual candidates for the CDA. We were also the first in the country to do a Home Visitor CDA because we were striving to be all inclusive.”
But whatever age group the candidates served, language the spoke or setting in which they worked, one thing held true for them all: their skill level largely depended on the kind of experience they received in an early childhood setting, she explains. “Whether a person succeeds in getting a CDA depends on the support a program gives them in learning developmentally appropriate practice. If you’re shouting at children and your director doesn’t tell you it’s inappropriate, there’s no one to stop you from shouting. As an educator, you learn things from the environment where you’re working.”
Leah has also learned a great deal from the many different environments where she, herself, worked. “I was a developmental therapist, and I went into homes and worked with children who had severe developmental delays or had been through trauma. I’m a play therapist because I’m convinced play is the way to help children develop. It’s a lot like being a home visitor because the primary caregiver has to partner with you and you are going into a child’s home, day care center or wherever they spend the day.”
While doing this work, Leah went around to a wide range of areas in Chicago and worked with families of all backgrounds: African American, Hispanic, Mongolian and more. “It doesn’t matter if they’re rich, poor or middle-income, children of all backgrounds have issues, trauma and developmental delays,” she points out. And working with them taught her not to be judgmental. “I learned to accept other families’ life styles and cultural differences,” she says, though sometimes it exposed her to disturbing aspects of life—and even danger.
“A lot of developmental therapists won’t go to certain parts of the city,” she recalls, “but being Leah, I went everywhere. One parent put her child in front of the TV all day and wouldn’t take her to the playground across the street because there’d been a gang killing there two days before. I had a child who threw toys at my head and lived with his mother in a shelter where all the moms were drug abusers. As a developmental therapist in early intervention, you get everything, and you either adapt or you don’t.”
She did, and she used her expertise to assist others in their work. “I’ve supervised home visitors and I’ve done a lot of training with bilingual home visitors,” she says. “I referred them to early intervention if I saw the child was having issues or developmental delays. I also collaborated with social workers. And I feel like I could have been a social worker because I became so knowledgeable about the families that I worked with.” And they’re still fresh in her mind because she gave up her developmental therapy work just a year ago though she’s now 74.
She no longer works directly with children because it’s hard for her to get down on the floor and play with them. “I’m semi-retired,” she says, “but I’m still very involved in my field. I still work as a PDS, attend seminars and do training because you should never stop learning,” she says. And one of her greatest concerns now is to help children also learn by bonding with books. “Parents and early childhood educators who enthusiastically share quality picture books with young children are promoting literacy in the fullest sense of the word,” she believes. “So, it is our responsibility as parents and teachers to bring books and children together. Next to hugging our child, reading aloud is probably the longest-lasting experience you can put into your child’s life,” she wrote in a recent paper.
Leah now spends a lot of time reading to her grandkids and helping them with virtual learning. They’re the love of her life and she sees them nearly every day—yet she hasn’t forgotten about the many vulnerable children who need her support. “I’m involved with Save the Children, and I advocate for families to get the funding they need for early childhood care. I now drive to meetings and demonstrations because I don’t march as well as I once did,” Leah ruefully says. But she’s still striving to contribute to her profession because she hasn’t given up her mission: to save the world by serving our youngest children.
We have all been victims or participants of gossip at work, and sadly, this is no different in an early childhood education setting. Maybe it’s something you overheard in the hallway about a co-worker’s romantic...
s care providers, it often becomes natural to neglect our own needs. We use up all our time making sure the children in our care are happy and cared for, often at the expense of...
I often tell the students in my capstone course, Student Teaching Practicum, how working with other teachers in the same child care room can feel like a marriage. In a good marriage, like any good...
We are pleased to announce the two winners of our 2016 Early Educators Leadership Conference (EELC) High School Leaders Scholarship. Our winners are Mary Matthews of Highland, Utah, and Tracy Westog of Woodstown, New Jersey....
The way early educators use technology today to help young children learn is a relatively new field of scientific research. There is a vast market for phones, tablets, and televisions, which are types of screens...
As early education professionals, we appreciate the value and necessity of lifelong learning. In order to maintain quality of practice, we absolutely need to stay on top of our game by attending early childhood conferences....
At the Council, we are proud of sharing CDA® success stories with you to show the importance of the work we do daily. Anthony McKinsey, Marisa Ray, and Devon Peone, from the Salish School of...
On May 4, our Renewal & Credentialing Team hosted its first Online Renewal Live Chat. In this live chat session, we answered questions from the audience about the new renewal procedures. My colleagues Raquel A....
The amount of websites devoted to the early education field is vast, but it is just a matter of finding the ones and using them as technology tools to enhance your child care program in...
Chief Operations Officer (COO)
Andrew Davis serves as Chief Operating Officer at the Council. In this role, Andrew oversees the Programs Division, which includes the following operational functions: credentialing, growth and business development, marketing and communications, public policy and advocacy, research, innovation, and customer relations.
Andrew has over 20 years of experience in the early care and education field. Most recently, Andrew served as Senior Vice President of Partnership and Engagement with Acelero Learning and Shine Early Learning, where he led the expansion of state and community-based partnerships to produce more equitable systems of service delivery, improved programmatic quality, and greater outcomes for communities, children and families. Prior to that, he served as Director of Early Learning at Follett School Solutions.
Andrew earned his MBA from the University of Baltimore and Towson University and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland – University College.
Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
Jan Bigelow serves as Chief Financial Officer at the Council and has been with the organization since February of 2022.
Jan has more than 30 years in accounting and finance experience, including public accounting, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. She has held management-level positions with BDO Seidman, Kiplinger Washington Editors, Pew Center for Global Climate Change, Communities In Schools, B’nai B’rith Youth Organization and American Humane. Since 2003, Jan has worked exclusively in the non-profit sector where she has been a passionate advocate in improving business operations in order to further the mission of her employers.
Jan holds a CPA from the State of Virginia and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lycoming College. She resides in Alexandria VA with her husband and dog.
Vice President of People and Culture
Janie Payne is the Vice President of People and Culture for the Council for Professional Recognition. Janie is responsible for envisioning, developing, and executing initiatives that strategically manage talent and culture to align people strategies with the overarching business vision of the Council. Janie is responsible for driving organizational excellence through strategic talent practices, orchestrating workforce planning, talent acquisition, performance management as well as a myriad of other Human Resources Programs. She is accountable for driving effectiveness by shaping organizational structure for optimal efficiency. Janie oversees strategies that foster a healthy culture to include embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion into all aspects of the organization.
In Janie’s prior role, she was the Vice President of Administration at Equal Justice Works, where she was responsible for leading human resources, financial operations, facilities management, and information technology. She was also accountable for developing and implementing Equal Justice Works Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion strategy focused on attracting diverse, mission-oriented talent and creating an inclusive and equitable workplace environment. With more than fifteen years of private, federal, and not-for-profit experience, Janie is known for her intuitive skill in administration management, human resources management, designing and leading complex system change, diversity and inclusion, and social justice reform efforts.
Before joining Equal Justice Works, Janie was the Vice President of Human Resources and Chief Diversity Officer for Global Communities, where she was responsible for the design, implementation, and management of integrated HR and diversity strategies. Her work impacted employees in over twenty-two countries. She was responsible for the effective management of different cultural, legal, regulatory, and economic systems for both domestic and international employees. Prior to Global Communities, Janie enjoyed a ten-year career with the federal government. As a member of the Senior Executive Service, she held key strategic human resources positions with multiple cabinet-level agencies and served as an advisor and senior coach to leaders across the federal sector. In these roles, she received recognition from management, industry publications, peers, and staff for driving the creation and execution of programs that created an engaged and productive workforce.
Janie began her career with Verizon Communications (formerly Bell Atlantic), where she held numerous roles of increasing responsibility, where she directed a diversity program that resulted in significant improvement in diversity profile measures. Janie was also a faculty member for the company’s Black Managers Workshop, a training program designed to provide managers of color with the skills needed to overcome barriers to their success that were encountered because of race. She initiated a company-wide effort to establish team-based systems and structures to impact corporate bottom line results which was recognized by the Department of Labor. Janie was one of the first African American women to be featured on the cover of Human Resources Executive magazine.
Janie received her M.A. in Organization Development from American University. She holds numerous professional development certificates in Human Capital Management and Change Management, including a Diversity and Inclusion in Human Resources certificate from Cornell University. She completed the year-long Maryland Equity and Inclusion Leadership Program sponsored by The Schaefer Center for Public Policy and The Maryland Commission on Civil Rights. She is a trained mediator and Certified Professional Coach. She is a graduate of Leadership America, former board chair of the NTL Institute and currently co-steward of the organization’s social justice community of practice, and a member of The Society for Human Resource Management. Additionally, Janie is the Board Chairperson for the Special Education Citizens Advisory Council for Prince Georges County where she is active in developing partnerships that facilitate discussion between parents, families, educators, community leaders, and the PG County school administration to enhance services for students with disabilities which is her passion. She and her husband Randolph reside in Fort Washington Maryland.
Read our monthly e-newsletter and keep up to date on all Council programs and services, as well as the latest news in the world of early care and education. Subscribe today to stay connected with us. You’ll receive timely information on events, webinars, special promotions, and more.