Leslie Holt: Changing Culture in the Classroom

“I want to bring the real-world stories of educators and families to life,” Leslie says. “I’ve done a lot of content creation since entering the early learning field 15 years ago and even served as the senior social media manager for Bright Horizons before becoming director of a Bright Horizons center in Cary, North Carolina.” Since taking on his current job in 2016, Leslie has faced a lot of new demands, but he still manages to find time to tell stories about the early learning field. “My role allows me to get into the classrooms and highlight what happens in child care centers,” he says. “That’s my mission because I don’t think most people realize the challenges our early educators face as they show up selflessly each day for work.”

It can be especially challenging for Black male educators like Leslie, as he points out. “I’ve always told people that being a man in early education is going to be a gift or a curse because men don’t fit the norm in our field. So, throughout my career, I’ve worked to change the culture of the early learning field.” Pursuing this goal has inspired Leslie to take on leadership roles since graduating from the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, with a degree in child development and taking his first job at a child care center in Marlboro Village, Maryland.

“I looked around at the center’s programming and implementation of early education, and I wasn’t happy with it,” Leslie recalls. “Though I wasn’t yet in a management position, I knew what the center had to do to provide high-quality early learning, so I took the initiative to begin coaching my colleagues. Together, we were successful in changing our approach and improving the center’s reputation, achievements that made me think I wanted to spend the rest of my career coaching and guiding teachers as a leader.”

Leslie was only in his early twenties when he made the decision to switch gears in his career, but he was confident that he could succeed. “I’ve always really considered myself to be like a natural-born leader,” he says. “In college, I was class president every year and as a senior, I was student government association president, a role in which I managed an activities budget of $1.5 million. Holding this position helped me hone my leadership skills and later made me wonder how I could use these skills in an early childhood setting.”

It was more challenging than Leslie expected when he found a job as an assistant director at Children of America in Waldorf, Maryland. “This was my first formal leadership role in child care,” he recalls, “and I found myself supervising a staff of women who were all old enough to be my mother. Some of them would show me respect as I tried to approach them from a position of authority. Others would look at me, shake their heads and walk away as if to say, I’m not listening to this little boy.”

That experience at Children of America led Leslie to give some deep thought to how he was going to define himself as a leader. “I wondered how I was going to carry myself among teachers and how I was going to connect with them,” he says. “It was a pivotal time in my career when I began to understand how much strong relationships matter.” And this reality check also made Leslie realize he couldn’t build respect by simply relying on the power of his position and threatening to fire people. “Instead, I had to listen to the teachers, treat them like experts and figure out how to support them. Collaboration became the core of my leadership style.”

He brought his lesson in leadership to the Celebree School in Bowie, Maryland, where he had to resolve licensing issues and lapses in the quality of care. These problems had led some families to lose faith in the program, so Leslie had to rebuild bonds with the families. “I did it by putting a spotlight on the positive aspects of the program, learning about the families’ needs and holding activities like a fall festival to build a sense of community,” he says. “I also started a Black history book club to highlight the values of diversity and inclusion,” values that families embraced by accepting Leslie as a young, Black man in education. “I think the families were excited to see me in the director’s role,” he says, “since that was not something they were used to.”

Still, not all families take this positive approach to Leslie’s gender, and he’s inspired mixed reactions since coming to Bright Horizons in North Carolina. “I have to convince some families of my expertise and qualifications as a director,” he says, “while others look on my gender as a plus. Recently, I had a family that told me that they had enrolled their child in our program specifically because they felt I brought a particular structure and energy to the program. So, whether the responses are good or bad, I’m always dealing with perceptions of what a man in early learning is supposed to be.”

Leslie is also still facing the challenge of changing the mindsets of educators who hold the time-worn idea that early education is a woman’s field. Recent research and developments in the early learning field have shown the value of having more men in the profession as role models for both boys and girls, as Leslie points out. “So, I urge my staff to embrace change and realize that I might not look like the directors they’ve had before, but I bring something new to the table.”

One of Leslie’s major contributions has been to bring diverse perspectives to the program by supporting men. “We have three men on our staff now and I’m always looking to hire more men,” he says, “by using chance encounters and social media to connect with men who might have an interest in teaching young children. Right now, I think our responsibility as a profession is to recognize that we need more men in the early learning field and we can’t wait for them to come to us. We have to be creative in how we do this, and we also need to reach out to more young men during high school since it’s harder to attract men in their thirties and forties who already have responsibilities for supporting a family.”

One of the key issues we face when it comes to recruiting and retaining men is the low wages for entry-level early childhood teachers, as Leslie explains. “That inhibits many men who are interested in working with children from taking on positions in early education, so I provide my staff—men and women alike—with opportunities for professional growth, like earning a CDA®, a proven way to promotions and higher pay. I also talk to the men about ways they can supplement their income, as I did at the start of my career, while pursuing their passion for serving young children.”

Leslie has also shared his story as the advisor and primary co-chair of the Men TEACH Employee Advisory Group at Bright Horizons. “It’s an organization in which we have conversations about how to support men in early childhood education and what resources we need to achieve this goal,” he explains. “We also answer questions from directors at other centers on the challenges their staff face, like how to deal with parents who don’t want a male teacher to care for their child. My job is to empathize with the parents’ perspective and also show the director how to help families understand that having more men work in early childhood classrooms benefits children and staff by making inclusion part of a program’s culture.”

Leslie is after broad culture change as he works toward a day when men can seamlessly enter the early learning field and we don’t look on it as something outside the norm. “We haven’t gotten there yet, but we’re making progress as productive discussions go on in the early learning community,” he says. “Now we have to engage policymakers in the conversation and give educators more chances to speak out for the salary and support they need,” Leslie says. And he’s already using his voice to get across the message that our nation needs to put more resources and investment into the early childhood workforce. “Part of that is doing more to recruit and retain men,” as Leslie explains, “by telling my story and that of other early educators who look like me. I want to change the narrative about men in the early learning field.”