The Intentional ECE

What changes when educators come into relationship with materials themselves? Roberta Pucci shares how our own experience of a material helps us read a child’s process, know when words help and when silence is enough, and offer materials we’re excited to share. A conversation about environments that are never neutral and the entering, immersion, and closing of the creative process.

To learn more about Roberta:

https://www.robertapuccilab.com/

https://www.instagram.com/robertapuccilab/reels/

The Language of Space & Time

What happens when we look beyond what children are learning, and notice how they’re learning? Starting with a fairy town that turned into a curiosity about water, this episode explores how that kind of noticing helps educators understand who children are, not just as learners but as people.

Revisiting Journeys by Miriam Beloglovsky & Jessica Frazier

The Intentional Educator

Mentorship is not a hierarchy - it’s a relationship. Kerry Drake joins the conversation to explore what genuine mentorship looks like in early childhood education, from the reciprocity and vulnerability that both mentor and mentee bring, to what it means to step into a formal mentoring role with intention, capacity, and the right support in place. A rich and honest conversation that includes peer-to-peer mentorship, reflective practice, and what it really means to help someone find their voice.

To learn more about Kerry:

Website:  KD Talks

IG: kdtalks.consulting  

What if professional learning looked less like a workshop everyone sits through, and more like the way we hope children learn: hands-on, relational, and full of questions? In this panel conversation, Rosalba Bortolotti, Paola Lopez, and Heather Jackson explore who the educator really is, with their own history, their own ideas about teaching, and their own need to belong before they can take risks. They talk about what it takes to learn alongside educators rather than direct them, from a ladybug inquiry that turned into map making to the leadership that protects time for thinking together. It’s an invitation to see educators as complex, diverse learners, and to build a culture where they have the trust and agency to thrive.

To learn more about Rosalba, Paola and Heather:

Acorn Collaborative, IG @acorncollaborative

Kinderoo Academy, IG:  @kinderoo_academy, FB:  Kinderoo Ocala

The Sunflower School, IG:  @thesunflower_studio, @thesunflowerschool

Childhood isn't a waiting room for adulthood. It's a valid place on the life cycle, with its own perspectives, ideas, and theories. Through a story of moss, a spray bottle, and a fairy town built on the carpet, we explore curiosity as a disposition rather than a strategy, and what becomes visible when developmental milestones move out of the foreground: the nonlinear, joyful, whole child in front of us.  Inspired by my workshop, Children are Capable & Whole.

The Intentional Educator

What would it mean to create a learning environment that children don't have to recover from? Kisa Marx - educator, author, and Liberation Architect - invites us to look through a kaleidoscope rather than a binary lens, shifting our perspective until we can truly see the child in front of us. A powerful conversation about cultural humility, child-affirming spaces, universal truths, and what it means to free the children in our care.

Learn more/connect with Kisa:

Website

Instagram:  @am_still_learning, @theplaylabfoundation

Substack

LinkedIn

The most important readiness isn't academic - it's social, emotional, and human. Norline Wild joins the conversation to explore what it means to prepare future educators to truly see children, know their students, and bring intentionality and joy to their practice. From picture books and play to developmentalism and systemic change, this is a conversation about what teacher education can be when relationships and curiosity are at the heart of it.

To learn more about Norline:

Website

This year, something's shifting in how educators think about the start of school - some are waiting to build the space together with the children who arrive. In this episode, we explore what that small choice reveals about a much bigger question: what do we actually believe about children, learning, and our own role as educators? A quiet invitation to revisit your values - not to change them, but to ask how they show up now - so that you, and the children in your care, can thrive.

Values to Action:  A Guidebook for Early Childhood Educators

References

From Teaching to Thinking - Ann Pelo, Margie Carter

Revisiting Journeys - Miriam Beloglovsky, Jessica Frazier

Finding Our Way - Ann Van Dam, Fiona Zinn

ASPIRE - Sue Roffey

Ecological Systems Theory - Uri Bronfenbrenner

Community in an early learning centre isn't something that happens by accident - it's built intentionally, through partnership, dialogue, and a willingness to ask hard questions about what we value and how we structure our time. Jessie Frazier joins the conversation to explore what it really means to create community with children, families, and educators - from integrating families into planning, to designing spaces that feel alive, to the self-work that has to come first.

What if the divide between infant and toddler, preschool, and school-age educators isn't really about age groups at all - but about status, hierarchy and whose work gets recognized as teaching? In this panel conversation, Paige Wernick, Ron Grady, and Dr. Misty Paterson explore the depth of knowledge educators carry, how it’s often not seen, the structural barriers that keep us from building bridges across rooms and programs, and what becomes possible when we stop treating collaboration as a ‘nice to have’ but as an essential part of an educator’s work. It's a conversation about power, perception, and what it might take for every educator, and every child, to truly thrive.

To learn more about Paige, Ron and Misty:

Paige Wernick

Ron Grady + website

Dr. Misty Paterson + website