Title:
Human Development Consultant
Organization:
Western Kentucky University
Biography
I am a lifelong advocate for social justice who found my professional home in 1979 when I discovered Head Start and embraced its values and its goals working as a Head Start teacher.
These days I spend most of my time visiting early childhood programs all over the United States as a consultant and a trainer helping programs to elevate the level of discourse in their classrooms and to meet the needs of individual children. In so doing I have gained a unique perspective and a thorough and intimate understanding of how early childhood education is practiced in these United States.
I earned my Masters Degree in Human Development at Pacific Oaks College in the year 2000, I have served as the coordinator and chief trainer for the Region IV Head Start Teaching Center at Western Kentucky University and in 2000 I developed the national training material used by the Head Start National Center for Family Literacy. I was a contributing author to the Zero to Three 2003 tome, Learning to Read the World, and I’ve had two articles published in Child Care Exchange. In 2015 my book, The Great Disconnect in Early Childhood Education: What We Know Vs What We Do was published by Redleaf Press.
My wife, Teresa Christmas, and I have raised a his, hers and ours family of five kids who have taught me that all children are incredibly different and that early childhood programs are not built to respond to those individual differences, I guess you might say that most of my life’s work has been to help early childhood programs become much less institutional and more like language rich, emotionally supportive families.
