Early childhood programs invest considerable time and money in professional development. Educators attend workshops, complete required training hours, earn credentials, participate in coaching, and learn new approaches to supporting children. Yet a critical question often receives too little attention:
What happens when educators return to workplaces that do not give them the time, resources, authority, or support to apply what they learned?
An educator may complete training on intentional interactions but return to a classroom without adequate planning time. A teacher may learn how to individualize instruction while working in a program experiencing chronic understaffing. A new director may understand the value of reflective supervision but spend each day covering classrooms, responding to urgent staffing problems, and completing compliance paperwork. In each case, the professional has gained knowledge, but the organization has not created the conditions needed to use it. This is why workforce preparation cannot stand alone. Preparation matters, but its value depends on what happens around it.
Preparation Is One Part of a Larger System
The Learning Policy Institute’s Preparing and Supporting Early Childhood Educators fact sheet identifies three interconnected requirements for building and retaining a strong early childhood workforce: high-quality preparation, competitive compensation, and ongoing professional learning and support. The brief also emphasizes accessible coursework, supervised clinical experiences, mentoring, induction, job-embedded coaching, collaboration, paid planning time, and career advancement (Learning Policy Institute, 2026). This systems perspective changes the question from “Did the educator complete the training?” to “Does the educator work in a setting that makes skilled practice possible?”
Training can introduce knowledge. Coaching can help translate that knowledge into practice. Planning time allows educators to think through what they observed. Collaboration helps teams examine problems together. Compensation makes it more feasible for skilled educators to remain in the profession. Career pathways show them that growing their expertise can lead to meaningful advancement. When one of these elements is missing, professional learning becomes more difficult to sustain. When several are missing, training can become an expectation educators must carry without the organizational support required to meet it.
Knowledge Does Not Automatically Become Practice
Learning about a strategy and using it consistently are different accomplishments. A workshop may help an educator understand open-ended questioning, child-led inquiry, responsive caregiving, or developmentally appropriate practice. Consistent implementation requires opportunities to observe, try, receive feedback, reflect, and try again. Research on coaching illustrates this distinction. Hanno (2022) examined 169 early childhood educators participating in a nine-month coaching intervention. Some teaching practices improved immediately after coaching cycles, particularly when the coaching focused directly on those practices. However, some changes diminished over time. The findings suggest that professional growth is not a one-time transfer of information. It is a developmental process requiring focused practice and continued reinforcement.
A randomized study of an online course and coaching intervention for toddler educators reached a related conclusion. Participating educators demonstrated stronger noticing skills and better educator–child interactions than educators in the control group. At the same time, turnover and competing work demands made sustained participation difficult (LoCasale-Crouch et al., 2023). This presents an important leadership lesson: when educators struggle to apply training, leaders should not immediately conclude that they are resistant, unmotivated, or unwilling to change. The first response should be inquiry.
Did educators have time to practice?
Were expectations clear?
Did they receive relevant feedback?
Could they adapt the strategy to their children and setting?
Were staffing and scheduling conditions stable enough to support implementation?
Did the organizational culture encourage questions and experimentation?
These questions move leadership away from blame and toward shared responsibility.
Paid Planning Time Is Part of Quality
Planning time is sometimes treated as time away from children. It is part of the intellectual work educators perform on behalf of children. Educators use planning time to review observations, prepare environments, interpret assessment information, adapt curriculum, communicate with families, and decide what individual children may need next. When this work must be completed during unpaid hours, or squeezed into brief moments while supervising children, the quality of professional decision-making is compromised.
The Learning Policy Institute (2026) specifically recommends paid planning time alongside job-embedded coaching and professional development. This pairing is important. Coaching may help an educator notice something new, but reflection and planning help the educator decide what to do with that insight. For directors, protecting planning time is therefore more than a scheduling decision. It is a leadership practice that communicates, “Your thinking matters.” It recognizes educators not simply as individuals who carry out activities, but as professionals who observe, interpret, design, and adjust learning experiences.
Compensation Is a Quality and Leadership Issue
It is difficult to build a professional learning culture when educators cannot afford to remain in the profession. The Early Childhood Workforce Index 2024 reported a national median wage of $13.07 per hour for early educators and found that 43% of early educator families relied on public safety-net programs (McLean et al., 2024). A review of compensation research similarly concluded that low pay is associated with poorer educator well-being and higher turnover or intentions to leave, although evidence connecting compensation directly to classroom quality and child outcomes remains more limited (Morrissey & Bowman, 2024).
Longitudinal research from Louisiana illustrates the instability this creates. Of 4,465 teachers working in publicly funded, center-based early childhood programs in fall 2016, fewer than 40% remained at the same site three years later. Turnover was particularly high among childcare teachers, educators working with toddlers, and teachers who were new to their sites (Bellows et al., 2022).
More recent experimental evidence shows that compensation interventions can make a measurable difference. Maryland’s ECSTRA pilot randomly offered eligible educators retention bonuses ranging from $1,000 to $3,000. Bonus offers reduced overall eight-month turnover modestly, from 9.5% to 7.8%. The effects were substantially greater for educators in their first five years and those earning lower wages (Atteberry et al., 2025). Compensation does not replace leadership, coaching, or professional learning. However, these supports cannot reach their full potential when skilled educators continually leave for more sustainable employment. A leadership pipeline without appropriate compensation risks becoming a pathway to greater responsibility without meaningful economic advancement.
Directors Need Support, Too
Directors are often expected to create supportive conditions for everyone else while working without sufficient support themselves. They manage regulations, staffing, family concerns, enrollment, budgets, facilities, curriculum, assessment, and employee development, often simultaneously. If directors are to become instructional and organizational leaders, they need preparation that goes beyond compliance. They need opportunities to learn how to coach adults, facilitate collaborative inquiry, delegate responsibility, build psychological safety, analyze organizational problems, and create systems that do not depend on the director solving every problem personally.
They also need the authority and resources to put those ideas into practice. A director cannot protect planning time without adequate staffing. A director cannot build a stable leadership pipeline when salary differences between roles are negligible. A director cannot provide meaningful coaching if every available moment is consumed by emergencies and paperwork. Supporting educator agency must therefore include supporting the leaders who shape educators’ working conditions.
From Professional Development Events to a Professional Learning System
A professional development calendar lists workshops. A professional learning system connects learning to practice, feedback, reflection, working conditions, and advancement. Programs can begin by asking five questions:
Preparation: Do educators have access to relevant, affordable, high-quality learning?
Application: Are they given opportunities to practice what they learn in their actual work?
Reflection: Do coaching, collaboration, and paid planning time help them examine their decisions?
Conditions: Do staffing, compensation, resources, and leadership make sustained practice possible?
Advancement: Does increased expertise lead to greater responsibility, authority, recognition, and compensation?
These questions can help organizations identify whether they are genuinely developing professionals or merely documenting training attendance. The distinction matters. Educators do not become more effective simply because they accumulate certificates. They grow when new knowledge is connected to supported practice, purposeful feedback, professional judgment, and organizational trust.
The Question Worth Exploring
The early childhood field frequently asks educators to learn more, earn more credentials, and implement more initiatives. Those expectations should be accompanied by an equally strong commitment to building environments in which educators can use their knowledge well. Training cannot compensate for chronic understaffing. Coaching cannot overcome a lack of release time. Credentials cannot resolve poverty-level wages. Reflection cannot flourish in a culture where questions are interpreted as resistance. Leadership development cannot succeed when emerging leaders receive more work but no additional authority or compensation.
The better question is not simply, “What training do our educators need?” It is:
“What must our organization change so educators can apply their knowledge, exercise sound professional judgment, and continue growing?”
When leaders begin with that question, professional development stops being an isolated employee benefit. It becomes part of a coherent workforce system—one designed not only to prepare educators, but also to help them remain, lead, and thrive.
Discussion Questions
Think about the most recent training offered in your program. What specific workplace conditions helped—or prevented—educators from applying what they learned?
If your organization could strengthen only one condition this year—paid planning time, coaching, compensation, collaboration, staffing stability, or career advancement—which would have the greatest effect, and why?
How can directors hold educators accountable for high-quality practice while also examining whether the organization has provided the time, resources, authority, and support needed to meet those expectations?
References
Atteberry, A., Doromal, J. B., Malhotra, K. P., & Lansford, T. (2025). The impacts of Maryland’s Enhanced Childcare Support and Teacher Retention Award (ECSTRA) bonus program. EdPolicyWorks, University of Virginia. https://education.virginia.edu/documents/maryland-ecstra-and-workforce-survey-report
Bellows, L., Bassok, D., & Markowitz, A. J. (2022). Teacher turnover in early childhood education: Longitudinal evidence from the universe of publicly funded programs in Louisiana. Educational Researcher, 51(9), 637–649. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X221131505
Hanno, E. C. (2022). Immediate changes, trade-offs, and fade-out in high-quality teacher practices during coaching. Educational Researcher, 51(3), 173–185. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211062896
Learning Policy Institute. (2026, June 22). Preparing and supporting early childhood educators [Fact sheet]. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/preparing-supporting-early-childhood-educators-factsheet
LoCasale-Crouch, J., Romo-Escudero, F., Clayback, K., Whittaker, J., Hamre, B., & Melo Hurtado, C. (2023). Results from a randomized trial of the effective classroom interactions for toddler educators' professional development intervention. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 65, 217–226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2023.06.005
McLean, C., Austin, L. J. E., Powell, A., Knight, J., Muñoz, S., & Schlieber, M. (2024). Early Childhood Workforce Index 2024. Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, University of California, Berkeley. https://cscce.berkeley.edu/workforce-index-2024/
Morrissey, T. W., & Bowman, K. M. (2024). Early care and education workforce compensation, program quality, and child outcomes: A review of the research. Early Education and Development, 35(5), 984–1013. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2023.2266340
About the Author
Victoria Long-Coleman, Ph.D., MBA is the Founder and Principal of Early Childhood Innovations. An early childhood educator, leadership, coach, author, speaker, she focuses on strengthening educators, developing leaders, and translating research into practical approaches that improve early childhood systems.
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