Moving from Good to Great.......My quest for how we get there
By Theresa Hawley, Executive Director, Illinois Governor's Office of Early Childhood Development
Ever wonder what it takes to move a program from "good" to "great"? I wonder about this all the time as do my colleagues in Illinois. We are convinced that the reason we are not seeing larger, more
sustained benefits from the majority of early learning programs for at-risk children is that programs are
not implementing the level of instructional excellence that a great program provides. As part of
implementation of the next phase of Illinois's Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) State
Plan, and with support from Build, we spent a day meeting with our colleagues across different
programs and sectors in Illinois to think more deeply about what it takes to move the needle on a
program so that it becomes not just a good program but a great program, reaching the highest
outcomes for young children. Our focus was on all programs that serve preschool-aged children and
families—child care, state funded Preschool for All, and Head Start. What does it take to move a
program to GREAT? What systems of support do we need to put in place in Illinois's early childhood
system to achieve greatness across all our programs? What level of investment is needed?
In an effort to begin this conversation, we brought together a variety of programs and partners for a one
day meeting. We put out a call for proposals, inviting programs to submit a proposal to share the work
they were doing in moving programs from good to great, what was working and what was not, and the
lessons they had learned along the way. We are fortunate to have had more than a dozen Early Reading
First grants over the years in our state, as well as three i3 grants focused on early childhood, and we
concentrated our recruiting efforts on these researchers. We knew that some of these programs were
investing $50,000 or more per classroom over three years to achieve excellence, while our traditional
state support systems for child care and preschool spend less than 10% of that amount on quality
supports. What is the point within that range where success is possible?
Through the call for proposals, we received many great responses and had a cross-agency team review
the proposals and determine the agenda. We included a keynote speaker and panel discussions, coupled
with ample time for reflection at tables of eight (tables were assigned to ensure rich, cross-sector
discussion). Rebecca Berlin, from Teachstone, served as our keynote. She laid out the problem of why
we are not achieving the quality needed to make a difference in child outcomes. This set the stage
perfectly for our panel discussions. Each panel presented their approaches and lessons learned. We
heard from the Erikson Institute Early Math Initiative, the Chicago Parent Child Centers, and Educare's
master teacher program, among others. One of the panelists that resonated the most was the director
of a large prek program who discussed how she has shared leadership and an ongoing learning
community among the staff in her program. After hearing from so many great programs, we all realized
that this prek director embodied what we were searching for and that the answer we were looking for
was how to create more leaders like her. And was that really a surprise?
So much of the research says that it is all about leadership, and in this case, specifically instructional
leadership. How do we build that into our professional learning communities within all our programs,
creating leaders that will encourage this same passion for excellence among their staff? What is the
right level of investment to achieve that? What we know for sure is that this must happen at the
program level and it has to be embedded in a way so that it does not end when grant-funded coaching
ends or special technical assistance ends. It's not about the visiting expert but about creating a culture
of growth with supports in the program. We can spend $50,000 per classroom on coaching and
mentoring but, at the end of the day, will we have made real change in our program staff and teachers
and leaders when it is over? How do we plant these seeds in every early childhood program? How do we
nurture and make them grow so that every program and every staff member working with young
children is on a continuous path of moving from good to great?
We ended this day of discussion with much information and examples of programs that are doing great
things. We are convinced that the answer lies within an ideal of instructional excellence but how to
achieve that ideal still lies beyond our reach. In Illinois, we will continue on a quest for this answer.
Please continue this discussion with me, share your efforts to move from good to great and let us think
together about how we move this agenda forward across each of our states and country. I look forward
to your comments and discussion.