Leveraging Our Strengths – Starting Today!

What Works!

Strengths-Based Approaches to Early Childhood Education

Panel #3: Leveraging Our Strengths – Starting Today!
We have discovered our strengths and envisioned our future: now we must design the path from here to there. This is where we explore the techniques, approaches, and strategies that result in preschool teacher–driven change.
Practitioner:
		Susan Isaac Kohl Susan Isaac Kohl, M.A., is the Preschool Director of The White Pony and a teacher at The Meher Schools in Lafayette, California. She has written five books and many magazine articles for parents. She is a Director Mentor and teaches mentor workshops at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill. Over the years, she has taught early childhood education at Palomar College in San Diego County, Merritt College in Oakland, and John F. Kennedy University in Orinda. Susan has been a consultant for the NAEYC on the Navajo reservation in Arizona and for Head Start in Hawaii and Oakland. Her latest book, The Best Things Parents Do (Conari, 2004), urges parents to focus on their strengths. Susan writes a column for The Meher Schools' weekly newsletter that is also published as Parenting from the Heart, Diablo magazine's online parenting blog. She appears regularly on View from the Bay on San Francisco's KGO-TV.
Policy Maker:
		Howard Levine Harold G. Levine became a professor in the UCLA Department of Education in 1979, and served as its Chair from 1995-1998. He was appointed as the Interim Dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in 1998. In August, 2001, Levine became the Founding Dean of the new School of Education at the University of California, Davis. As Dean, he has overseen substantial growth in faculty, staff, and students; and the implementation of a commitment to work with practitioners at all levels of public, K-12 education. Dr. Levine also serves as Associate Provost for Education Initiatives at the UC Office of the President, responsible for developing, implementing and evaluating strategies for coordinated, ongoing collaborations between University of California campuses and California's public preschool through 12th-grade schools. He is also a member of California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell's P-16 Council, a statewide group of education, business and community leaders charged with developing strategies to better coordinate, integrate and improve education for preschool through college students. As a researcher, Levine has conducted studies both abroad and in the United States. Among the latter has been the study of everyday thinking and reasoning among developmentally delayed children in Los Angeles area special education schools, the transition to high performance work environments among four leading California manufacturing companies, and a study of the development of entrepreneurial thinking and behaviors of a national sample of high school students. Levine's published work spans these, and related, topics.
Researcher:
		Peter Mangione Peter L. Mangione is a Co-Director of WestEd's Center for Child and Family Studies. He has worked extensively in the fields of child development, early childhood education, research and evaluation design, and public policy. For over twenty years, he has provided leadership in the development of the Program for Infant/Toddler Care, a national model for training early childhood practitioners. Mangione has edited curriculum guides on topics such as early cognitive development and learning, language development and communication, and culturally responsive care. He has also played a major role in the creation of a series of broadcast quality videos on infant/toddler care and development, and was an executive producer of the video A World Full of Language: Supporting Preschool English Learners. Recently, he has led the collaborative development of the California Department of Education's infant/toddler learning and development foundations, preschool learning foundations, and preschool curriculum framework. Mangione currently serves on the advisory board of the National Association for Family Child Care, and has previously served three terms as a consulting editor for the Early Childhood Research Quarterly and on the board of directors of the Child Care Law Center. He received a Ph.D. in Education and Human Development from the University of Rochester in 1980 and completed postdoctoral study at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, Germany.
Moderator:
		Lindsey Godwin Lindsey Godwin is an Assistant Professor of Management in the College of Business, Morehead State University and received her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, where she studied with the founders of Appreciative Inquiry. She has worked on AI projects with the UN, World Vision, Houston Schools, Weatherhead School of Management, and other organizations. In collaboration with David Cooperrider, the leading thought leader on Appreciative Inquiry (AI), she has been a partner in the development and facilitation of OvationNet, which provides online experiential workshops that focus on teaching the foundations of AI. She is currently a knowledge manager for the AI Commons and served as content manager for the 2007 International AI Conference in Orlando, FL and is the Co-Chair for the 2009 World Appreciative Inquiry Conference in Nepal.