Professional Development Programs

Innovative, Practical, Inspiring: Modelling and Coaching for your Team

Our job-embedded coaching is personalized, actionable, tech-enabled professional development for early childhood staff.

Help your staff restore a mindset of optimism and agency.

Engagement with the group experience is where we first “learn to learn”, and it is ultimately what we value most in early education!

Learning Seeds offers teachers the tools and strategies to realize this fundamental goal.

  • Replace disengagement and disruption with teachable moments. Reduce challenging behaviors by increasing children’s engagement in exploration, interaction, and shared thinking.

  • Cultivate more enduring, independent group play. Help children discover how to play longer during periods of semi-structured learning, think more flexibly, care for the group, and share ideas.

  • Identify the purposes of common challenges. Address children’s motives for behaviors such as withdrawal, “bossiness”, and flitting from activity to activity.

  • Learn transformative strategies to guide struggling individuals. Create plans of support that focus on the specific skills a child needs to build to enjoy more positive and lasting connections with the group experience.

Our innovative programs draw on the transformative strategies we employ in our own direct work with children, to provide participants relevant, applicable solutions to their common challenges.

Personalized coaching of best practice helps your school retain staff by solving their specific problems.

Recording of best practice at your school informs new staff going forward.

Check out our resources for educators, or get a taste of Learning Seeds thought leadership in our recent Sesame Workshop webinar!

Testimonials

  • "Learning Seeds are the detectives who can spot precursors to behavioral challenges. They understand how to identify the motivation behind a child's moment-to-moment interactions."

    Sarah, preschool director

  • "Learning Seeds is reinforcing for us the benefit of the teacher staying close, observing and stepping in when scaffolding would be helpful to shore up the child's play and ensure that all of the children are benefiting from it."

    - Marie, lead teacher

  • "We learned so much from watching how the Learning Seeds Enlightened Shadows interact and play with the children – making activities more inclusive, giving everyone their own parts, making it a group activity, getting the kids used to doing things all together."

    Shea, lead teacher

  • "Learning Seeds made the child the first person instead of the adult telling the kids what to do. They went with how the child was feeling and allowed the child to build the story."

    Tamara, teacher

  • "Learning Seeds has the potential to revolutionize kindergarten readiness because of their focus on the individual child. The skills that my child developed during his time with Learning Seeds helped him to feel like a good friend, like somebody who could socialize and play and engage with the group."

    Becca, parent

  • "While some interventions tend to focus on one specific area such as OT or Speech and Language, Learning Seeds takes a more integrative approach. The Learning Seeds team has gotten to know my child as a whole, from many perspectives, as opposed to just one perspective."

    Sue, parent

  • "Words cannot describe how many changes I witnessed in my son as a direct result of Learning Seeds' intervention. I now have a very talkative and social eight-year-old who is learning so much every day."

    Laurie, parent

  • "The Learning Seeds team has been a wonderful support to me since my son was diagnosed with PDD-NOS. They have helped me find my footing amidst a new world of evaluations, therapies and acronyms, and offered to troubleshoot some of the specific issues we were having at home. A struggle in our daily life isn't so hard anymore."

    Tara, parent

  • "We saw more improvement in 10 weeks with the Learning Seeds program than with 9 years of in-person coaching with the most widely-used solution."

    PreK teacher mentor

Learning Seeds Play Modeling Staff Development Program

In a series of visits, our team consults with your staff, coaches strategies that apply directly to your program and the children in your care, and helps to solve the daily realities of your learning environment.

We model the transformative techniques we use in our own practice, guiding children to engage during open play with independence and endurance. As we model for your staff, we serve as an extra set of hands providing expert support.

We record and capture examples of the work we do with your students. Using headsets, we capture the details of each teachable moment so they can be shared and discussed with your staff. 

We follow up with meetings and additional team-wide conversations to discuss highlights and  themes and explore critical insights. We lead a cycle of preparation and reflection to make coaching most impactful.

We produce customized templates and visuals for your staff’s immediate reference and for use as a long-term teacher training resource.

If you are a Boston-area school interested in scheduling this program at your school in the coming year, reach out to us for more details.

Cohort Coaching

In-person or virtually, we lead early childhood educator cohorts through a series of sessions focused on topics such as object-based play or outdoor activities. Participants set intention, identify goals, reflect on practice, and over time build optimism and change mindset.

Cohorts are organized around learning environment:

  • indoor classroom play centers (choice and open play time)

  • playground play

  • nature-based outdoor preschools 

Over the course of twelve weeks, we hold six one-hour cohort sessions to discuss solutions to common struggles. Participants learn to guide children

  • out of the periphery and into group activities

  • from flitting and disrupting to grounding in the play

  • toward sharing objects, smiles, laughter, and experiences

  • toward pretending, imagining, and playing together

In each session the Learning Seeds coach introduces the topic within the framework of the Learning Seeds Engagement Lens. The cohort discusses the topic, with reference to their own teaching experiences.

Between sessions, cohort members are provided with content and materials to support their practice of techniques and strategies discussed in each session.

Vignettes from each participant’s practice are collected for discussion during the subsequent session.

Let’s solve the daily challenges in your learning environment together, viewing teachable moments through the Learning Seeds Engagement Lens.

Learning Seeds brings in-person coaching and modeling to partner schools in New England.

Professional development is most effective when it is tailored to participating teachers, their own learning environments, and the children they work with.

For schools in our own region, we have the opportunity to come directly to your learning environment, work alongside your team and model the strategies and best practices.

Check out our in-person play modeling and hybrid cohort coaching programs.

Connect with us to discuss how Learning Seeds can support your team in person.

We are committed to helping our teacher colleagues guide the children in their care toward engagement.

Do you have special concerns about an individual child not engaging in the group experience?

Do you need help creating enduring, independent group engagement in unstructured play settings?

Let’s connect to explore how Learning Seeds can support you and your education team.

Educator FAQs

  • Have the family request a consultation, and we’ll follow up with them as soon as possible.

  • We believe the earlier the better for children to experience neutral and positive group play experiences. Please have the family send us a message.

  • Learning Seeds is eager to share our transformative approach with our educator colleagues, and we do offer professional development. Subscribe to our mailing list to receive updates or contact us for more information.

  • Our job-embedded coaching is personalized, actionable, tech-enabled professional development for early childhood staff. Subscribe to our mailing list to receive updates about our professional development, or contact us to find out more.

Collaborators