Dr. Donna Housman, Ed.D has over 35 years’ experience as a psychologist in the field of child development and early childhood education. She founded Housman Institute and its lab school, Beginnings Child Development Center, based on the emotional foundations of learning and cognition. In her years of research and practice, Dr. Housman has trained hundreds of teachers and educated thousands of children and families in her evidence-based emotional, cognitive, and social early learning program, begin to ECSEL. This globally recognized early childhood educator training program provides comprehensive educator development and support, and SEL-infused programming. Through training, mentoring, practice and the use of developmentally appropriate tools and classroom experiences, the begin to ECSEL approach develops the foundation for Emotional, Cognitive, and Social Early Learning from birth to age eight while instilling key emotional understanding and management skills for educators themselves. Dr. Housman’s peer-reviewed research, detailed in the International Journal of Education Policy as well as her co-authored article on begin to ECSEL in the International Journal of Emotional Education has shown that children who experience the begin to ECSEL program significantly outperform their peers nationally in key measures of emotional competence, self-regulation, empathy, and executive functions.
Dr. Housman is an active speaker having presented to the American Education Research Association (AERA), National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), Zero to Three, and Harvard China Education Symposium, among many others. Dr. Housman is a founding executive board member of the Massachusetts Association for Infant Mental Health, a subchapter of the World Association for Infant Mental Health. She is also a member of the Children’s Health Task Force, Coalition of the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and serves on the board of the New England Center for Children (NECC).
