Anne Douglass, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education and founding Executive Director at the Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has been designing and leading innovative academic and leadership development programs for early educators at UMass Boston since 2009. Her Institute cultivates and supports the entrepreneurial leadership of early educators and child care business owners, and produces cutting-edge research on leadership, innovation, and change in early education.
Dr. Douglass is an expert on leadership, quality improvement, and professional development strategies and policies that promote talented, diverse, entrepreneurial leadership from within the child care workforce. She is the author of a new book entitled Leading for Change in Early Care and Education: Cultivating Leadership from Within. She studies relational organizational systems theory to understand how workplace relationships and organizational structures can positively influence early educators’ capacity to improve teaching practices and build partnerships with families. She brings extensive research and professional development expertise in the areas of family engagement and support, STEM teaching and learning, and instructional leadership. She is co-author of the book Engaging young engineers: Teaching problem-solving skills through STEM, published in 2015.
She brings almost 20 years of expertise as an urban early educator to this work, as a teacher, administrator, family child care owner and educator, and quality improvement coach and mentor. Her experience as a practitioner working directly with children, families, and teachers informs her deep respect for the expertise of early educators as the drivers of transformative change in early childhood programs and the profession.
