Ask a teacher in a child care center or an owner of a family child care home about their experience with professional development (PD) and they’ll undoubtedly talk about attending a training. Trainings that aim to support new knowledge or reinforce key concepts are the most common form of PD for early educators, but knowledge gained through training doesn’t necessarily make its way into practice.
Individual coaching is increasingly available to support early educators’ application of knowledge to practice, but its reach remains relatively narrow. Even more rare is the form of PD focused on collaborative learning and improvement, in which teams of early educators within and across programs work together with coaches not only to improve their practice but also to implement tools that help them sustain these effective practices over time. Collaborative learning and improvement methods have been used successfully in the health, education, and social welfare sectors, but have not been widely adopted in early care and education (ECE).
To understand more about the feasibility of incorporating collaborative learning and improvement methods into ECE professional development, the Culture of Continuous Learning project examined a specific methodology called the Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC) that explicitly coaches participants in using continuous improvement strategies. Over the past 10 years, we’ve learned important lessons about the promise of a collaborative learning approach for supporting early educators’ social-emotional learning (SEL) practices with children, their overall work environment, and their sustained use of improvement strategies. These findings emerged through data collection with early educators, center directors, members of the BSC team, and state agency leaders responsible for overseeing early childhood professional development.
Early educators value collaborative learning and improvement and the way it helps them directly address issues in their practice.
This professional development approach lets early educators identify and implement changes tied to their own classroom needs and data instead of strategies that are disconnected from their work.
“Usually when I do PD I just sit there and listen to someone talk, and every now and then you give your feedback. But this one’s personalized to us, it’s data that we’re taking ourselves and taking from our classroom … so it’s actual issues that we’re having within our classroom and trying to help with that as opposed to just generalizing a topic.”
Early educators appreciate the unique opportunity to be connected in a learning community.
Working with teams in other centers exposed participants to new ideas they may not have otherwise considered, along with opportunities to learn from what worked well (or not) in other programs.
“It was nice to bounce ideas back and forth and hear what other people were doing to give us some ideas, more than just talking amongst ourselves, actually seeing some of the examples [of testing and evaluating small changes in practice] being put up so we can see how it’s being done.”
Centers can create conditions that support educators’ engagement in learning collaboratively and leading improvement.
As one example, participation in the BSC was stronger in centers with more positive initial working conditions and lower staff turnover. Support from the center director and the provision of paid planning time were essential facilitators of participation.
“Having a champion in the classroom or in the leadership—I think that it's infectious for the team. People [say] … we can do this! This is doable ... having an advocate in leadership is important.”
The skills gained through a learning collaborative can extend beyond the original team members.
Even team members and staff who had not directly participated in the BSC noted improvements in communication, data use, and inquiry-oriented thinking.
“We definitely saw the things that we were doing spread into more classrooms than we had originally intended throughout our school … we started in one and two classrooms and then we added a third and it just kept trickling down.”
While it’s challenging to sustain changes in practice, it is possible with the right support.
Early educators who participated in the learning collaborative reported using continuous quality improvement practices more often and became more intentional about using data to inform their decisions over time. Many early educators also believed that elements of the improvement approach could continue beyond the project, envisioning how new practices could be integrated into their work. At the same time, competing priorities and staff turnover presented ongoing challenges. Sustaining engagement in quality improvement practices requires continued attention to the broader conditions in which early educators work.
Overall, early educators were highly satisfied with the learning collaborative and expected key practices to sustain after the project’s closure. These findings were consistent with emerging research showing that engaging groups of educators who work together is an effective driver of lasting improvements. These collective experiences promote shared learning, peer reinforcement, and strong alignment between professional growth and early educators’ daily work with children and families. As the field considers ways to make professional development more relevant and impactful, investing in opportunities for educators to collectively learn, reflect, and improve is an important step forward.
These project insights were jointly prepared by Kathryn Tout, Anne Douglass, and Tamara Halle, co-principal investigators of the Culture of Continuous Learning project. Anne Douglass is executive director of the Early Education Leaders Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Kathryn Tout, vice president for early childhood research and partnerships, and Tamara Halle, senior scholar, are at Child Trends. Meg Bredeson, research scientist II at Child Trends, provided additional support.
Suggested citation: Tout, K., Douglass, A., Halle, T., & Bredeson, M. (2026). Lessons on collaborative learning and improvement for early educators. Child Trends. DOI: 10.56417/2818w646z
Read the latest publications from the Culture of Continuous Learning project
- Strengthening Continuous Quality Improvement Practices in Early Care and Education through a Breakthrough Series Collaborative: Learn more about the evaluation, its methods, and the full findings.
- Perspectives on Integrating the Breakthrough Series Collaborative Methodology into State Early Care and Education Quality Improvement Systems: Explore considerations for incorporating BSCs into broader state early childhood quality improvement systems.
- Coaching Teams for Quality Improvement in Early Care and Education Programs: Learn more about team coaching as an emerging quality improvement strategy for early childhood education programs.