Events for December 18, 2025 - December 18, 2025

Research shows order to gain a meaningful understanding of children’s behavior there must be a meaningful understanding of adult bias and the context in which these behaviors occurs. This webinar will help you look beyond the child to the implicit bias, contextual elements, interactions, and classroom variables that might contribute to labeling behavior as challenging.

Join Dr. Lauren Starnes in this webinar to address the big adult questions young children often ask that often cause us to pause, silence the child, or deflect the response. This session will guide you to answer difficult question respectfully and developmentally appropriately with even the youngest children. The webinar will explore big topics as miscarriage, domestic terror events, gender fluidity, death of a classmate, and other equally emotional and unsettling topics.

To create the next generation of critical thinkers and leaders, we must ensure that every child has a sense of agency — that they are problem solvers and decision makers! For this to happen, educators make a difference. Children must learn in equitable settings where power is shared and all the adults define themselves as Optimistic Leaders. This interactive webinar will examine how Optimistic Leaders think impact, cultivate self-awareness, nurture relationships, refine communication, and activate curiosity to enhance their work and ensure children’s success as learners.

Join us as we welcome guest trainer, Dr. Lillian Duran. Lillian Durán has a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota and her research is focused on improving instructional and assessment practices with preschool-aged dual language learners (DLLs). She teaches graduate coursework in early literacy and early childhood special education at the University of Oregon. This training will focus on dual language learning and how to best support dual language learners at Head Start of Lane County. This training is on ZOOM --- not on Teams.

Have crippling staff shortages forced you out of the director’s office and back into the classroom? Are you struggling to recruit and train employees? Does your existing staff complain about burnout? Perhaps you’ve even turned away potential enrollments due to being short-staffed. As overwhelmed directors must ask more and more of their loyal workers—who often play multiple essential roles, from food prep to administrative tasks—they risk losing the staff they already have. This very timely webinar will reveal untapped sources of talent you might not have considered—from targeting certain groups for recruitment, to finding hidden potential in your current staff.

This training will provide greater understanding about how a young person’s history and context informs current behaviors. The training will aim to shift one’s lens from thinking about behaviors such as lying, hoarding food, and tantrums as deficits to understanding them as adaptive strengths that have enabled a child to survive in very difficult circumstances.