Updates to the Whole Leadership Framework: Responding to Voices in the Field

McCormick Institute for Early Childhood

BY Marie L. Masterson, Teri N. Talan, Jill M. Bella  | May 28, 2024

Copyright © Dimensions Educational Research Foundation. Reprinted with permission from Exchange Press. All rights reserved. Visit us at hub.exchangepress.com or call (800) 221-2864.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the Summer 2024 edition of Exchange magazine.

A page of a book titled updates to the whole leadership framework.
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In 2017, the McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership at National Louis University developed the Whole Leadership Framework with diverse voices from the field to define the critical components of early childhood leadership and to ensure consistent approaches to leadership standards and competencies. In 2023, the framework was revised by Building on Whole Leadership: Energizing and Strengthening Your Early Childhood Program authors (Masterson, M.L., Talan, T.N., & Bella, J.M.) in response to current research, the needs of the profession, and additional feedback collected from over 200 early childhood leaders as part of the Building Leaders Project, funded by the Foundation for Child Development. The book, Building on Whole Leadership: Energizing and Strengthening Your Early Childhood Program, provides a variety of tools that can be used by administrators to enhance their core knowledge, skills, and behaviors to foster effective and thriving early childhood organizations.

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Please click here to download the Whole Leadership Framework.

By Jamie Fishman • September 18, 2026
This conference definitely helps our business. Like I said, it's really an opportunity for us to highlight all the products that we have that are new and exciting. I try to bring and highlight things that are new this year. Pretty much everything on this table are new products for 2026. And what makes this conference different? I think it's just really there's a lot of decision makers here, which is really good for us as a business to be talking to childcare owners, to actually, the providers that are in the classroom, and connect with even larger centers that have multiple locations. And it gives us that time to really have that in-person connection that we don't often get to have. So it's kind of like a bang for your buck you get to see lots of different customers over a short course of time because the conference is only a day and so it gives us a chance to connect with a lot of customers and get our products out there. 
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