Whole Leadership: A Framework for Early Childhood Programs – 2023

McCormick Institute for Early Childhood

BY Teri Talan, Marie Masterson, Jill Bella  | April 4, 2023

A woman wearing glasses and a suit is smiling in front of a flag.

Sim Loh is a family partnership coordinator at Children’s Village, a nationally-accredited Keystone 4 STARS early learning and school-age enrichment program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, serving about 350 children. She supports children and families, including non-English speaking families of immigrant status, by ensuring equitable access to education, health, employment, and legal information and resources on a day-to-day basis. She is a member of the Children First Racial Equity Early Childhood Education Provider Council, a community member representative of Philadelphia School District Multilingual Advisory Council, and a board member of Historic Philadelphia.


Sim explains, “I ensure families know their rights and educate them on ways to speak up for themselves and request for interpretation/translation services. I share families’ stories and experiences with legislators and decision-makers so that their needs are understood. Attending Leadership Connections will help me strengthen and grow my skills in all domains by interacting with and hearing from experienced leaders in different positions. With newly acquired skills, I seek to learn about the systems level while paying close attention to the accessibility and barriers of different systems and resources and their impacts on young children and their families.”

This document may be printed, photocopied, and disseminated freely with attribution. All content is the property of the McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership.

Leadership framework infographic: people in conversation, with supporting text in quadrants of various colors.
A picture of a leadership framework with birds flying in the background

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.

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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