Anne L. Douglass

Anne L. Douglass, Ph.D., is associate professor of early childhood education and care and founding executive director at the Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her teaching and research focus on child care quality improvement, professional development, leadership, policy, and family engagement. For over 2 decades, she has worked to strengthen family-centered and trauma-informed practice in early care and education settings, with a focus on organizational change, leadership, and resilience. She studies relational organizational systems and their capacity to create the conditions that enable high-quality teaching and family-centered practice. Her leadership work is dedicated to the design of programs, systems, and policies that support individual and collective leadership for quality improvement and innovation among early educators. Her work has been funded by the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, as well as by private foundations including The Boston Foundation. Her research has been published in a wide range of academic journals and books, and she presents nationally and internationally at academic, policy, and professional meetings. 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. She earned a Ph.D. in social policy at the Heller School at Brandeis University, an Ed.M. at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from Wellesley College.