Fall Conference 2026

Steve Tuber

Play in childhood is a profound elixir that is essential to health and wellbeing. Its adult incarnation, the capacity to be playful, is equally essential to a fully developed life. It is the prime means through which the child and adult can best make affective sense of the world around her and hence simultaneously the optimal way in which the child can learn to best understand who they are and why they do what they do. In this presentation I will focus on why play is so essential to child development and then focus on what allows the capacity to play to be most usefully developed in the child.

Theresa McCaffrey

Early childhood education is increasingly caught between what we know about how young children learn and what the systems around them expect. We know that children learn through play, movement, relationships, exploration, and meaningful experiences. Yet early childhood educators face growing pressure to prepare children for kindergarten classrooms with increasingly academic and structured expectations.

So, what do we do when what we know is not always what they want?

Together, we will explore four questions: What do we know? What do they want? What can we adapt? What must we protect? Participants will consider when adaptation can support a child's successful transition, when expectations should be questioned or reframed, and when educators have a responsibility to advocate for change.

Ayuko Uezu Boomer

Teaching in New York City comes with unique challenges, but outdoor play remains a vital foundation for early childhood development. This presentation will explore the cognitive, physical, and social and emotional benefits of nature-based learning for preschoolers, while providing practical strategies to navigate the harsh realities of urban environments. Attendees will learn how to scaffold open-ended play, document learning outcomes, and connect outdoor exploration directly to New York State early learning standards. The session will also discuss guidance and methods to help educators partner with parents, administrators, and stakeholders in seeing outdoor play as a joyful, essential part of learning.

Cindy Puccio

Alana Hassanein

Across classrooms and communities, human needs remain remarkably consistent: to belong, to be heard, and to remain connected through uncertainty and difference. This interactive workshop reimagines mindfulness as a dynamic, shared relational practice that cultivates awareness of ourselves, one another, and the communities we create together—strengthening regulation, belonging, and collective resilience across an entire school community.

Participants will engage in embodied mindfulness practices and explore a replicable whole-school model that weaves mindfulness into classrooms, educator well-being, student leadership, schoolwide gatherings, restorative practices, and family engagement. Together, we will consider how schools can cultivate a shared language of regulation, reflection, compassion, and dialogue that extends beyond the school day into the broader community.

Njeri Gachathi

What happens when a shared professional conviction — that play is not a break from learning but the substance of it — is introduced to a room of teachers whose professional preparation looks nothing like our own? This workshop draws on reflections and participant responses from an ongoing workshop series, "The Case for Play," currently running with early childhood educators in Nairobi, Kenya.

These same tensions — the pull between what we know children need and what systems make room for — are playing out here too, as US classrooms face rising academic pressure, shrinking time for child-directed play, and growing demands for measurable outcomes.

Participants will use a practical framework to recognize resonance, friction, and opportunities for next steps, and will engage hands-on with real (anonymized) workshop responses, physically test where play sits at the edges versus the center of a sample daily schedule, and surface examples from their own practice of what's already working and what could move further.

Lorayne Carbon and Barbara Schecter

We will ground our discussion in Dewey’s vision that the core of progressive education is  participation in processes of choice and responsibility at all ages.

This vision manifests in all levels at our Early Childhood Center—from the work of our director with her faculty, to the collaborative processes of teachers with each other, and the co-construction of classroom practices between the teachers and the children.

These principles have been in place since the founding of our ECC as a progressive preschool almost 90 years ago, and have related primarily to the community inside the school.  For the past 3 years, we have been engaged in a process of redesigning our two outdoor play spaces, which has provided us for the first time with the opportunity to focus on these principles in the outdoors.

What does it mean for an outdoor playground to really be democratic?

Emily Cullen-Dunn

What changes when we view play as essential to the development and belonging of children with disabilities rather than as an optional part of their education?

Play is a fundamental part of childhood, yet children with disabilities do not always have equitable access to the freedom, choice, connection, and belonging that meaningful play provides. This interactive workshop invites educators and other professionals who work with children to examine the intersection of play, disability, and inclusion through a developmental lens.