Kane Hookstra taught 4th grade for over two decades at Southern Elementary School in Wymore, Neb., before he was selected as principal in 2023. Hookstra thought he knew his small, 198-student school well. But once in the role, he discovered entire parts of the building he was unfamiliar with—the classrooms with the youngest learners and their teachers.
Hookstra was used to teaching more independent, older students. He had little understanding of how students learned in the early grades.
“I was unaware of the importance of play-based instruction, and how that’s developed, and how it’s intentional. Yeah, that was very eye-opening,” he said, referring to a central strategy applied to teaching students in pre-K and kindergarten. That practice has made a recent comeback to early-grade classrooms after years of a federal policy push toward more testing in kindergarten.
In recent years, states across the political spectrum have expanded access to universal pre-K programs in public schools. Integrating preschool can lead to gains across all grades and ease the transition from pre-K into higher grades, research shows. Most principals recognize these benefits and support housing preschool within schools—but many lack firsthand experience with how early grades operate.
Preparation to lead early grades is largely missing from principal-training programs, according to experts. To date, only Illinois has formally included early education content in its principal licensure exam, following a 2010 revamp of what’s required to pass the licensure exam. A handful of other states—California, Colorado, and Minnesota, among them—have training programs on the fundamentals of early-childhood education, but they aren’t mandatory for school leaders.
That doesn’t mean principals don’t need such training, said Hannah Melnick, a senior policy adviser at the Learning Policy Institute, a California-based research organization and think tank, who oversees its work on early-childhood policy. In 1986, only 10% of elementary principals oversaw preschool; by 2026, nearly half are tasked with the job.
“A lot of states have a generic preschool-to-grade-12 credential that might, in name, include early childhood, but it is difficult to really dive deep [in it],” said Melnick. Internships or practical experience for aspiring principals usually happen in high or middle school settings, which are larger than elementary schools and have more leadership positions. “You can move down to an elementary school once you’ve done your clinical, but it means you’re very removed from the youngest students in your preservice training.”
Crafting early-learning experience for leaders
Only 5% of principal-preparation programs require coursework in early-childhood education, and 20% address the topic in other courses. That leaves many principals like Hookstra underprepared, whether or not they have prior teaching experience in early grades.
“The early-childhood realm of things almost got put on the back burner a little bit, because you’re just so inundated with all the requirements of the job,” said Megan Flohr, who taught kindergarten for eight years before she became the principal of Eagle Elementary School in Eagle, Neb. Five years into the job, Flohr decided to “refocus” on the early grades in her school and signed up for a leadership-training course offered by the National Association of Elementary School Principals and the Nebraska education department
The Pre-K-3 Leadership Academy, which Flohr and Hookstra both attended, was created to meet the growing need to train principals on the fundamentals of early grades. The 11-month hybrid training introduces principals to early-childhood learning, intentional play, and developing relationships with parents, among other topics, said Gracie Branch, a former early-childhood educator who now oversees professional learning at NAESP.
Branch and her team have collaborated with states like Nebraska and Alabama, and the District of Columbia, to offer the Pre-K-3 Academy modules to principals. Participants learn how a pre-K classroom is set up—with an emphasis on play, small-group instruction, and manipulatives—as they learn about brain development in young children. The program also evolves to meet changing needs, such as engaging families of early learners.
“We know that families are children’s first teachers. That is important for school leaders to realize and include families as partners in this work,” Branch said. The modules suggest strategies like home visits before the school year begins, multilingual communication, and family involvement in decisionmaking.
School leaders are also encouraged to connect with existing pre-K and kindergarten options in the community to ease the transition for early learners when they switch to a much larger public school, Branch said.
How principals apply their training in early learning
Training in early-learning concepts can help improve instruction in higher grades and create a bridge for students when they transition from pre-K and kindergarten, said Flohr, the principal in Eagle, Neb.
For example, reading to preschoolers may involve acting out certain parts of the story or exploring sounds. The same thing can happen with 3rd grade students, too, said Flohr. “We want students to do the work, instead of constantly telling them what to do and how to do it,” she added.
Understanding early learning also helps principals recognize how concepts like the “science of reading” are incorporated into play, avoiding falling into the trap of pushing more worksheets onto early learners or limiting play that seems “chaotic,” said Flohr.
Principals need to ensure smooth transitions from pre-K or kindergarten to higher grades by creating time for teacher collaboration and preventing teachers from early grades from being isolated in professional development.
In his school, Hookstra built time into team meetings for early-grade teachers to collaborate with other teachers across grades, so that principles such as intentional play and student exploration extend across the school. “When primary teachers were asking our youngest learners to explain something to me, or try to verbalize their thinking, [I felt] we could encourage our oldest learners to work on that as well,” Hookstra said.
How states plan to scale PD on early learning
Despite national programs, early-learning PD for principals remains “piecemeal” and can feel disjointed, said Melnick from the Learning Policy Institute. Principals have to seek out these opportunities and find the time and money to pursue them.
A statewide approach can create more access to continuous, high-quality training.
In California, a major investment in universal pre-K in 2021 coincided with the relaunch of the California School Leadership Academy (21CSLA) as a vehicle for no-cost professional development, including early-childhood education.
To build the program, developers first had to bridge long-standing divides between K-12 leadership and early-care systems, said Rebecca Cheung, the director of the 21CSLA state center.
“The care leadership [ in the state] has been really separate, historically, so we worked with a lot of early-care experts to design and develop the instructional leadership curriculum,” said Cheung.
The model also shifted from a top-down approach to a localized, responsive system, Cheung said. Today, 55 trainers across seven regional academies tailor PD to community needs, whether that’s in rural, multigrade classrooms, or multilingual urban settings.
Trainers collaborate with local early-childhood experts to develop their modules, continuously adding new strategies to a content library that all trainers have access to.
The program has just started to gather data on its impact on principals and teacher leaders. Some early responses, shared by Cheung, point to an appreciation of play-based learning but are accompanied by concerns over how to assess and quantify this learning.
Cheung is hopeful, though, that leaders see the larger picture: “We hope they’re taking away that there’s an opportunity to make a big impact [on young students]. Not just their learning but their trajectory. If we can do a good job in the early years, this is a high-leverage moment as a leader.”
