Transform Your Classroom and Program: GROW Strategies for Inclusion

I Hear You: Inclusion Is Hard

This course is a reset for administrators, teachers, and support staff whose purpose is teaching, not fighting to survive.

Built From Classroom Experience, Research, and Real Stories

This course helps you apply the Growth Model for Inclusion to your own classroom or program. It is grounded in Dr. Andrew D. L. Goff’s 12 years in inclusive classrooms, 11 years teaching more than 2,000 educators, and two memoirs about the real struggles of inclusion. Through video lessons, GROW Field Notes, team reflections, and coaching, you will practice small shifts that help you stay in the work without carrying it alone.

Here’s what you’ll learn

Course Description

GROW Your Program’s Culture is a professional development course for early childhood educators, staff, specialists, administrators, and program leaders who want to strengthen inclusive program culture. Participants explore how reflection, relationships, shared responsibility, and partnership help children, families, and professionals experience greater access, dignity, participation, and belonging. Through the Growth Model for Inclusion, participants examine the program conditions that shape inclusion and practice GROW strategies that support meaningful growth across reflective practices, curriculum, teaming and collaboration, and partnerships. The course concludes with a practical growth plan participants can use to continue developing inclusive practices in their own classroom, team, or program.

Course Competencies
  1. Discuss how an inclusive early childhood program culture grows
  2. Recognize how program conditions influence the experiences of children, families, staff, professionals, administrators, and community partners.
  3. Use reflective practices to notice assumptions, values, stress responses, ethical responsibilities, and professional choices.
  4. Examine how everyday routines, environments, materials, expectations, and communication patterns affect access, participation, dignity, and belonging.
  5. Reflect on relationship-based strategies that recognize strengths, support trust, encourage shared responsibility, and connect people and supports.
  6. Practice communication, reflective listening, and problem-solving skills that strengthen collaboration among team members and program partners.
  7. Reflect on respectful partnerships with families, specialists, administrators, volunteers, and community members to support inclusive practice.
  8. Create a practical growth plan that identifies next steps for strengthening reflective practices, curriculum, teaming and collaboration, partnerships, and program culture.

Address what is really happening

Inclusion may feel hard for obvious reasons, but this course helps you look beneath the daily stress to see what is missing, what is disconnected, and what needs support.

Distribute power and influence

You will learn how to use GROW strategies to move inclusion from one person’s burden toward shared responsibility across the classroom, team, and program.

Build it into your culture

You will begin embedding GROW strategies into the daily parts of your program, including curriculum, reflective practices, teaming and collaboration, and partnerships.

Contact Dr. Goff

Have a question about the course or whether it is the right fit for your classroom, team, or program? Contact Dr. Goff to talk through your goals, your current challenges, and how this course can support the next step in your inclusion work.

Module 1: We Are All Where We Are

Inclusion is meaningful work, but it can feel hard to sustain when programs are stretched, staff are tired, and support feels limited. In this opening module, you will begin where you are, without shame or pressure to prove that you already have everything figured out. You will be introduced to GROW strategies and SOIL conditions as tools for understanding why inclusion feels difficult and how growth can begin through small relational practices. By the end of the module, you will start noticing where growth may already be trying to happen in your classroom, team, or program.

Lessons

An Introduction to Conditions, Strategies, and Strands Preview Learning Is Not the Same as Growing Understanding the SOIL

Module 2: Creating Space to Grow

In Module 2, you will practice the reflective habits that help inclusion grow from the inside out. You will use the pause to notice automatic reactions, assumptions, values, and ethical responsibilities before deciding what a moment means. You will connect your personal values to professional ethics and consider how SOIL conditions can create tension between who you want to be and what the work asks of you. By the end of the module, you will begin shifting away from blame and toward noticing the conditions, relationships, and GROW strategies that can help children, families, staff, and administrators participate with more dignity, access, and belonging.

Lessons

Pausing To Think Slow Identity and Integrity Growing Rather Than Fixing

Module 3: Every Minute Is An Opportunity

In Module 3, Every Minute Is An Opportunity, you will carry the reflective practices from Module 2 into the curriculum and program environment children and adults experience throughout the day. Curriculum is not only lesson plans or materials. It includes spaces, schedules, routines, transitions, expectations, communication patterns, and interactions that shape access, participation, dignity, and belonging. Through the physical, temporal, and social dimensions of curriculum, intentionality, and Universal Design for Learning, you will practice noticing who participates easily, who is not fully included, and how small changes can make participation more possible and meaningful.

Lessons

The Dimensions of Curriculum Intentionality Designing for The Margins

Module 4: Growing As An Ecosystem

Module 4: Growing As An Ecosystem helps participants move from individual effort to shared responsibility. Participants practice listening with an open mind and open heart, explore the DEC five leadership dimensions, and use dignity-building deposits to strengthen trust across teams.

This module helps early childhood professionals see inclusion as ecosystem work. When leadership, communication, feedback, and care are shared more intentionally, children, families, staff, community partners, and students experience stronger belonging, participation, and support.

Lessons

From Egosystem to Ecosystem The Five Dimensions of Leadership Dignity Model in Feedback

Module 5: Our Infinite Connections

In Module 5, participants explore how inclusion grows through relationships with children, families, staff, administrators, specialists, and community partners. They examine family context, lived experience, listening, partnership, and dignity as essential parts of inclusive program culture.

Participants practice seeing children and adults as whole people shaped by family, relationships, responsibilities, strengths, stressors, and hopes. They also reflect on how partnerships can emerge when professionals stop trying to force outcomes and begin creating conditions for trust, connection, and shared responsibility.

This final module brings the course together through the Program Growth Plan. Participants review their GROW Field Notes, identify how they have matured, and choose one realistic next step for continued growth. The course ends with the reminder that there is direction, but there is no destination. Inclusive culture grows one intentional choice, one relationship, and one deposit at a time.

Lessons

Families as Knowledge Holders The Canvas of Partnerships Direction With No Destination

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