What Teachers Need to Build a Culture of Care, Kindness, and Belonging

The early childhood education (ECE) environment is the foundation of a child’s future—their first community, their first school, and their first chance to build a sense of their own unique strengths. This is especially critical for children with disabilities or suspected delays. As administrators and leaders, your role isn’t just to manage programs; it’s to build a system where children, families, and teachers thrive in a culture of care, kindness and belonging.

The challenge is significant. For young children in the U.S., the special education system often defaults to segregated classrooms, where children with disabilities are separated from their peers without disabilities. In ECE, we have the opportunity to change that trajectory by providing early childhood special education services in inclusive settings such as child care, Head Start or PreK. When children with and without disabilities are educated together, the results are powerful! We see improvements across all domains of development, for each and every child.

As a person with a disability myself, I know our world is inherently inclusive. We all work, play, and live next to people with all kinds of abilities and backgrounds.

Our ECE programs should reflect this reality.

Changing a system resistant to change requires leadership that understands that the child and family experience is strongly related to the teacher’s support system. We cannot demand high-quality inclusion without first investing in what teachers need to successfully create a supportive classroom culture. Here are some strategies to consider.

Setting the Foundation with High Expectations

It all starts with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law is the baseline, guaranteeing every child be educated in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE).

“To the maximum extent appropriate, children with disabilities, including children in public or private institutions or other care facilities, are educated with children who are nondisabled;”

- Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; § 300.114 LRE requirements

But it’s more than a legal mandate; it’s an ethical demand for high expectations. The IDEA’s mandates for high standards, accountability, and the use of research-based services are fundamentally about showing respect and valuing the potential of every child.

The law sets the expectation that the focus should never be if a child can participate, but how we will support them to achieve their highest potential. This belief in high expectations is the ethical prerequisite for a true culture of care—it affirms that every child is an essential, capable member of the community.

What Teachers Need from You:

• A Clear, Shared Vision: Teachers need administrators to articulate a clear philosophy that inclusion is the non-negotiable first choice, as reflected in IDEA. Your teachers need to know, without a doubt, that you believe every child belongs and that your high expectations extend to their practice.
• Freedom from the “If,” Focus on the “How”: Teachers need administrative support to move beyond debating if a child can be included to focusing creative energy on how they will be included to reach their full potential.
• Belief in Their Potential: Teachers are dealing with complex challenges every day. They need to know that you trust them, trust the child’s potential, and are willing to invest in the research-based practices that make a difference.

Source: Every Child Can Fly

The Relational Blueprint: Access, Participation, and Supports

To translate this philosophy into practice, we turn to the DEC/NAEYC Joint Position Statement on Early Childhood Inclusion, which defines high-quality inclusion through three interrelated and relational features: Access, Participation, and Supports.

Access: Creating a Shared, Welcoming Space

Access is the commitment to creating a physical, social, and temporal environment where everyone is welcome. It means using the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to eliminate physical and programmatic barriers.

This is a profound act of kindness in design. It’s about more than ramps; it’s about offering multiple ways for children to interact with materials, problem-solve, and express what they know. When you provide visual schedules, varied ways to use classroom materials, books that reflect the families in the program, or quiet sensory areas, you are signaling to children that “this space was designed with you in mind.” This foundation makes belonging possible.

Participation: Fostering Engagement and Belonging

Participation ensures that once a child is in the room, they are actively and meaningfully engaged with their peers and the curriculum. It requires teachers to be intentional, using adaptive strategies—from curriculum modifications, to scaffolding or routines-based teaching—teachers ensure a sense of belonging for every child.

An important goal of participation is to foster positive social relationships and friendships. This is where the magic of inclusion truly happens. For instance, consider a game of blocks: an inclusive approach doesn’t just place a child who uses a wheelchair near the blocks; it may move the activity to a table height that allows the child to build alongside their peers, or it may incorporate a system for the whole group to work together on a large, shared structure. This teaches all children the joy and necessity of collaboration and empathy.

Supports: Building the Infrastructure of Care for Adults

The third defining feature, Supports, refers to the infrastructure that undergirds the entire system. It’s the framework that ensures teachers have the knowledge and emotional resilience to do their demanding, relationship-driven work.

For inclusion to succeed, systems-level supports are critical and administrators play a key role. A strong system of supports ensures that teachers, specialists, and family members have what they need for effective implementation. Some of these supports include a clear, written program philosophy on inclusion that creates shared expectations for every child, opportunities for communication and collaboration among all team members and inclusive policies, such as planning time and workloads that allow teachers to address the needs of every child.

What Teachers Need from You:

• Time for Genuine Collaboration: Teachers need protected, paid time for assessing children’s needs, planning inclusive daily activities, and consulting with specialists. True inclusion requires breaking down the silos between general and special education, so scheduling and funding decisions must reflect this need for shared planning time.
• Professional Development Supports: Teachers need PD focused not just on what UDL is, but how to implement it in a busy classroom. Teachers need training and time to implement play-based interventions that intentionally foster social-emotional development, teach friendship skills, and adapt the environment to create a welcoming, calm, and supportive space for diverse needs and abilities.
• Family-Focused Partnerships: Teachers are on the front lines of building relationships with families. They need support and guidance on how to establish a partnership built on trust and respectful communication, ensuring families are viewed as the child’s first and most valuable teacher.
• A Culture of Belonging: We can all relate to the fact that when you have a friend in the workplace, work is just more fun! Your staff needs you to build a culture that reflects this sentiment. High-quality inclusion requires compassionate, emotionally available teachers. Administrators not only set the tone, but we also can create policies that prioritize staff well-being and manageable workloads, where teachers feel safe, valued, and professionally supported by leadership.

The Payoff: Thriving Children and Families

When leaders commit to fully supporting teachers with resources, training, and a culture of care, the benefits are immediately visible in the classroom.

Take the example of Perl and the Gear Game. Perl, a child with cerebral palsy, loved the gear game but lacked the motor control to use it. Because an empowered, supported educator had the training (Supports) and the tools (Access), they connected a simple switch to the game. This adaptation allowed other children to set up the gears, while Perl became the essential controller of the activity (Participation).

This wasn’t just a lesson about gears; it was a lesson about care, kindness and belonging. As leaders, your decisions today about funding, professional development, and staffing considerations are not merely administrative tasks—they are direct investments in relationships. Invest in your teachers’ capacity to care, and they will build the culture of belonging that will allow all children and all families in your program to thrive. By prioritizing these practices, we don’t just comply with a law; we build a more equitable, empathetic, and fundamentally better world, one early childhood classroom at a time.