Bryanne Adler on the four-year-old her team had already labeled, and what the same mistake costs when the person struggling is a teacher.
When Bryanne Adler closed the preschool she owned, the next chapter of her work increasingly centered on the adults inside early childhood classrooms. The challenges she watched educators experience in her classrooms were not challenges a better curriculum alone could solve, and the field’s standard explanation for why those same educators eventually leave often has the same blind spot. “Directors and administrators often assume early childhood educators leave because of pay, benefits, or because they found a better opportunity somewhere else,” she says. Compensation is an important part of the retention conversation, but too often, that is where the inquiry stops.
Adler is the founder and CEO of Tiny Learning Town, a professional development and consulting company supporting early childhood educators and leaders, and holds the NAEYC Coaching Certificate.
The Child Who Was Labeled Before Anyone Understood Him
Adler works from one premise, applied identically to a three-year-old and to a thirty-year-old: a behavior is a report about conditions, and so is an adult’s struggle. Before a program concludes that a person cannot do something, it has to establish what that person has actually had the chance to practice. “My responsibility was to make sure a need for support wasn’t mistaken for a lack of potential,” she says. Two situations inside her own school tested that.
The first was a four-year-old the staff had described as having very challenging behavior. He had frequent tantrums, used little language with the adults, resisted feeding himself, struggled with toileting, and became upset whenever independence was expected of him. The team’s early theory was developmental, that something was happening they had not identified. Conversations with his family produced a different explanation: at home, most of those tasks were still being done for him. He was fed, carried, helped extensively in the bathroom, still drinking from a bottle.
“Suddenly, what we had been calling ‘difficult behavior’ looked completely different,” Adler says. “We were asking a child to demonstrate independence skills he hadn’t yet had enough opportunity to practice.”
The response changed rather than escalated. Feeding became one bite from the adult and encouragement to take the next, then two, with the share he managed himself increasing gradually. The bottle was traded down through a sequence of cups. Attempts at toileting were treated as attempts and celebrated as such. The classroom worked with the family and with the public pre-K program the school participated in so that the expectations he met in one setting were the expectations he met in the others. The teacher in the room came to Adler during that stretch and asked, “Is it me? Am I missing something?” Her answer was, “No. We just haven’t figured out what he’s trying to tell us yet.”
Is it me? Am I missing something?
“We had labeled him before we understood him, and once we recognized that, we became much more intentional about asking what a behavior was communicating before deciding what it meant,” Adler says.
We had labeled him before we understood him, and once we recognized that, we became much more intentional about asking what a behavior was communicating before deciding what it meant,
From Floater to Assistant Director in Three School Years
The second test was an adult. An educator who joined the school as a floater spoke English as a second language, and early on she struggled with communicating with English-speaking families, with certain classroom behaviors, and with licensing requirements. She was also bilingual in a program serving many Spanish-speaking children and families, which made her one of its genuine assets. “Rather than looking at what she couldn’t do yet, I tried to figure out what support she needed to get there,” Adler says.
The support was scheduled rather than improvised: monthly check-ins, annual reviews, and regular observations, each documenting what Adler was seeing, what the educator named as her own growth areas, what the program would supply, and what its expectations, policies, and procedures actually were. Adler sourced professional development in Spanish where it existed and was appropriate, covered the cost of the training, and accepted the educator’s own preference for English-language sessions when she wanted the practice.
“The outcome wasn’t something I measured with a test or percentage; I saw it in the responsibilities she became capable of taking on,” Adler says. Across roughly three school years, that educator moved through four roles: floater, teaching assistant, lead teacher, and finally assistant director. She was working consistently in a classroom by the end of the first year, confident enough to take a lead-teacher role during the second, in leadership conversations by the end of it, and training as assistant director at the start of the third while still carrying classroom duties. The progression is documented in the observations, check-ins, and reviews throughout that process, and she stayed with the program through its final day.
The outcome wasn’t something I measured with a test or percentage; I saw it in the responsibilities she became capable of taking on,
“Looking back, one thing I would do differently is bring in a bilingual professional-development consultant much earlier,” Adler says.
What Directors and Administrators Can Take Before the Next Resignation Letter
Treat a behavior as a question before treating it as a problem. The operative question is what the behavior is communicating, asked and answered before anyone decides what it means, and asked of adults as readily as of children.
Teach the expectation before judging the performance. Adler learned this against herself. She came home frustrated that her staff were not doing something the way she wanted it done, and her husband asked, “Did you tell them what you wanted? Did you teach them how you wanted it done?” She had not. “I realized I had expectations for my staff that I hadn’t clearly communicated or taught. I couldn’t blame them for not meeting a standard that mostly existed in my own head.” She went looking for professional development for herself, talked to other directors, and made communicating expectations an explicit part of the job.
Put growth on a written schedule. The three-part record that made a four-step progression legible as progress rather than luck required a monthly hour and a form: what the leader observed, what the educator named, what the program committed to.
Build professional learning for the whole classroom team. “I also saw a major gap for teaching assistants,” Adler says, in a field where most development is designed with lead teachers in mind despite assistants being an essential part of the room. Apply her own test to anything purchased. “I don’t want educators to leave my training with more information; I want them to leave knowing what to do with that information,” she says. “If someone walks away thinking, ‘She understood what this actually looks like in my classroom, and I can use this tomorrow,’ then I’ve done what I came there to do.”
Debrief the departure. Adler is direct that not every exit indicts the leadership, and that a strong program with supportive leadership and low turnover still loses people to circumstance, growth, and genuine mismatch. The failure is letting that become the whole account. “What matters is ‘not a good fit’ doesn’t become a convenient explanation that keeps us from examining our own leadership when there really is something we need to address.” The costs she counts run past the open position: children lose someone they saw every day, families start asking why the faces keep changing, the educators who stay absorb the instability, and the program’s standing in its community erodes from there. “We have to stop looking at turnover as simply another vacancy to fill and start asking, What did that staff member mean to that classroom? What did they mean to those children and families? And what made them decide they could no longer stay here?”
The premise underneath all five is the one that turned a labeled four-year-old into a child with a communication gap and a struggling floater into an assistant director. “Before we decide someone ‘doesn’t know what they’re doing,’ I think we need to ask whether we’ve actually given them the knowledge, tools, expectations, support, and opportunity to succeed,” Adler says.
Before we decide someone ‘doesn’t know what they’re doing,’ I think we need to ask whether we’ve actually given them the knowledge, tools, expectations, support, and opportunity to succeed,
Who Is Bryanne Adler?
Bryanne Adler is the founder and CEO of Tiny Learning Town, a professional development practice for early childhood educators and leaders. Based in New York, Adler works with educators, leaders, and programs across the United States and internationally. She is also an Aspire Certified Trainer. She began as a teaching assistant in a Head Start classroom, moved to lead preschool teacher, then to director, and took ownership of the school in July 2020, at which point it became Tiny Scholars Town. As owner and director she ran staff evaluations, OCFS compliance and training hours, licensing, and the school’s professional development calendar, supported staff into CDA enrollment, and coordinated services for children with the health department and the public pre-K program.
After closing her school, she went on to build the practice she runs now. “I think the dream I’m living now was hiding underneath my other dream,” she says, and she is unsentimental about the reason: “I was checked out, and keeping the school open simply because it had once been my dream would not have been fair to the children, families, or educators depending on me.”
Adler is the creator of Chaos to Calm, a self-paced classroom management course for early childhood teachers and teaching assistants that begins with the educator’s own role, communication, and reflective practice before it reaches transitions, routines, environment, and behavior. It launched in 2026 and has been delivered to one cohort through a regional teacher center and is available to individual educators and to programs. In its early evaluation, all 15 respondents said they would recommend it, reporting strategies they could apply immediately.
She holds a master’s in early childhood education with dual certification in special education from Fordham University and a bachelor’s in early childhood education from SUNY Empire State University, and is an EdD candidate at Johns Hopkins University School of Education with an anticipated completion in 2028. Her doctoral research is on teacher retention and the influence transformational leadership has on retention.
Her instruction to the educator two years in and already thinking about leaving is a diagnostic rather than a rescue. “Before you leave, ask yourself, ‘What is the one thing that, if it changed, would make me want to stay?’ Then advocate for what you need, listen carefully to the response, and let that help you decide whether you need to leave the program or whether you truly want to leave the profession.” It is the same instrument she hands directors, pointed the other way: find out what is actually happening before deciding what it means.
Bryanne Adler is the founder and CEO of Tiny Learning Town, a professional development practice for early childhood educators and leaders, based in New York.
