Love. Talk. Play.: A district’s journey

Decades of research demonstrate that early childhood education produces significant long-term academic and economic benefits for students, with studies consistently linking high-quality early learning programs to improved academic achievement, higher graduation rates, and greater lifetime earnings (Heckman, 2006). Early learning serves as a robust predictor of long-term academic success, a finding consistently supported by decades of longitudinal research. Landmark studies such as the HighScope Perry Preschool Study and the Carolina Abecedarian Project, both of which followed participants for over half a century, demonstrate that children who received high-quality early education outperformed their peers on academic measures well into adulthood, attaining higher test scores, greater educational attainment, and stronger cognitive outcomes (Schweinhart et al., 2005; Campbell et al., 2002; Heckman et al., 2010).

California’s early learning expansion and the challenge Reflecting a commitment to this body of research, California took a historic step in 2021 by legislating the Universal Prekindergarten (UPK) initiative — a plan to provide free, high-quality early education to all 4-year-olds statewide by the 2025–26 school year (California Department of Education, 2021). However, while the expansion was bold in its vision, local education agencies (LEAs) were not provided with a clear blueprint for how to implement high-quality early education in actual practice. Instead, many teachers and administrators of preschool and transitional kindergarten (TK) classrooms found themselves navigating competing pressures to prioritize academic skills, literacy, and reading instruction approaches more aligned with elementary education rather than with developmentally appropriate practices that early childhood research supports. Compounding this challenge, many educational administrators and school leaders tasked with overseeing these programs came from K–12 backgrounds with little to no formal training in early childhood education (D’Souza, 2025).

Grounded in the understanding that early intervention is one of the most powerful predictors of student success, Chula Vista Elementary School District embarked on a purposeful journey to not only expand access to early childhood education, but to truly embrace it by shifting mindsets, building capacity, and becoming champions of early childhood education. This article reflects on that journey, sharing the lessons we learned and the transformations we witnessed.

Our pillars: Love. Talk. Play. Like many districts across California, we began our journey by expanding our transitional kindergarten classrooms. However, from the beginning, we were committed to doing more than simply adding seats; we wanted to fundamentally transform what early education looked and felt like in our district. We developed a three-year strategic plan with a clear and ambitious goal — ensuring that every district leader and early childhood educator would not only understand the principles of high-quality early education but would become a true champion of it.

Central to that plan was the development of our three guiding pillars designed to elevate early childhood development across all our early education classrooms: Love. Talk. Play. We envisioned early education classrooms where children felt genuinely loved and welcomed the moment they walked through the door; where they were given rich, meaningful opportunities to talk, collaborate, and learn from one another; and where thoughtfully designed centers invited children to explore, create, and discover through the power of play. This was our foundation for early education.

The first pillar: Love With our pillars in place, we set out to bring them to life through intentional professional learning. We engaged our early childhood teachers, district committees, and community partners such as our District English Learner Advisory Committee (DELAC) in understanding the why behind “Love. Talk. Play.” At the heart of our professional learning was the foundation that research consistently affirms: Relationships are key in every classroom. Drawing on the science of early brain development, we helped our educators understand that the brain builds from the bottom up. A child’s developing brain is literally shaped by the quality of their earliest relationships and experiences (Nicholson et al., 2022). Warm, responsive, and consistent relationships with trusted teachers are not simply a nice-to-have in early childhood classrooms but a neurological need. This understanding gave new meaning to our first pillar: Love.

We also emphasized to our teams that what makes preschool and TK truly extraordinary is the unique opportunity these classrooms offer to teach children emotional literacy: the ability to identify, understand, and express their emotions in healthy ways. Research demonstrates that children who develop emotional literacy show stronger self-regulation, greater empathy, and improved academic engagement (Bierman et al., 2008). In our early education classrooms, we are not only building knowledge, we are building the whole child.

The second pillar: Talk As we deepened our commitment to “Love” in our classrooms, we turned our attention to our second pillar: Talk. As explored in my previous work, “The Relationships That Noise Builds,” productive noise — children thinking aloud, collaborating, and making sense of their world — is necessary in the classroom (Madrigal, 2018). It is a sign of a thriving learning environment and, as my own research found, a meaningful predictor of mathematical success.

To bring “Talk” to life in our early education classrooms, we partnered with Dr. Nicholas Johnson, assistant professor at San Diego State University and co-author of “Young Children’s Mathematics: Cognitively Guided Instruction in Early Childhood Education” (Carpenter et al., 2017). Grounded in the framework of cognitively guided instruction, a research-based approach that centers instruction on listening to and being led by students’ own mathematical thinking, our teachers learned to create classrooms where children’s voices drove the learning.

Three key strategies became the cornerstone of “Talk” in our early education classrooms:

Together, these strategies transformed our TK and preschool classrooms into places where teachers followed their students’ lead, where talk was not a teacher delivering information, but a community of young learners building understanding together.

The third pillar: Play As we worked to bring our pillars to life, we knew that teacher voices had to guide our next steps. We surveyed our preschool and TK teachers to better understand what additional support was needed to strengthen early learning practices. As our TK expansion grew, so did our teaching workforce. Many teachers newly entering TK classrooms came from elementary backgrounds, bringing strengths in academic instruction but limited experience with developmentally appropriate early childhood practices. A consistent concern emerged: Administrators did not always understand why children were playing in the classroom. Murphy argues that many administrators (and other adults) misinterpret play as “just play” because it doesn’t always produce immediate, visible evidence of learning, even though it is where the deepest cognitive and social development happens (2016).

A lack of understanding about how play shapes children’s brain development is a challenge that extends well beyond our district. Learning through play is not merely a break from academics; it is a core educational strategy (Boryga, 2022). Play is the vehicle through which young children build language, develop cognitive skills, strengthen social-emotional competencies, and deepen academic understanding (NAEYC, 2022).

In response, we made Play our third pillar and the centerpiece of our professional learning. We invested in numerous professional learning opportunities focused on access to play, honoring the right to play, and shifting mindsets to make clear that play in early childhood classrooms is a necessity. Over time, something remarkable happened — our teachers became champions of play.

Bringing leaders along Through our journey it became evident that it was not enough for teachers to believe in play; our administrators needed to believe it as well. One question that we asked was how could we help our principals and assistant principals not just understand play intellectually, but experience it themselves? This is where our creativity as a district leadership team came alive.

Our district has a long and proud history, rich with accolades, established relationships, and deeply respected school leaders. We decided to lean into that culture. During the summer, we surveyed our principals and assistant principals and asked a simple question: What is your go-to karaoke song? We then approached our executive cabinet with a playful but purposeful ask to film short lip-sync videos as part of an interactive learning game we were designing for the start of the school year.

Picture this: the beginning-of-year leadership meeting. Eager but incredibly busy principals arrived, ready to take notes, prepare their school sites, and tackle the year ahead. They were greeted with a call-and-response drawn from their own karaoke song submissions, then asked to pull out their devices and play “guess the next lyrics.” What appeared on the screen, to their absolute delight and surprise, were lip-sync videos performed by their own assistant superintendents and superintendent’s office team. The room erupted in laughter and applause.

The message was simple and powerful: Fun and play belong in every space, at every age. The body language in that room shifted completely; leaders who had walked in tense and task-focused were now open, relaxed, and fully present. They had just experienced, in their own bodies, exactly what we want our earliest learners to feel every single day: Love. Talk. Play.

That karaoke activity was just one of many experiences woven throughout our journey, each one designed to give our leaders a visceral sense of what high-quality early education looks and feels like. Principals and assistant principals did not just play; they felt the love and the strength of the relationships that our district had spent years building.

And then we made it actionable. We knew that helping leaders feel “Play” was only half of the work, they also needed a clear framework for what to look for when walking into an early childhood classroom and how to provide meaningful feedback to their teachers. To bridge that gap, we developed a simple observation tool aligned to the three domains of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). The observational tool is also used within California State Preschool programs to assess the quality of teacher-child interactions: Emotional Support, Classroom Organization, and Instructional Support (Pianta et al., 2008). We gave our principals concrete items to observe and recognize which support high-quality early childhood practice. They were now informed, invested, and ready. Our administrators had become early education champions.

Our journey had moments of uncertainty and the very real pressure to conform to an academic-first model that did not always honor what young children need most. However, we always kept children at the center of our work and returned to our pillars: Love. Talk. Play.

Becoming a champion of early childhood education does not require a perfect plan. Becoming an early education champion requires the willingness to listen to teachers, trust the research, bring leaders along, and, above all, believe that what happens in a preschool or TK classroom is not just preparation for the important years; they are the important years.