This summit will bring together neuroscientists, pediatricians, educators, business and museum professionals, and policymakers to develop a broad partnership dedicated to improving the outcomes of all children entering kindergarten. Keynote speeches and facilitated, small discussion groups will focus on the following goals:

1)    To improve the outcomes of all children entering kindergarten by:

• informing interventions with the latest advances in the science of early brain and child development;
• sharing best practices and accelerating the application of innovative approaches to buffer toxic stress;
• supporting caregiver capacity, encouraging play and joyful discovery in children and promoting organizational skills in work with caregivers; and               
• improving broad public awareness of these advances, examining implications for public policy and developing a broad coalition of interested parties that will work together to implement these policies.   

2)    To best support the whole child by breaking down silos between health and education, both budgetary and professional.

3)    To engage the Massachusetts business community in investing wisely to support human capital development and remaining competitive by building an educated work force for the future.

The full event schedule is below. Please watch this page for changes leading up to the event. If you have any questions, please contact Michele Rankin at Summit@bostonchildrensmuseum.org or please call (617) 986-3649.

Schedule:

7:30am             Registration and Coffee

8:00-8:10am      Welcome

• Michael Yogman, MD, Board Chair, Boston Children’s Museum; Executive Board, Massachusetts Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics

http://www.yogmanpediatrics.com/index.php/our-staff/dr-yogman

Additional welcome remarks:
•   Mayor Thomas Menino, City of Boston **

•   Michael K. Durkin, President of United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley **

•   First Lady Michelle Obama *

•   Governor Deval Patrick *

                              *Invited

                              **Confirmed

8:10-8:30am      Early Childhood and Economic Development

• Eric Rosengren, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston http://www.bos.frb.org/about/president/rosengren.htm
  

8:30-9:15am      Driving Science-Based Innovation to Strengthen the Foundations of Lifelong Learning, Behavior and Health: Advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, genetics, and the behavioral and social sciences can help usher in a new era of early childhood policy and practice that is driven by science, guided by experience, and fueled by innovation. Improved understanding of how early adversity gets into the body with lifelong consequences and how executive function skills in adults and children shape the experiences that affect healthy development can together inform new ideas for policies and programs that achieve breakthrough outcomes for children and families.

• Jack Shonkoff, MD, Director, Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University

http://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/center_director_and_staff/#Shonkoff

9:15-9:25am – Q&A

9:25-9:55am      Using Executive Functioning Frameworks to Improve Family Economic Mobility: Since 2009, Crittenton Women's Union (CWU) has been using an executive functioning lens to develop new programs to help low-income families attain economic independence. Early outcomes from these programs have been stronger than expected. Greater Boston families who were fully dependent on subsidies have earned college degrees, bought their own homes, and secured jobs paying family-sustaining wages. In this presentation, CWU CEO, Beth Babcock will describe these program frameworks and their impacts on children.

• Elisabeth D. Babcock, MCRP, PhD, Crittenton Women’s Union

http://www.liveworkthrive.org/who_we_are/leadership_team

9:55-10:05am – Q&A

10:05-10:20am   Coffee Break

10:20-10:50am   Neighborhood Supports for Young Children: Dudley Children Thrive: Community Developing Children is a new initiative whose mission is to strengthen the Dudley community's capacity for developing high achieving and healthy children. To accomplish this, Dudley Children Thrive works toward two shared goals: (a) Building capacity among local organizations, merchants, service providers and others to provide high-quality programs, services and information, and (b) Building capacity among families to be primary educators and advocates for quality childcare.  

• John F. Barros, Executive Director, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative
  http://www.dsni.org/staff

10:50-11:00am – Q&A

11:00-11:30pm The Joy of Discovery and the Power of Play: Engaging children and parents in joyful discovery experiences instills an appreciation of our world, develops foundational skills, and sparks a lifelong love of learning. Play and informal learning is an important and unappreciated complement to formal learning and can promote young children's natural tendency to think creatively. By playing with others, children learn to negotiate and resolve conflicts, develop their capacity for decision-making, self-advocacy, and agency—all skills that form the core of future leadership abilities.      

• Carole Charnow, President and CEO, Boston Children’s Museum http://www.bostonkids.org/about/senior_team.html
• Michael Yogman, MD, Board Chair, Boston Children’s Museum; Executive Board, Massachusetts Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics
  http://www.yogmanpediatrics.com/index.php/our-staff/dr-yogman
  

11:30-11:40am – Q&A

11:45am            Buffet Lunch

1:00-2:00pm      Panel of Boston business leaders

• JD Chesloff (moderator), Executive Director, Massachusetts Business Roundtable http://www.maroundtable.com/doc_documents/MBR_ChesloffBio.pdf
• John Fish, Chairman and CEO, Suffolk Construction
  http://www.suffolkconstruction.com/staffView.php?staff_id=1
• Marcy Reed, President, National Grid

• Tom Leighton, CEO, Akamai Technologies
  http://www.akamai.com/html/about/management_tl.html
• Charles Rizzo, Principal Financial Officer and Chief Financial Officer, John Hancock Funds

      Goal: To engage the Massachusetts business community in investing wisely to support human capital development and to build an educated work force for our future prosperity. The panel will assess investments in early education that go beyond traditional enrichment models to apply advances in neuroscience and innovations in learning, such as executive function, to improve outcomes. Specifically, panel members will address 1) how their expertise in innovation and short-cycle learning can shape the way early childhood programs and policies build a culture of innovation, and 2) the skills needed for future workforce and how early childhood education can accelerate that readiness.                     

2:15-3:30pm      Cross-Sector Innovation Sessions

Goal: Building on the morning sessions’ focus on early brain development, supporting the capacity of caregivers to buffer toxic stress, and the application of innovative approaches such as play-based and self-directed learning to improve executive function and readiness for kindergarten, the afternoon Innovation Sessions are designed to catalyze cross-sector thinking about systemic application of and support for innovative ideas.

Each afternoon Innovation Session will be led by one or more Thought Leaders, who will concisely outline the theory of change that drives their program or topic and the systemic challenges they see. What has worked? What has not? What are the things we can change to overcome obstacles at a systemic level? Participants from multiple disciplines will be pre-assigned to Sessions in order to break down silos among health, education and business. Participants will have received background materials on each program/challenge in advance so that they are prepared to contribute to the discussion.

The goal of these participatory sessions is to engage participants in addressing the challenges of implementing innovative programs, to share best practices, and to propose cross-sector partnerships and solutions.

Questions to consider:

• Are the challenges the same across sectors?
• How can best practices and fast-cycle learning be applied and shared across sectors?
• What barriers to success (beyond financial) can we overcome in the work we do? 
• How can we reach and engage with the most high-risk families?   
• How can the business community contribute to these efforts?
  • How can the expertise of the business community in innovation better inform early childhood practices and policies?

Trained facilitators (medical students, pediatricians, and graduate students) will ensure balanced participation and will guide the discussions along with the Thought Leaders in order to address the overall policy questions. Facilitators will meet during the afternoon coffee break to consolidate the input from the sessions and present findings with the entire group in a wrap-up session at the end of the day.

3:30-4:00pm      Coffee Break – facilitators meet and synthesize the recommendations of the Innovation Sessions. Poster displays in the Gallery describing all 12 breakout sessions

4:00-5:00pm      Wrap-up, presentation of the summary suggestions

5:00-6:00pm     Reception

Full Descriptions of the Cross-Sector Innovation Sessions

Each participant will select their top three Innovation Sessions as part of the check-out process and will be assigned to one session to participate in.

1. Digital Media and Child Development: This presentation explores the latest research and development in the use of digital technologies to support early learning and teaching. We’ll take a look at the breakthroughs and opportunities emerging from the Next Generation Preschool Math project, funded by the National Science Foundation, as well as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS’s Ready to Learn study on transmedia learning.

• Christine Zanchi, Executive Producer, WGBH
  http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=11830738&trk=tab_pro
• Shelley Pasnik, Director of the Center for Children and Technology and Vice President of the Education Development Center http://cct.edc.org/people/pasnik-shelley

2. A Prescription for Playful Learning: How Museums and Libraries can Reduce the Experience Gap for Children : This session features the current work of the MA Department of Early Care and Education and Boston Children’s Museum as they collaborate on the Race to Top – Early Learning Challenge Grant with Museums and Libraries across the Commonwealth. Dr. Sherri Killins, Commissioner of the Department of Early Education and Care and Jeri Robinson, BCM will pose questions such as: How do we support parents in the role as their child’s first teacher? How do we encourage parents to visit museums and libraries where they can build their confidence while learning and practicing new skills and activities they can repeat at home? Museums and libraries are poised to deliver rich early learning experiences for families with young children. However, accessibility and affordability barriers often prevent MA families from fully connecting with these institutions. What will it take to fully implement a “Prescription for Playful Learning” for all of the Commonwealth’s children and families?

• Dr. Sherri Killins, Commissioner of Early Education and Care for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts http://www.mass.gov/edu/birth-grade-12/early-education-and-care/dr-sherri-killins-eec commissioner.html
• Jeri Robinson, Vice President, Education & Family Learning, Boston Children’s Museum http://www.bostonkids.org/about/senior_team.html

3. Addressing Barriers to Success for Public Health Initiatives: A Community-Based Approach in Western, MA: Professional and departmental silos are one of the greatest barriers to implementing effective public health initiatives. The Community-Based Perinatal Support Model (CPSM) has been successful in addressing these barriers. This model effectively partners medical providers with mental health, social service, and early intervention in a cross-disciplinary approach that enhances both access to care and quality of care. Through a sequence of strategic interventions, key policy changes are implemented across systems to create a unified public health approach. The CPSM is being implemented in urban and rural settings, but this presentation focuses on a rural application of the model in Western MA communities.

• Linda Jablonski, RNC, MSN Baystate Franklin Medical Center

http://www.baystatehealth.org

• Liz Friedman, MFA, Franklin County Perinatal Support Coalition

      http://www.motherwoman.org/liz-friedman

4. Buffering Toxic Stress with Purposeful Parenting: This session discusses the implications of frame-shifting advances in the basic developmental sciences for the clinical practice of pediatrics. To build a strong foundation for healthy life-courses, the pediatric medical home of the future must be integrated both vertically (providing different levels of care, including universal preventions, targeted interventions, and indicated treatments) and horizontally (collaborating with a wide array of community partners, including early intervention, home visiting, and early education / child care professionals).

• Andy Garner, MD, PhD, Early Childhood Brain Development Task Force http://www.uhhospitals.org/find-a-doctor/garner-andrew-8646
• Jim Perrin, MD, President elect, American Academy of Pediatrics http://childrenshospital.org/cfapps/research/data_admin/Site2231/mainpageS2231P23.html

5. Tools of the Mind Curriculum: Tools of the Mind Curriculum is an innovative national preschool curriculum designed to promote executive function skills in young children that is being implemented in Lexington Children's Place in Massachusetts.

• Elizabeth Billings-Fouhy, Lexington Children’s Place and Kerry McIntosh

http://lps.lexingtonma.org/Domain/17

• Kerry McIntosh, Teacher, Lexington Children’s Place

http://lps.lexingtonma.org/Domain/17

• Miriam Calderon, Chief Advisor, Strategies and Operations, to Tools of the Mind

6. The Cradle of Democracy: At birth, children are declared citizens, but are not realized as such until they are old enough to vote and pay taxes. A view of children as deliberative citizens will be advanced. Rather than being relegated to the waiting room of society, socialization practices should aim to integrate children into public space and actions, while respecting their emerging capacities. The personal and collective benefits of this investment in child development will be argued. Neighborhoods have a major role in mentoring children and fostering their sense of agency and this session will discuss the way neighborhoods can work collectively to optimize this outcome.

• Felton Earls, MD, Professor of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Professor of Human Behavior and Development, Harvard School of Public Health http://ghsm.hms.harvard.edu/people/faculty/earls/
• Mary Carlson

7. Family Engagement in Early Childhood: A Community-Based Parent Empowerment Approach: Research documents that when families are engaged in their children’s learning and healthy development from birth, children’s long-term outcomes are improved. Smart from the Start, Inc., and Thrive in 5 Boston seek to leverage the success of their grassroots work and their unique public/private partnerships to collaboratively transform family engagement practices in Boston. The ultimate goal is to use local success from this innovative strategy to advocate for a statewide paradigm shift where parents become the change agents in increasing community capacity to support young children’s healthy development, kindergarten readiness, and success in school and beyond.

• Jane Tewksbury, Executive Director, Thrive in 5
  http://thrivein5boston.org/
• Cherie Craft, Executive Director, Smart from the Start
  http://www.mydorchester.org/Smart-from-the-Start

8. Breaking Down Silos to Inform State Policies for Children: Because efforts to help children thrive require supporting the whole child, children's policies need to consider a spectrum of domains: physical and mental health, education and social development, nutrition and physical safety, and economic security. To strengthen our capacity to increase public awareness and build coalitions that take an integrated view of child development, this session introduces MassBudget’s KIDS COUNT Children's Budget, which provides easy access to detailed information on every state program for children.

• Jeff Bernstein, Policy Analyst, Mass. Budget and Policy Center
  http://www.massbudget.org/about_staff.php
• Nancy Wagman, KIDS COUNT Project Director, Mass. Budget and Policy Center
  http://www.massbudget.org/about_staff.php

9. Power of Play for All Families: The social-emotional and physical health benefits of family playtime can be powerful and immediate. Dr. Donald Wertlieb explores the integration of children with special needs into play settings that serve all children, followed by a provocative glimpse of how children's museums are currently approaching the role of play in families’ lives: both now (Megan Dickerson, with a short case study) and in the future (Janet Rice Elman, on reimagining children's museums). Discussion on the role of play in improving mental health and strengthening social capital to follow.

• Donald Wertlieb, PhD, President, Partnership for Early Childhood Development and Disability Rights
  http://www.global-partners-united.com/member/donald-wertlieb-phd
• Megan Dickerson, Senior Manager of Community Programs and Partnerships, Boston Children’s Museum http://takeplayseriously.org/about
• Janet Rice Elman, Executive Director, Association of Children’s Museums http://www.childrensmuseums.org/docs/elman_bio.pdf

10. Literacy: Aligning communities around research, policy and practice to ensure reading proficiency for children birth through age nine. Using lessons learned from both the community level and statewide perspective, presenters will shed light on the challenges, potential levers, and policy opportunities using the frame of third grade reading proficiency. Attendees will hear about and discuss opportunities for cross sector collaboration and engagement in both practice and policy.

• Carolyn Lyons, President and CEO, Strategies for Children http://www.strategiesforchildren.org/2staff.html
• Kelly Kulsrud, Director of Reading Proficiency, Strategies for Children http://www.strategiesforchildren.org/2staff.html

11. Home-Based Interventions: Home based interventions offer unique advantages: they make services accessible to clients with childcare obligations, limited transportation and other constrictions; they provide the home visitor a view of the resources and constraints faced by clients every day; and they eliminate the discomfort that a medical exam room or agency office may evoke. However, home visitation is not magic. There are challenges to building a home visiting program that has the flexibility required to meet client needs and the structure required to assure quality. This session will discuss the logic of home visiting and review its advantages and pitfalls, providing examples from two current Boston initiatives.

• Robert Sege, MD, PhD, Division Director, Ambulatory Pediatrics, Boston Medical Center http://www.bmc.org/findaphysician/PhysicianProfile.php?id=iZqmpqKYlZyVnQ
• Debbie Allen, Director, Bureau of Child, Adolescent and Family Health, Boston Public Health Commission http://www.bphc.org/programs/cafh/Pages/Home.aspx 
  

12. Health and Safety in Childcare: This session examines key elements of high quality standards for teachers and   high quality health and safety standards in early education settings with additional focus on the concept of wellness. The frame for health and safety includes conditions in the classroom and extends to the family and community. Successes, obstacles and innovative approaches to addressing these issues will be discussed. We will also discuss elements of a quality early education setting and their intersection with health, safety, wellness, family and community.

• Dr. Valora Washington, Founder and President, CAYL Institute http://www.cayl.org/vwashington
• Tucker Levy, COO, Associated Early Care and Education http://www.associatedearlycareandeducation.org/about