Holly Gold is an educator and the founder of The Little Schools and The Little School Approach to Early Childhood Education. For more than two decades, she has explored how young children learn best through relationships, play, curiosity, and meaningful experiences. She is creating environments that support children’s emotional well-being while giving educators the freedom to respond to each child’s individual needs. Her approach is grounded in nature-based learning and mixed-age classrooms, with a focus on teacher empowerment and long-term relationships.
In this interview, Holly shares insights into what young children truly need in their earliest years and explores aspects of her approach that make it especially valuable to educators looking to move away from traditional outcome-based teaching models. She also discusses why early childhood education should be viewed as a distinct discipline rather than a simplified version of elementary school. This interview offers practical ideas for educators, school leaders, policymakers, and parents interested in creating learning experiences that center children’s growth, curiosity, and well-being.
Holly, we are noticing an increase in academic, scheduled, and outcome-driven school models. When it comes to The Little School Approach to Early Childhood Education, how do you think it responds to misconceptions about early childhood?
Holly Gold: One of the biggest misconceptions about early childhood is the idea that preschool is simply a smaller version of elementary school. For decades, preschool developed as a distinct field because young children learn differently. Families sought out preschool because they saw their children thriving in environments centered on play, relationships, exploration, and social-emotional growth. Research consistently supported those observations.
In California, we’ve recently seen what happens when policymakers attempt to solve one problem, in this case, access, without fully understanding the ecosystem they’re changing. Universal Transitional Kindergarten was presented as free preschool for four-year-olds, but a TK classroom within the K–12 system is not the same as preschool. At the same time, by removing four-year-olds from community-based programs, TK has predictably weakened the very early childhood education sector it was intended to complement. The number of preschools that have predictably closed as a result of California’s TK policy is astounding.
The result is that an extraordinary number of beloved preschools have closed, even when families loved them and children thrived there. Public schools were required to rapidly create classrooms for 4-year-olds, and this was presented as a solution to the need for universal preschool.
For me, the lesson is that we must look to the early childhood educators if we want to make good decisions about public investment in early childhood education. We need to respect early childhood education as its own profession and discipline with very long and successful roots.
The Little School Approach begins with the belief that young children deserve environments designed specifically around their developmental needs, not around the assumptions of older grades.
You’ve spoken about rejecting “institutional” preschool design in favor of open, connected environments where friendships and curiosity can develop naturally. As more schools attempt to modernize their spaces, what do you think many educators still misunderstand about the connection between physical environment, emotional safety, and learning behavior in young children?
Holly Gold: Many people still think environment is about decoration. They focus on furniture, materials, or aesthetics. But for young children, the environment is fundamentally about the whole child.
Children learn best when they feel emotionally safe, connected, and trusted. The design of a school communicates powerful messages about whether children are expected to comply, perform, and move through a schedule, or whether they are expected to explore, collaborate, and contribute. It’s about a child’s relationship to the natural environment, their friends, and their teachers. It’s about how family members connect when they come in each day.
What concerns me about the public school system’s Transitional Kindergarten model is that classrooms are being created within systems designed for older children. You can add child-sized furniture, but if the culture, schedule, teaching approach, and environment remain fundamentally institutional, children still experience something very different than a true early childhood setting.
The most effective environments create opportunities for connection. They encourage children to move, collaborate, observe, and discover. They support friendships that develop naturally over time. They make children feel like they belong to a community rather than simply occupying a classroom.
When children feel secure, their curiosity emerges naturally. Emotional safety is not separate from learning; it is the foundation that makes learning possible.
The Little School Approach draws inspiration from Reggio Emilia, Waldorf, Montessori, and other models. Instead of committing to one philosophy, you created an integrated framework. What were the hardest decisions in building an approach that stays intentional rather than becoming a collection of disconnected educational trends?
Holly Gold: The hardest part was resisting the temptation to adopt ideas simply because they were popular. There is such a long and inspiring history of early childhood education. There is infinite knowledge to draw from.
Every educational philosophy contains valuable insights. But every philosophy is also built upon a particular image of the child and a particular understanding of learning.
We began by asking a fundamental question: What do we believe children need?
We believe children need meaningful relationships, opportunities for play, environments that inspire curiosity, and teachers who are empowered to make thoughtful decisions. Once those principles became clear, it was easier to evaluate practices from various traditions.
The goal was to build a coherent approach that honors children as capable learners while recognizing that learning happens through relationships, exploration, and community. And the people who care for the children matter too.
Children are not standardized products. They are unique individuals growing within communities, and educational approaches must reflect that reality.
One of the most interesting ideas behind your schools is the emphasis on continuity between teachers and children across multiple years. What have you learned about the long-term developmental impact of sustained relationships and emotional familiarity?
Holly Gold: The impact is profound.
In many schools, children essentially start over every year: new teachers, new classmates, new routines, and new expectations. Yet one of the most important developmental needs of young children is consistency.
When children and teachers remain together across multiple years, they develop a deep understanding of their strengths, interests, challenges, and developmental journey. Children experience the security of being known.
I’ve also come to appreciate how continuity benefits families. Trust deepens over time. Conversations become richer. Parents and educators become true partners rather than simply exchanging information at drop-off and pickup.
As we rethink early childhood education, I hope we pay more attention to these relational elements. They’re often invisible in policy discussions because they’re difficult to measure, but they have enormous influence on children’s confidence, resilience, and overall development.
You’ve discussed educators rejecting overly directive teaching habits and instead becoming listeners, observers, and collaborators with children. What does that transformation process actually look like in practice? Also, why do you believe it is so difficult for many traditional educational systems to adopt?
Holly Gold: It requires a fundamental shift in how we define teaching.
Many educators were trained in systems that emphasize delivering information and managing behavior. In The Little School Approach, teachers guide learning, but they do so through observation, listening, and thoughtful engagement.
A teacher spends time listening to children’s conversations, studying their interests, and designing experiences that build upon those interests. Instead of immediately providing answers, they ask questions. Instead of controlling every outcome, they create opportunities for discovery.
This is very demanding work. It requires deep knowledge of child development and a great deal of professional judgment. It can be challenging to resist the urge to interrupt children by solving their problems.
Traditional systems often struggle with this because observation, reflection, and responsiveness are difficult to standardize. It’s much easier to distribute a curriculum guide than it is to develop teachers as reflective practitioners.
Teacher empowerment requires trust. It requires viewing educators as professionals capable of making informed decisions in response to the children in front of them. That’s a very different model than one built around compliance and uniformity.
And lastly, what parts of The Little School Approach do you most hope other educators, founders, and policymakers will adapt or rethink in their own communities over the next decade, especially when it comes to teacher empowerment, play-based learning, and children’s emotional well-being?
Holly Gold: I hope we begin viewing early childhood education as an ecosystem rather than a collection of separate programs.
Over the last hundred years, we built a network of early childhood centers that reflected the communities they served. These centers had a big impact. People wanted more of them at a more affordable rate. Early childhood educators had been committing our lives to creating community-based preschools and advocating for universal access.
People wanted access to more affordable preschool. A small group of policymakers missed the opportunity. They funded the public school system in the name of childcare and destroyed the well-loved community-based preschools in the process.
Over the past several years, we’ve seen how quickly well-intentioned policies can reshape the landscape. When one part of the system changes, everything else changes with it. Community-based preschools, public schools, family childcare providers, infants, toddlers, teachers, and families are all interconnected.
I would love to see greater investment in teacher expertise and greater respect for the unique knowledge required to work with young children. Early childhood educators are not babysitters. They are developmental specialists whose work shapes the trajectory of children’s lives.
I also hope we protect play-based learning. Not because play is a break from learning, but because play is one of the primary ways young children learn. Through play, children develop language, problem-solving skills, self-regulation, creativity, empathy, and resilience.
Most importantly, I hope we continue to prioritize relationships. The strongest predictor of a positive early childhood experience is not a curriculum, a building, or a technology platform. It is the quality of the relationships children experience every day.
If we can create systems that trust teachers, support families, preserve diverse early childhood options, and place children’s emotional well-being at the center, we will not only improve education; we will build healthier communities for generations to come.
Conclusion
This conversation with Holly Gold highlights an important question facing early childhood education today: What kind of learning environments help young children thrive? She argues that meaningful relationships, emotional safety, play, and curiosity are the foundation upon which learning is built. Her perspective challenges the growing belief that younger children need increasingly academic and structured experiences. Instead, she points to the value of environments where children can explore, collaborate, build friendships, and develop confidence through real experiences. She also emphasizes the importance of trusting educators as skilled professionals who can respond thoughtfully to children. Her insights reinforce that strong relationships are at the center of meaningful early learning experiences.
