Bev Engel is a consultant and teacher of Early Childhood Education and Organization Development. Drawing on principles derived from both Early Childhood Education and the field of Organization Development, Bev offers learning programs, leadership coaching, and facilitation to organizations seeking to enhance the quality of existing services for young children and their families.

Bev’s specializes in curriculum design, implementation and improvement, which includes portfolio assessment and The Project Approach. She also helps groups of teachers and their leaders articulate a clear program philosophy statement and what that would look like in day-to-day practice.

Bev has worked extensively with program leaders and administrators to strengthen and enhance their leadership effectiveness in support of change within their organizations.

She has guided administrators and teachers in re-energizing and reorganizing existing early childhood services in child care centers and school systems. Her goal is to help each client system to better reflect developmentally appropriate practice and current thinking in the field.

By building on the existing knowledge and skills of the people within each organization, Bev encourages individuals within each program to personally experience how the whole organization benefits from each member’s commitment to ongoing learning and professional growth.

The current emphasis on accountability taps into Bev’s longstanding experience that has focused on helping Leaders learn new skills and improve existing methods for individualizing staff supervision and evaluation. Having co-developed a systematic approach to portfolio collection, she has helped administrators and teachers understand the many ways in which careful and thorough documentation of children’s learning can also be the spring board and the catalyst for addressing their ongoing professional development. Long-term clients who have done in-depth work with Bev, have experienced first-hand that a comprehensive portfolio system can be a catalyst for:

• improving Family/Teacher communication,
• meeting criteria for National accreditation,
• and/or incorporating State School Readiness Performance Standards

any of which can result in overall program improvement.

Bev was a tenured faculty member of the Early Childhood Education Department at Vanier College in Montreal, where she taught early childhood curriculum design and implementation and supervised students in fieldwork practice. She has been a full time consultant to both educational and business organizations since moving to Maine in 1992

Bev holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Early Childhood Education from Sir George Williams University (Montreal), a Master of Arts in Organization Development and Leadership from Goddard College (Vermont) and a Graduate Diploma in College Teaching from McGill University (Montreal). She has done advanced training in Human Interaction and Conflict Management and is certified in the administration and application of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. She was the 2001 recipient of the Montreal-based Bothwell/Smith Award for outstanding contribution to the field of Early Childhood Education.

PUBLICATION: Focused PortfoliosTM : A Complete Assessment for the Young Child (with Gaye Gronlund), Redleaf Press, 2001.

• curriculum development
• authentic classroom assessment processes (portfolios)
• leadership coaching and support
• supervisory skills
• conflict management
• connecting best practices to accreditation and state standards
• organizational philosophy& statement of mission
• organizational climate and morale

• Sustained help in implementing a center-wide authentic performance assessment system
• A leadership workshop explaining how to use children's portfolios as a professional development tool
• A long-term project to articulate an in-depth center philosophy statement and the accompanying classroom practices to support it
• An in-service series to facilitate the use of the "Project Approach"
• A center-wide learning series to improve communication and conflict management skills