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Course Overview
Introducing our exclusive LEARN Conference 2026 Virtual Experience: an unparalleled opportunity for early childhood professionals to engage with cutting-edge content and connect with peers from across the country—all from the comfort of your own space.
This course gives you access four content-rich main stage sessions broadcast live to your device, ensuring you're at the forefront of field innovations – and inspirations.
Revisit every session with on-demand access for 30 days post-event. Learn at your pace, on your schedule, without worrying about missing out.
Earn up to four contact hours (.4 CEUs) with completion of CEU quizzes and Evaluations for each session.
Session Times
Opening and Practice Plenary Wednesday, October 28 | 9-10 AM ET
Title: What Comes Into Focus When We Center Relationships? The Safe Babies Lens
Speakers:
- Darneshia Allen, Manager, Training and Technical Assistance Integration, Safe Babies, ZERO TO THREE
- Crystal Hallock, PRSS, PRSS-SUP, Parent Leader, Safe Babies, ZERO TO THREE
- Delaney Jones, MSSA, LSW, Community Coordinator, Safe Babies Program of Cuyahoga County, Ohio
Description: Early childhood and child welfare systems are complex and often shaped by transactional and hierarchical relationships. This Practice Plenary explores what comes into focus when relationships lead through the Safe Babies lens.
As a flagship ZERO TO THREE program, Safe Babies integrates practice, policy, and systems change to coordinate across systems, elevate parent voice, and shift interactions toward trust, authenticity, and compassion with families and with providers.
Join this panel of Safe Babies leaders and parent advocates as they share reflections grounded in lived experience and community practice. Participants will examine how relationship-centered practice builds hope and resilience while shaping work across a continuum, from prevention within early childhood systems to intensive, relationship-based interventions for families involved in child welfare.
By naming complexity honestly and highlighting real inroads for change, this session will demonstrate how a relationship-centered, systemic approach creates the conditions for meaningful progress to take hold. Join us to explore what becomes possible when relationships remain at the center of your work and consider how this lens might shape your own practice and partnerships.
Science Plenary Wednesday, October 28 | 4-5 PM PT
Title: Seeing What Matters: Rethinking Development in Complex Times
Speakers:
- Dr. Cynthia García Coll, PhD, Professor Emerita, Brown University and University of Puerto Rico
Description: What if the challenge is not only what we are seeing in our work, but how we are making sense of it?
Across early childhood settings, professionals encounter complexity every day. Children’s development unfolds within multiple, interacting influences that are not always immediately visible, making it difficult to interpret what is happening and how best to respond.
In this plenary, Dr. Cynthia García Coll brings a powerful, integrative lens to these realities. Drawing on decades of research, she will help participants look again at familiar situations with greater clarity, illuminating how development takes shape across everyday environments and what may be influencing what they see.
This session invites participants to deepen how they understand their work. By strengthening their ability to interpret complexity, participants will be better equipped to make thoughtful decisions, respond with intention, and stay grounded in their role. As the conference turns toward broader systems and structures, this plenary offers a foundation for seeing both practice and policy with greater depth and insight.
Policy Plenary Thursday, October 29 | 9-10 AM PT
Title: Shaping AI Before It Shapes Them: Policy for the First Three Years
Speakers:
- Melissa Boteach, Chief Policy Officer, ZERO TO THREE
- Dana Suskind, MD, Founder and Co-Director, TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health, Founding Director of the Pediatric Cochlear Implant Program, Professor of Surgery, Pediatrics, and Public Policy, University of Chicago
Description: No period in human development carries higher stakes than birth to age three. And no policy conversation is more urgent than the one discussing happens when AI enters that window.
The question is not whether artificial intelligence is coming to the early education space. It’s here. The question is how we shape it. New technologies carry enormous promise — enhancing early childhood development, supporting caregivers, and streamlining access to public benefits. But they also carry real threats, chief among them the risk of supplanting the secure attachment and human connection that are the foundation of lifelong well-being.
How can policy amplify opportunities and mitigate the threats? And what is the role of parents, professionals, researchers, and advocates in protecting young children while shaping the promise that AI may unlock? This session takes on those questions.
Keynote Thursday, October 29 | 4-5 PM PT
Title: The Cost of Showing Up Happy: Burnout and the Wisdom of Asking for Help
Presenter:
- Steve Burns, Emmy-Nominated Original Host of Blue's Clues
Description: As the implacably happy, beloved host of Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues, Steve Burns was the guy who sang, danced, and cheerfully bolstered your self-esteem. What you don’t know is that he was doing so with undiagnosed severe clinical depression. What is the cost of forcing joy? How can one maintain peak-level achievement and be completely burned out at the same time? And once it’s all over, how do you re-engage with your own life when the tank is completely empty? Steve Burns shares lessons from his struggles as the Happiest Depressed Person in North America and learns to personally take the messages he gave to an entire generation.
Learning Objectives
What Comes Into Focus When We Center Relationships? The Safe Babies Lens
- Identify key ways the Safe Babies approach centers relationships as the foundation for change across early childhood and child welfare systems.
- Recognize how the lived experience of families, parents, and professionals informs practice within Safe Babies and other family-serving systems.
Seeing What Matters: Rethinking Development in Complex Times
- Identify at least two factors that influence early childhood development across multiple, interacting contexts (e.g., family, community, systems).
- Select examples of how an integrative, research-informed perspective can support more accurate interpretation of children’s development in complex contexts.
Shaping AI Before It Shapes Them: Policy for the First Three Years
- Identify at least two opportunities and two potential risks associated with the use of artificial intelligence during the prenatal to age three period.
- Select examples of policy approaches that can promote the responsible use of artificial intelligence while protecting healthy relationships, early development, and family well-being.
The Cost of Showing Up Happy: Burnout and the Wisdom of Asking for Help
- Recognize how cumulative stress can affect personal wellbeing and identity in early childhood professional roles.
- Identify core areas of self-care that support sustainability in professional practice.
- Recall at least one strategy for re-centering personal wellness in daily routines.
