Patricia Snyder, Ph.D.
Director

We connect with local, state, national and international partners to collaborate and positively impact early childhood development and learning within our community and beyond.

CHILD Center for Early Learning

Gainesville’s Southwest Advocacy Group (SWAG) — in partnership with the Anita Zucker Center, O2B Kids and Head Start — opened the CHILD Center for Early Learning, a model demonstration program for children and families that provides state-of-the-art early care and educational experiences. The CHILD Center is designed to support quality early learning experiences, family self-sufficiency and positive outcomes for children and families in the SWAG community.

Symposium Series

As an outcome of the 2017 UF Early Childhood National Summit Starting Ahead, Staying Ahead, the Center launched a symposium series of public discussions with internationally recognized experts in early childhood. Since 2018, these events have addressed areas of disability and early childhood policy, professionalization of the workforce, prenatal exposure to opioids, advocacy, leadership, equity and law.

We mentor tomorrow’s early childhood leaders in research, policy, advocacy and practice.

Professional Development

Through partnerships in our community, across the nation and around the world, we have developed and researched Practice-based Coaching (PBC), a recommended early childhood coaching model that helps people use effective practices to support children’s development and learning. With a four-year, $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs, the PBC Data-Informed Decision-Making model is being implemented across diverse early childhood programs supporting infants, toddlers and preschoolers with or at risk for disabilities.

Beyond the Center

The Anita Zucker Center prepares tomorrow’s early childhood leaders to support young children’s health, development, learning and well-being and to advance the future of early childhood studies. Through connections with alumni, students, postdoctoral fellows and external partners, we witness the widespread impact we are making to the field beyond our Center.

We build partnerships and implement research-based solutions with caregivers, practitioners and policymakers to transform the lives of young children everywhere.

Embedded Learning

The Anita Zucker Center, through collaboration with national partners and funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, has propelled research and practice around embedded learning. Focused on children with or at risk for disabilities, the embedded learning model helps practitioners and caregivers of young children learn how to partner and support children’s learning opportunities in everyday activities and routines at home, at preschool and in the community.

Social and Emotional Learning

BEST in CLASS began in 2008 with the goal of supporting young children’s social-emotional learning and decreasing their challenging behaviors. Designed to increase the use of evidence-based practices in community-based early childhood settings, BEST in CLASS supports practitioners’ use of these practices with children during everyday learning activities.

We work to conduct and translate science to share and improve real-world practice and policy in early childhood.

Sunshine Portal

The Sunshine State Early Childhood Information Portal project, funded through the Florida Division of Early Learning in the Florida Department of Education, is developing a statewide early childhood integrated data system that includes administrative data from the Department of Health, the Agency for Health Care Administration, the Department of Children and Families, the Department of Education and local Early Head Start and Head Start programs covering health, economic and education sectors within the early childhood mixed delivery system. The primary product is a password protected, interactive web portal that presents maps and other data visualization strategies to provide a comprehensive view of the strengths and needs within the state’s system to support data-informed decision-making among state and local policymakers.

The 3R’s of Early Learning

Our research shows there are three important processes that shape children’s development and early learning. At the Anita Zucker Center, we refer to these processes as the 3R’s of Early Learning: Relationships, Repetition, Routines ™. The 3R’s of Early Learning are important because they focus on how children learn in addition to what they learn.