Andrea Pearson

Andrea Pearson is a teacher at heart. She has spent her career working to improve outcomes in partnership with children, families, and staff in early childhood and elementary learning environments. Her passions include creating relevant and impactful professional learning experiences for adults, ensuring all children and families have access to high quality education, helping teachers and leaders reignite their “spark” and exploring innovative solutions to the challenges many staff and families face as they seek ways to become their very best. As Director, Educare Practice at Start Early: Champions for Early Learning (formerly The Ounce), Andrea focuses on bringing a diverse group of leaders and practitioners together around a unified vision to elevate the early childhood field and each program, professional, family and child within it. Andrea’s work is focused on cultivating and mining innovations across the 25-school Educare Learning Network, supporting leaders in the intersection of program, policy and research and facilitating collaborative partnerships among the Educare staff and leaders. Andrea leads the practice consultation team in creating and facilitating high quality professional learning experiences and providing practice consultation, training and technical assistance for early childhood professionals and leaders around the country. Andrea has more than 20 years of public and private K-12 education experience as a teacher, counselor, principal, board member, and consultant.  She is honored to serve on the Ideal Learning Round Table, a group whose Ideal Learning Principles are deeply aligned with the Educare Model, and whose focus is ensuring that all children, especially those in under resourced communities, have access to high quality early learning experiences. 

She has worked in public, private and international schools in the U.S., Brazil and India, as well as in the nonprofit sector.  Andrea has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish from the University of Iowa and a Master of Science degree in Elementary Education from Northern Illinois University. She and her spouse enjoy their most treasured role as parents to their two toddler boys.