Her Assistant Quit on a Tuesday. She Had No Idea It Was Coming.

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EEAS-107: Adult Supervision and Leadership · Fall 2026 at Theoria Technical College

Marissa is thirty-two.

She has been a head teacher for eight months. She was promoted because she was exceptional with children: warm, calm, and patient in a room of fifteen four-year-olds. Her director watched her handle a meltdown, a fire drill, and a parent complaint in the same afternoon and decided she was ready to lead the classroom team.

Nobody trained her to lead the team. Nobody told her that leading adults is a completely different set of skills from leading children. Nobody warned her that her assistant, Diana, had been quietly checking out for three months and that Marissa had been watching it happen without knowing what she was looking at.

Diana walked in Tuesday morning with a resignation letter.

Marissa was shocked. She kept saying so, all week, to anybody who would listen. "I had no idea. I really had no idea."

Her director already knew. Her director had been watching Marissa miss the signs for weeks. But that was the problem: Marissa was not missing them because she was careless. She was missing them because nobody had ever given her the framework to see them.

EEAS-107: Adult Supervision and Leadership is that framework.

What This Course Actually Teaches

Over five weeks, using Caruso and Fawcett's Supervision in Early Childhood Education: A Developmental Perspective (the field's text), students learn the actual, evidence-based practice of supervising adults in early childhood settings. Not managing them. Supervising them: reading their developmental level, matching the right orientation, holding the conference that turns a struggling teacher into a growing one.

Students learn to:

Read the developmental stage of every adult on the team using the same frameworks NAEYC-accredited programs use: Katz's four stages, Vander Ven's five stages, the three phases of supervisor development.
Choose the right supervisory orientation for each supervisee (nondirective, collaborative, directive control, directive informational) instead of using the same voice on everyone.
Run the five-stage clinical supervision cycle: preobservation conference, observation, analysis and strategy, supervision conference, postconference analysis. The same cycle every accredited early childhood program uses.
Hold the supervisory conference that most head teachers dread: how to open it, what questions to ask, when silence is the tool, how to give feedback that does not shame.
Build a career ladder and staff development plan for the program (whether it is a program the student runs or a program the student is preparing to run).

The course culminates in a Career Ladder and Evaluation Plan the student can hand to a director.

For the Teacher Who Was Just Promoted

You already know. You have already been the one standing there on a Tuesday, holding somebody's resignation letter, wondering how you missed it. EEAS-107 is the course that ends that pattern.

For the Director Reading This

The teachers on your team who take EEAS-107 stop losing assistants. They also stop losing themselves. Send one head teacher into this fall's section. You will feel the difference in your retention numbers by January.