Farmington Faculty


Betsey Squibb, Ph.D.

Professor - Early Childhood Education

Ph.D., The Fielding Institute
M.A., Pacific Oaks College
A.B., Bryn Mawr College

In the Classroom — Inspiring Students and Setting High Academic Expectations
Betsey Squibb is well known among Farmington students of Early Childhood Education as a mentor who not only inspires them to work with very young children but also as a professor who sets high academic standards.

She is a strong advocate of what she describes as “active learning.” Part of each class may involve actively doing research, actively planning classroom curriculum materials and more — the key word being “active.” It means students rolling up their sleeves and thinking, “OK, what does this mean and what additional information can I gather on this topic? And what can I apply what I’ve learned and what I’ve researched?”

Betsey’s in-the-classroom work is always linked to the assigned readings, the theory, or the class topic for the day. But she just tries to make her classroom work a truly active learning process, so that the Early Childhood Education concepts and theories are not just a lecture-type discussion (although she does teach by discussion, too) but are actually tied to doing something, hands-on. After all, once her students are out in the real world working with very young children and their parents, practically everything they do will be active and hands-on.


Putting Theory Into Practice
For example, in her Planning Environments class, students worked in teams to change the physical layout of a real classroom. The class was held in a unique building on campus specially-designed for Early Childhood Education classes, and one of Betsey's student teams turned the children’s classroom into a jungle. Others made more subtle changes, positioning reading areas to be more inviting to children, rearranging art areas to better support child creativity and independence. Regularly modifying the environment of the classroom allowed Early Childhood Education students to understand they could indeed change the physical environment to suit the needs of the class — they just had to think about it and observe the end results of their work.


Getting Students Involved in Research Right From the Start
Undergraduate Research is a Farmington hallmark — among all academic disciplines. So, too, is the concept of active learning. Betsey Squibb has long been a practitioner of both. She builds active research into her students’ First-Year work because she knows the fields of Early Childhood Education and Child Development are continually expanding and that there’s new information every week.

For instance, Betsey makes sure her Early Childhood Education students know how to use a library (sure, all college students arrive knowing the basics) but Betsey ensures her students really know how to use a library — for things and in ways they never imagined. She assigns projects where she helps students to actively seek out late-breaking research or professional-level resources, right on campus at Mantor Library. This helps to position her Early Childhood Education students as learners and researchers.

Betsy knows the importance of this from her own research background. She is considered a national leader in the fields Childhood Education and Child Development and contributes greatly to the cutting-edge research published in those fields. As a research leader, she is keenly aware how quickly and significantly the research changes; she strives to put her students at the forefront of that pipeline of change.


Classroom Work Outside of a College Classroom
Once every year Early Childhood Education students participate in what is called a practicum experience. This is where students go out and observe a real Early Childhood Education situation in action.

It’s in these first, real-world settings that Farmington students learn, firsthand, if this is the kind of work they truly want to do. They also discover just what it takes to run an early childhood program or a school classroom.

Later in their college careers, Betsey’s Early Childhood Education students intern, work, or volunteer at a variety of early childhood education settings, from one day a week to a couple days a week.

Students often work at child care centers and programs, and home-based child care throughout the Farmington area; some work at Farmington’s W.G. Mallett School (a public K-3 school a short walk from campus). Others have worked as a substitute teachers in the Farmington area school district or in their hometown.


Helping Students to Make Professional Connections
This hands-on, outside-the-college-classroom work also helps Early Childhood Education students make valuable professional and continuing connections. For instance, students often land internships or jobs through connections they made while doing their practicum work.


A True Academic — Area of Special Interest
Betsey Squibb’s areas of academic expertise are in infant and toddler care and development as well as family childcare. She has conducted significant scholarly and professional research in the fields of early education and child care, including: rural child care and family child care; and teacher and child caregiver education and training.

She is also heavily involved with the Head-Start program where one of its newest programs puts Head-Start children in family childcare homes situations. Betsey is also involved in an off-campus program in Bath, Maine for working professionals in education to improve their skills and stay current in the field. Participants in this program receive advising and coursework to complete UMF's Bachelor's degree in Early Childhood Education.

Betsey also served as the Maine director for a “Family Childcare Cost and Quality” study for family childcare. Conducted in conjunction with Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 2004, the research showed the clear link between caregiver training in early childhood to high quality outcomes for children.

She was one of the authors for the landmark study, Maine Childcare Cost and Quality and has written books on family child care and infants and toddlers, including one more recently one published by Children’s Resources International.


Transforming the Way the World Practices Early Childhood Education
In addition to her work at Farmington, in Maine and in the U.S., Betsey Squibb has long been involved in infant and toddler educational issues across the globe.

Betsey’s expertise in the field of infant and toddler development — combined with her willingness to travel — has led her to do extensive work in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia: the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Lithuania, and countries in the Balkans. Through Children’s Resources International, Betsey was chosen to help lead the training for the development of Step By Step, a Head-Start-type program in Eastern Europe.

With their newfound independence, the new republics in those regions wanted to completely change how their societies cared for and educated young children and radically change how they trained people to work with young children. Through Children’s Resources International, experts like Betsey helped them to establish breakthrough new methods of working with very young children.

For example, Betsey’s work was part of an effort to transform what were once draconian Romanian orphanages into inviting, western-style child care centers. Today, parents in Romania drop off their children in the morning at a safe, nurturing learning environment and pick them up at the end of the work day. Betsey’s work with Children’s Resources International truly shifted the way that country thinks, in terms of early care and education for the youngest children.


Respected in the Field – Noteworthy Accomplishments
Betsey Squibb is a highly-respected, highly-published leader in the field of child development. She has authored and co-authored numerous books and articles including the internationally acclaimed Learning Activities for Infants and Toddlers, (which has been translated into several languages) through Children’s Resources International; and Family Day Care: How to provide it in your home; and The Cost and Quality of Full Day, Year-round Early Care and Education in Maine: Preschool Classrooms, a report on the findings from the Maine Cost and Quality Study.

She was the Maine Director of the Maine Cost and Quality Family Child Care Study project, and has received numerous Maine Department of Human Services Infant Toddler Training and Early Childhood Education Training grants.

Betsey is currently a member of the Association for Childhood Education International, the Association for the Study of Play, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and the New England Educational Research Organization.

She taught international seminars under the auspices of Children’s Resources International, Inc., Washington, D.C., in Georgia, Ukraine, Mongolia, Slovenia, and Lithuania.


Outside of Academia — Personal Interests and Activities
Because the Appalachian Trail is right in her backyard (she resides in nearby Madrid, Maine) she is outside much of the time when she is not teaching. She is an avid hiker and mountain climber (year-round). In the wintertime she also does a lot of back country skiing, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. In addition, Betsey is into gardening and she volunteers at the Island Farm, an organic farm in her area.


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