Gisele M. Crawford, MAA, is a Research Specialist at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. She currently serves on the National Evaluation Partner team for the Educare Learning Network. Early in her career she served as an assistant teacher in a classroom for four-year-olds and a lead teacher for two-and-a-half to three-year-olds, as well as a teacher of English for children and adults in Taiwan. Since then she has worked on numerous studies of young children and their environments and experiences, including large-scale studies of public pre-kindergarten in the United States. She has served as coordinator of FirstSchool, a pre-kindergarten through third grade initiative, since the project’s inception in 2004. She has published articles and book chapters about serving diverse populations of children in early education settings, and is a contributing author to FirstSchool: Transforming PreK-3rd Grade for African-American, Latino, and Low-Income Children. She is a co-creator of the FirstSchool online course, the Art of Communication in Classrooms for Young Children.