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Outstanding Preschool Teacher-Connie Williams Coulianos

Preschool Performance Art
Coulianos is a model for her students—and other teachers

Connie Williams Coulianos came to Manhattan to pursue a career in music. “Then I took a job in this little pre-school and got hooked,” she says. “Children that age are just fascinating. I decided to teach so that I would have a chance to rediscover the world every year.”

That was 22 years ago, and Coulianos has been at the Hollingworth Preschool, at Teachers College, Columbia University, ever since. She currently serves as the school’s director and master teacher and also mentors graduate students.

Over the course of her career, Coulianos has earned a reputation as one of the leading educators in the city, with many other preschool programs sending their teachers to observe her classes. In 2006 she was recognized by Nickelodeon’s parenting magazine, Nick Jr., as one of the 11 most inspiring preschool teachers in the country.
“Connie’s work has really set the standard of how to nurture the high potential and gifts of the children that attend Hollingworth,” said Kelly Posner, whose eldest son just finished his first year with Coulianos.

The Hollingworth Preschool was founded to nurture gifted children, and lessons in Coulianos’s classes are tailored whatever her students are interested in—everything from the medieval history to astronomy. Heady stuff for toddlers, but Coulianos says she believes children are capable of a great deal more than is generally expected of them. “Children are not vessels to be filled but fires to be ignited,” she said. “I think there should be no limits on what children study.” So if they’re interested in the solar system, Coulianos says it’s up to her to make it accessible.

Parents say Coulianos’s lessons go beyond just feeding children’s intellect. “She teaches them to be caring and compassionate about other people—it’s so much a part of life, and normally you don’t get that,” said Cristina Cuomo, vice president of Gotham magazine, whose daughter is one of Coulianos’s students. “Education really starts in these formative years,” she said, “and certainly the experience they have with Connie resonates the rest of their lives.”

This past year students in Coulianos’s classes raised money for a sister school in Kenya. It’s a model early childhood program for vulnerable and orphaned children near Nairobi that Coulanios helped set up in 2006. This year Hollingworth students were sent home with jars which they filled, raising about $4,000, which went toward buying much needed supplies for the school. Coulianos will go back to Africa for another three weeks this summer, to work with the teachers and children.

Though Coulianos says she sometimes misses her former dream of being onstage singing, she’s says she’s found a way to incorporate her background in music into her classroom. “There’s an element of performance in good teaching,” she said. “It’s like a big musical. We sing constantly.”

Coulianos said she has thought about working with other ages but in the end decided she wouldn’t want to teach any other grade. She said, “I want to have first crack at them.”

— Courtney McLeod