From Fragmented Tools to an Integrated Child Care Solution

Challenge

Before partnering with Teaching Strategies, Celebree’s educators managed curriculum and assessment almost entirely on paper—binders, booklets, and checklists that consumed teachers’ time; made consistency difficult to ensure; and left administrators like Kristen Miller, the Director of Education, with limited visibility into data.

Celebree introduced a provider to digitize family communication, but without any connection to the curriculum or day-to-day tracking, they found that it was yet another tool that teachers and center owners had to update manually.

Celebree needed a partner that could help them deliver high-quality education, assessment, and family engagement, consistently and efficiently, across all their private child care centers.

Solution

Celebree found a partner who could deliver all of this in one integrated solution with Teaching Strategies.

“We just kept growing with [Teaching Strategies], utilizing the different components,” Stefanie Shurer, the Director of Franchise Management, said. Celebree has never looked back.

Results

Empowering teachers with more time to focus on children

“When I first started, I was a teacher, and everything was paper, lesson planning was: here is your theme for the month, do whatever you want with it,” Stefanie told us. “Teachers were running from classroom to classroom, looking for books and other shared resources, and there was no way to ensure quality and consistency across classrooms.”

With the addition of The Creative Curriculum Cloud, teachers could plan their day, week, or even year in just a few clicks; easily find high-quality resources to support children’s learning; and customize as much as they wanted to.

“Our intention was to give teachers back time that they could spend on intentional teaching experiences and guiding children through their milestones. The adoption of the Teaching Strategies ecosystem has proven successful in giving them that time back.” — Kristen Miller

Giving administrators the data to maintain quality as they grow

For a growing private child care provider with more than 75 locations, having integrated access to data insights has been a game changer.

With consistent visibility to insights across locations, Kristen Miller and Stefanie have been able to see if teachers are using the curriculum and assessment tools with fidelity, identify gaps, and provide coaching and mentoring when and where it needs to happen. And with integrated professional development and ready-to-teach lessons, vital teacher support is easy to find.

“What’s made the biggest impact is…it helps maintain a status quo and a level of quality. If a teacher is stressed they can just hit a button and get a quality lesson plan.” — Kristen Miller

“It also celebrates wins for students that have been showing progress over time,” Mollie Hethcoat, School Director at Celebree, noted.

Seeing these wins not only empowers the school to recognize high-performing teachers and centers, it empowers educators to share and celebrate progress with families of individual children—seamlessly through the connected family app, without copying it over into other tools or systems.

Engaging families with meaningful resources and easy communication

Celebree had been using a separate tool for family communications, but it wasn’t linked to the curriculum, assessment data, or children’s routines. This forced educators to spend a lot more time tracking down resources and entering details that were readily available within Teaching Strategies’ integrated solutions.

By adopting the Teaching Strategies family engagement app, teachers are now able to send curated collections of digital children’s books, videos, and activities home each week that are connected to the weekly learning. Two-way communication has become quick, personal, and easy.

Families agree. “Parents seem very, very happy with the app. I have not had one parent say, why did you get rid of our other provider?” Kristen Miller reported.

“I love it!” a Celebree parent, Kristen Masters said. “I love the daily reports at the end of the day that give a very thorough overview of what my children did.  Being a busy mom of 2, I like that I can let them know ahead of time that they will not need care on certain days. It’s also very easy to message the management team and get a quick response.” 

Moving from disparate tools to one integrated solution

Instead of working with five different vendors, Celebree School has lightened the workload on both teachers and administrators, improved program consistency and quality across centers, and strengthened family engagement, all through its partnership with Teaching Strategies. And since every tool within the ecosystem shares information with the others, centers are spending less time re-entering data and more time applying it to support the children’s and the program’s success.

“[Other vendors] weren’t seamlessly able to integrate curriculum, assessment, and a parent platform, so it was sort of a no-brainer to adopt the whole Teaching Strategies ecosystem,” Kristen Miller said. 

Celebree plans to continue leveraging the Teaching Strategies ecosystem to improve and sustain quality and support great teachers as it grows.