Company Updates

What To Expect in Early Childhood Education This Year

Read Time: 5 minutes
John Olsen
January 31, 2023

It’s a new year, and early childhood education has never been more important. Three years since the onset of the pandemic, our youngest learners—and those closest to them— deserve comprehensive supports that meet their evolving needs. And Teaching Strategies remains committed to offering children, educators, and families the most innovative, timely solutions.

More specifically, in 2023, we are focused on the following key themes. Teaching Strategies is:

Giving Teachers Robust Support

To best support the development of young children, we must build robust teacher pathways and supports that strengthen the quality and wellbeing of the early educators caring for children daily. Educators shared they are experiencing high levels of burnout and stress, echoing sentiments observed in media coverage and other surveys on the state of the early educator workforce. Educators also shared they find more job satisfaction when they have access to high-quality professional development. Through our new Teacher Membership program, we are demonstrating our commitment to rapidly onboarding new teachers with coaching and support through their first eight weeks, connecting them through community, and providing different ways for them to learn, whether from real-time microlearning or from a robust catalog of accredited, virtual live or on-demand classes. By investing in and properly equipping our early educator workforce, we anticipate positive cascading effects on children’s early development.

Encouraging Learning through Play

At Teaching Strategies, we know children’s development is also enriched by a whole-child approach to early education. In 2023, we anticipate a robust push toward supporting the social-emotional development of children—in addition to important academic pillars like numeracy and literacy—to build a solid foundation for continued learning and life success. Research shows the benefits of learning through play are integral to a child’s social, emotional, and cognitive development, with long-term benefits for academic achievement. It’s never been more critical to create accessible and easy-to-use tools and activities for educators and parents that support a child’s playful learning.

Harnessing the Science of Reading

Teaching Strategies continues to align all facets of our connected ecosystem with evidence-based instruction in the Science of Reading. How best to teach young children to read captured the attention of mainstream media in 2022 after the nation saw declining test scores, strong advocacy, and increased awareness around effective, brain-based instruction. We know phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension are key components of literacy, and we remain committed to ensuring proficiency as a foundation of a child’s development.

Utilizing Technology as an Enabler

We see the role of technology in early education as integral in expanding access and ease for educators and families. While technology does not and will never replace the learning that happens through relationships between children and attentive adults, it can act as a helpful learning support. Teaching Strategies offers a digital platform that brings together research-backed curriculum, developmentally appropriate formative assessment, family engagement tools, on-demand professional learning and a community in one place, saving educators and families time so they can enhance the quality of a child’s earliest experiences.

Scaling High-Quality Early Childhood Education

Lastly, Teaching Strategies understands the key to ensuring all children have access to high-quality early learning means partnering with states and districts. As policymakers across the nation, from California to North Carolina to Alabama, signal the need to expand access to early childhood education, it will be critical to ensure those early learning experiences are high quality. High-quality early childhood education includes aligned curriculum, comprehensive but accessible professional development for teachers of all experience levels, observation-based assessment, and opportunities for family engagement. Teaching Strategies is working with states and districts to build robust scaffolds that complement services at scale while never compromising on high-quality learning.

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