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Our memories of being preschoolers often center around baking mud pies and discovering new insects while playing outside, building block towers as high as we could reach, and beginning to understand the magic of reading. But these opportunities to explore, play, and grow didn't just happen. The behind-the-scenes intentional documentation and planning by our teachers set the stage and made that learning come alive. While not readily observable from the perspective of a 4-year-old, teachers' ongoing assessment, reflection, and planning process is an integral component of every high-quality early childhood setting. And yet, like preschoolers' learning environments, teachers' abilities to spark children's learning don't just happen; high-quality, intentional teaching is cultivated with time, effort, and support-ideally, lots of support.
In this article, we follow two teaching teams-working with the same coach-as they use child assessment data to identify opportunities for the educators to build their knowledge and skills, set meaningful goals, and grow through a supportive coaching process.
Sam and Lake are preschool coteachers with 25 years of combined teaching experience and have worked as partners in the same classroom for the past eight years. They have had a consistent instructional coach, Jamie, for the past two years and have sought out professional learning opportunities, including training for using their child assessment tool. They stated, "It's helpful to know where children are related to learning. It's how we develop lesson plans, and it guides how we support each child." Because their curriculum model encourages continuity, each teacher has facilitated small group time with the same eight children since the beginning of the school year. When reviewing their assessment data, Sam's reports showed trends high in language and literacy but low in math; Lake's reports showed trends high in math but low in language and literacy.
Kris and Peyton, both relatively new to the field of early childhood education, have been preschool teaching partners for two years. They both maintain positive attitudes toward working with children and in implementing the curriculum. In this first year working with Jamie as their coach, they demonstrated strong adult-child interactions; but as a teaching team, their child assessment data showed limited growth among the children enrolled in their classroom, and they expressed frustration with the child assessment process, namely that...