High-quality early childhood education (ECE) settings can foster young children’s positive development, especially for children with social, emotional, or behavioral challenges (Ansari et al., 2021; von Suchodoletz et al., 2023). The elements of high-quality ECE include warm, caring, and supportive caregivers; culturally relevant classroom experiences; developmentally appropriate expectations and learning opportunities; outreach to families; and caregiver training and mentorship (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009; Iruka et al., 2020; Workman and Ullrich, 2017). Unfortunately, many early childhood settings lack the resources and supports needed to provide high quality experiences for children, resulting in low scores on observational measures of classroom quality (McLean et al., 2021; Schaack et al., 2020). The lack of resources and supports is especially prevalent in center-based settings and infant and toddler classrooms (Bassok et al., 2016; Slicker et al., 2020). For decades, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners have sought ways to improve ECE quality to optimize children’s learning and development, often through measurement and improvement strategies.

Curricula are an essential tool to provide young children with the best possible early learning experiences (Clements, 2007; Copple and Bredekamp, 2009; Workman and Ullrich, 2017). A high-quality curriculum formally describes the scope and sequence of a classroom’s learning activities and defines the knowledge and skills that children are expected to have gained after a defined exposure period (Copple and Bredekamp, 2009). Curricula give structure to early learning programs by formalizing a program’s philosophy, providing guidance on classroom set-up and materials, and helping educators identify activities to support children’s learning. Educators¹ benefit from effective early childhood curricula that help them provide stimulating and engaging learning experiences for young children. To ensure equitable learning experiences, early childhood educators also need support to identify how curriculum practices and interactions in the classroom can be modified or enhanced to reflect the cultures, languages, and home experiences of the children served within their program (Friedman and Mwenelupembe, 2020; Iruka et al., 2020). With support, high-quality curricula also guide educators in differentiating instruction for children with disabilities or more intense social and emotional needs.

In this paper, we illustrate how a comprehensive birth-to-five curriculum model with aligned professional development, STREAMin³, was intentionally designed to build the capacity of early childhood professionals to foster high quality interactions and learning environments for all children. In the introduction, we describe the development and initial implementation of the curriculum and how STREAMin³ facilitates the inclusion of all young children, including those who need specialized social, emotional, and behavioral support across a variety of early childhood settings. We then present data showing initial uptake and satisfaction as evidence of the curriculum’s feasibility for use at-scale. Our implementation scale-up data includes a large sample of early childhood educators across settings that serve many young children, but are less represented in the research, such as those serving within private child care centers and family day homes.

The STREAMin³ curriculum model supports children’s development from birth through preschool across learning domains, is responsive to children’s individual needs and diverse backgrounds, and embeds professional development (PD) as a core feature to facilitate strong implementation (Williford et al., 2018). STREAMin³ focuses on children’s development of five Core Skills (Relate, Regulate, Think, Communicate, and Move) and six STREAM Skills (Science, Technology, Reading, Engineering, Art, and Math). See Table 1 for a description of the Core and STREAM Skills.

Central to the theory of change, STREAMin³ is a single curriculum used at the program-level, spanning infant, toddler, and preschool classrooms. We conceptualize that a single curriculum across ages will enhance children’s learning through continuity in their learning experiences across ages paired with activities that are purposefully tailored for each stage of development. The program-level approach provides coherence, continuity, and alignment for children and educators and creates a common lens and language for communication among children, families, educators, and leaders. This helps to ensure continuity in caregiving beyond the classroom, while providing opportunities for programs and families to collaborate and work together in promoting children’s development. Further, early childhood educators often move between classrooms or age groupings due to coverage and turnover; program-wide alignment in curriculum eases these transitions, including by supporting a sense of safety and stability for young children. Professional development experiences can also be more impactful when educators are using a shared language and common resources that enhance open, regular, and positive communication and collaboration.

STREAMin³ supports educators to be highly intentional about the social, emotional, and academic learning experiences children experience each day. To do so, STREAMin³ provides a comprehensive set of curriculum components, including classroom routines, daily schedules, and activities. The learning objectives are integrated across domains, intentionally calling educators’ attention to multiple domains of development that can be addressed within each activity. Using this framework, instruction focuses on the whole child by encouraging development of multiple skills at once, true to the ways that children develop outside of the classroom. Table 2 describes the main curriculum components. Figures 1, 2 provide examples of a toddler activity and a preschool activity card, designed to be flexibly used throughout the day. For more examples, visit the STREAMin³ website at https://streamin3.org/streamin%c2%b3-curriculum-model-2/how-it-works/curriculum-overview/ or our Virginia Early Childhood Education Resource Hub at https://eceresourcehub.org/ece-resource-hub/core-skills/.

Additionally, the STREAMin³ curriculum model includes aligned PD that is flexible and embedded within the curriculum program. Teachers attend group trainings, and some receive individual practice-based coaching depending on needs. Program leaders are encouraged to attend teacher trainings and trainings designed for leaders, which encourage them to take true ownership of program-wide implementation while forming connections with other local leaders. The development of the PD resources was guided by implementation science, finding that simply providing curriculum resources is not enough to support implementation; educators need ongoing and relevant training to implement any curriculum with high fidelity. The PD is intentionally designed to support educators’ understanding of child development and increase the effectiveness of their implementation of the curriculum by tightly aligning PD with classroom practice and tailoring support to meet individual educator and classroom needs. The PD model deliberately structures collaborative engagement across classrooms involving educators, leaders, and classroom aides. This facilitates continuity in support for implementation and experiences of children.

Our second aim, describing how the STREAMin³ model builds capacity of early childhood educators, uses data from the 2022–2023 scale-up year to understand how educators across different settings perceive and use STREAMin³ at-scale. First, we describe the scale-up process. We then describe the professional development offerings to demonstrate how we built educator capacity to implement the curriculum. Finally, we provide survey data across the year to understand how educators across settings perceived and used the curriculum.

Curricula are an essential component of high-quality early learning experiences. Unfortunately, many early childhood educators face challenges in accessing evidence-based curricula, and implementing curriculum with fidelity requires aligned supports. These supports are often unavailable to educators, especially those in lower-resources settings such as small private centers and family day homes, where educators tend to receive the lowest pay, do not access to PD supports, and are more likely to leave the program and the field of ECE. In this paper, we described the STREAMin³ comprehensive birth-to-five curriculum and presented data from the implementation scale-up across early childhood education settings in Virginia. We found that most educators used and enjoyed the curriculum. Educators at private programs and family day homes reported higher satisfaction, compared to those at public programs and in early childhood special education settings. We review these main findings below.

STREAMin³ is a comprehensive curriculum designed to integrate a focus on social, emotional, and academic development across infant, toddler, and preschool ages. This integrated approach promotes the inclusion of children with varying social and emotional needs, as it supports teachers to give the necessary attention and support to skills such as problem-solving skills, friendship skills, and emotion regulation, rather than seeing these skills as barriers to or secondary to academic learning. Further, the curriculum model includes professional development to meet educators where they are and build capacity to implement the curriculum with high fidelity. In the current study, PD offerings included asynchronous online courses and other universal support, as well as individualized coaching for programs deemed a priority (i.e., private and family day homes).

In this paper, we presented data from educators across settings, including private programs and family day homes, to understand how educators perceived and used the curriculum. We found that most teachers enjoyed the curriculum and were likely to recommend it to a colleague, though differences emerged based on program type. In particular, private, family child care, and Head Start providers had higher satisfaction, compared to state-funded public and early childhood special education settings. We also found that, on average, educators reported implementing curriculum components two to three days a week. When educators reported finding a component more beneficial, they tended to also report using it on more days of the week. Curriculum component use and benefit ratings were highest among educators in private programs. Differences in satisfaction and implementation by program type are important to understand, as STREAMin³ and other early childhood curricula and initiatives are ideally intended to be used in classrooms across the many early childhood sectors. Thus, these findings point to the need to understand why educators across different program types have varied experiences. In our partnership with VDOE, we were asked to provide the most outreach to programs who had not previously used an approved curriculum, which were small private centers and family day homes. This increased outreach may have resulted in educators feeling more comfortable with the curriculum, leading to higher satisfaction ratings. Our findings point to the importance of tailoring implementation support depending on the unique needs of programs.

For teachers who were offered direct coaching, participation was lower than expected, with nearly a third of enrolled direct coaching teachers having zero coaching engagements. For direct coaching educators who did have coaching engagements, they engaged in an average of almost five coaching sessions. The average was higher when disaggregated by program type – specifically, family day home providers engaged in an average of 7 coaching activities, whereas private providers engaged in an average of 3.5 coaching activities. Coaches reported that barriers to participation included staff turnover, limited time, and fatigue with multiple initiatives. Previous research has also consistently found that turnover, a lack of time and resources, and teacher burnout impede participation in PD and implementation. Future research should explore these barriers and potential solutions to increase educator engagement, with attention to the unique needs of different program types.

This paper has several limitations that future research can address. First, we present descriptive data that relies on educators’ self-report. Though this provides insight into how educators experienced the curriculum, it is unclear how strongly self-reports of implementation relate to observed implementation. Future research should incorporate observational measures of curriculum implementation in classrooms to better understand day-to-day use of the curriculum. There is also a need for experimental research on curricula to understand how a curriculum like STREAMin³ may impact teaching practices and children’s social, emotional, and academic outcomes. Finally, though our study includes a large sample of providers across a variety of settings, our data and findings are limited to Virginia, and it is unclear how these findings may generalize to other state contexts. Our study contributes to the early childhood education literature by examining implementation in a large sample of early childhood educators and has implications for facilitating implementation fidelity across settings to better support educators and young children’s development.