CDA competency statements — the six Reflective Statements of Competence in the CDA Professional Portfolio — are first-person essays about how you run your classroom.
You write each one around real practice: what you do, why you do it, and a concrete example that shows the result.
The prompts and length limits live in the Competency Standards book for your setting, and the Council's own name for them — Reflective Statements of Competence — says what it wants: a reflection on your work, not a duty list.
Here is how to write all six.
What are the 6 CDA Competency Standards?
Six Reflective Statements of Competence are a required part of the CDA Professional Portfolio that the Council for Professional Recognition has every initial candidate prepare.
They sit alongside your education documentation, the Family Questionnaires you distribute to families, ten Resources and a Professional Philosophy Statement — all of it what candidates call the CDA portfolio.
You may also see the statements called competency statements or competency goals; the Council's own name is Reflective Statements of Competence.
What each of the six must cover is set in the Competency Standards book for your setting, and the Council requires every initial candidate to purchase that book — green for Preschool, yellow for Infant-Toddler, magenta for Birth to Five, blue for Family Child Care, purple for Home Visitor.
The Council's public pages we reviewed do not reproduce the standards' wording or the statement prompts, so a list of "the six standards" from a blog or a test-prep site is not something to write to.
If you have not settled on a setting yet, the CDA credential guide compares all five.
One thing the Council's public pages do publish in this territory is the list of eight subject areas that your 120 hours of formal early childhood education training must cover, with no fewer than 10 hours in each, in the center and family child care settings:
- Planning a safe and healthy learning environment
- Advancing children's physical and intellectual development
- Supporting social and emotional development
- Building productive relationships with families
- Managing an effective program operation
- Maintaining a commitment to professionalism
- Observing and recording children's behavior
- Understanding the principles of child development and learning
Those subject areas structure your training hours; the six statements are your written account of the practice they describe — keeping children safe and healthy, supporting how they grow, working with their families, running the room, keeping your own skills current, watching children closely, and understanding how they learn.
Home Visitor candidates are the exception to the list: their subject areas differ, and so does their process.
Your setting's Competency Standards book is the authority
How a competency statement is structured
A competency statement is a short reflective essay, and the ones that work follow the same shape: name the practice, give the reason, show it happening, and say what it does for children.
That is the whole skeleton — a routine you actually run, the thinking behind it, a concrete example, and the result.
The reflection lives in the reason. "I greet each family at the door" is a duty list. "I greet each family at the door because the handoff sets how a child's morning goes, and a parent who has told me what kind of night it was gets a different kind of morning from me" is a statement — it shows judgment, not just routine.
Write to the prompt in your book rather than to the topic in general.
Your book gives the prompt for each of the six statements in your setting, and a statement that answers a neighboring question — lovely writing, wrong prompt — reads as assembled, not reflective.
Ground every statement in materials, places and age groups you can point to: the shelf, the cot room, the sign-in sheet, the block corner.
Specific nouns are what make a statement feel lived-in, and they are also what the rest of your portfolio can back up.
Examples by standard
The sample lines below are organized by the eight subject-area themes — the territory the Council publishes — so you can see the level of specificity that works, then match it to the prompt your own book gives for each statement.
They are original examples written for this page, not statements to submit: your six statements should describe your own classroom, in your own words — they are your reflection, so let them sound like your room.
| Subject-area theme | What a statement in that territory can sound like |
|---|---|
| Planning a safe and healthy learning environment | Before toddlers arrive I walk the room once: gates latched, loose pieces off the low shelf, sign-in sheet where families actually stop. A broken toy goes to the repair bin, not back into rotation. |
| Advancing children's physical and intellectual development | During block play I sit at the children's level and describe what I see — 'you stacked the long blocks as your base' — then ask whether a wider base would hold more, instead of building it for them. |
| Supporting social and emotional development | When preschoolers both grab the same wagon, I kneel down and hand each of them the words — 'tell Maya you were still using it' — and stay close while they try it themselves. |
| Building productive relationships with families | Each child goes home with a note about something specific they did that day, and at pickup I open with something I noticed — so the first thing a family hears from me is never a complaint. |
| Managing an effective program operation | Lunch-to-nap runs on the same sequence every day — books, then cots, then soft music — and the afternoon materials are set out before nap begins, not during. |
| Maintaining a commitment to professionalism | I asked my director to watch circle time and give me something specific to change, and I keep my training certificates in a single folder so my next credential step is paperwork, not archaeology. |
| Observing and recording children's behavior | I keep a notebook on the shelf and jot anecdotal notes when something matters — the date, what was said, what happened next — which is where the block-play pattern I shared with the director came from. |
| Understanding the principles of child development and learning | My toddlers play side by side without interacting, so I set out duplicates of favorite materials rather than scheduling sharing turns — expectations matched to what that age can do. |
Notice what the samples have in common: a named routine, a reason, and a detail that could only come from a real room.
That specificity — not vocabulary, not length — is what separates a statement that reads as yours from one that reads as assembled.
Length and tone
How long each statement should be is set out in the Competency Standards book for your setting, not on the Council's public pages we reviewed — our research could not confirm word counts from the Council's site, so treat any limit from a blog, a forum or a course handout as unconfirmed until you check your own book.
On tone: write in the first person and the present tense, about the room you run now.
Short sentences, short paragraphs, plain words. "I do this because it does that for children" beats any amount of theory — a statement that could have been written by someone who has never met your children is not a reflection.
Freshness matters too.
The Council requires the portfolio to be prepared within the six months before you submit your application, so your statements should describe your current classroom.
If you have changed rooms, age groups or centers since an older draft, rewrite rather than recycle — a statement about practice you no longer do will not match your resources — or, if your process includes a visit, your observation.
How the PD Specialist uses them
When a candidate's process includes a verification visit, the Professional Development Specialist who conducts it follows the Council's R.O.R. model: Review the portfolio and Family Questionnaires, Observe the candidate working with children, and Reflect with the candidate.
Your statements are read in that first step, next to the Family Questionnaires that came back from your families.
Where it happens is set out too: the observation takes place at the center or home where you work or volunteer with children, while the review and the reflection can move to a quiet place outside the classroom.
Practically, that means the room the specialist sees is the room your statements describe — write about the routines you actually run.
Since February 2, 2026, not every candidate has a visit: candidates who show a qualifying level of competence on the CDA exam no longer need one.
Applications submitted on or after that date must include a portfolio — uploaded, except for Home Visitor candidates, whose portfolio is reviewed onsite by a PD Specialist — so for candidates who skip the visit the statements stand on the page alone.
Either way they reach the Council's process as your own account of your practice — and they hold up best when the account and the classroom agree.
The six statements are the part of the portfolio that comes from your room — documents can be collected anywhere, but the reflection has to be yours.
Give them the same care as the rest of the credential, and start early enough that each one can sit for a few days before you revise it.
When the credential is within reach, browse childcare teacher jobs to see how centers describe the CDA in their postings.
Career information, not licensing or legal advice. The CDA and its competency statements are set by the Council for Professional Recognition; confirm the current requirements with the Council before you apply.