What Is HighScope? The HighScope Curriculum for Teachers

HighScope is a comprehensive early childhood curriculum — a published model a program adopts to structure its classrooms, its daily routine and its assessment, rather than a single subject or a box of lesson plans.

When the name shows up on a job posting, it is telling you how the room runs.

The approach's premise is that young children learn through active experience: acting on materials and ideas, not only listening to an adult, with the teacher arranging the environment, joining the play and extending it through questions.

Two pieces of the model shape the teaching day, and they give this page its middle sections.

The daily routine is built around plan-do-review — a cycle in which children choose and describe their own work.

And learning is assessed observationally: what you watch children do is what you record, and the assessment tool attached to the approach is called COR Advantage — a name we carry with a research caveat below.

Those two habits — running the cycle and keeping the record — are what a HighScope classroom adds to the preschool teaching role you already know.

One research note before the detail.

HighScope's own pages returned errors during our research pass, so we could not verify the publisher's current materials.

We keep to the shape of the approach as teachers work in it, we tell you where to confirm the rest, and we will not quote the publisher's specifics — counts, age ranges, item lists — secondhand.

A program that runs HighScope can show you its own materials, its own goals chart and its own training in the interview.

HighScope is also one of several published curricula you will meet on preschool postings.

Teaching Strategies describes The Creative Curriculum for Preschool, for example, as a curriculum for 3- and 4-year-olds built on play-based studies — we keep that in the publisher's own words because a curriculum's details belong to its publisher (what the Creative Curriculum involves).

Whichever shelf a program buys from, the differences show up in the routine — which is where we go next.

If you are still weighing the role itself, the preschool teacher career guide maps the ages, settings, requirements and pay underneath any curriculum.

Plan-do-review names the cycle at the routine's center, and its name is its outline.

Children plan — they decide what they intend to do and say it out loud.

They do — they carry the intention out in the room's interest areas.

They review — they recall what happened and talk it through.

The cycle hands children ownership of their own activity, and it hands you a steady stream of observation material: children narrating their own work.

Each phase asks something different of you.

• In the plan phase, you help children put an intention into words — what they will work on, where, with whom, with which materials. Your tool is the question, not the answer.
• In the do phase, you move through the room at child level: watching, asking questions that stretch the play without taking it over, and adding materials when the play asks for them.
• In the review phase, you help children rebuild the experience in language — what they made, what was hard, what they might try next time. Recall is where an activity becomes learning a child can talk about, and it is where your notes are richest.

The specifics — how long each piece runs, where plan and recall sit next to group times, meals and outdoor play, and how the room's interest areas are stocked for it — live in a program's own schedule.

Ask to see a copy of the daily schedule in the interview — how a program protects the cycle tells you how seriously it runs the curriculum.

Key developmental indicators are the goals layer of the curriculum: the statements of what children are working toward that your plans point at and your observation notes are read against.

They are the shared language of a HighScope teaching team.

They turn "he was busy in the block area" into a note about a specific skill, and they are how a team decides what to offer a child or a group next.

We will not list the indicators themselves.

HighScope's pages returned errors during our research pass, so the current set — how many there are, how they are grouped, which ages they map to — went unverified, and curricula get revised.

An outdated goals list is worse than none.

Get the current chart from the program during onboarding, or from HighScope's own materials, and read it before your first week of notes.

The transferable skill is reading a goals list and seeing a classroom in it.

You match the morning's block play to a statement on the chart, choose a focus when you plan a small group, and write anecdotes that name the goal they show.

Whatever the publisher revises, that habit is the working core of a goals-driven curriculum — and it is what makes your documentation useful to the team instead of decorative.

COR Advantage is the name attached to the observational assessment side of this approach; everything past the name went unverified in our research.

What you can count on is the general habit of observational assessment: your records of what children said and did are the raw material, and you write them down while the moment is fresh.

How this tool turns those notes into ratings is a question for the program that runs it.

We could not verify the tool's details.

HighScope's pages returned errors during our research pass, so points as basic as the age range it covers and the items it rates went unconfirmed, and we will not quote them from memory.

Ask the program which version of the tool it runs, how often teachers complete ratings, and when in the schedule documentation happens.

The answers tell you whether assessment is resourced or squeezed — and that is a working-conditions question, not a small one.

If you have used another observational assessment, the habit carries.

Teaching Strategies' GOLD, for example, is an online observational assessment for children from birth through third grade, rated against objectives the company describes as research-based — Teaching Strategies cites 38 — and GOLD checkpoint reports show which children are below, at or above widely held expectations.

The record system differs; the underlying discipline of watch, note and rate is the one you already practice, and it moves with you between tools.

Put the pieces together and the job has a recognizable shape.

Your day runs on children's choices: the plan-do-review cycle anchors it, and your attention goes to what children are doing rather than to a script you are delivering.

You spend the day at child level — questioning, extending play, keeping the room organized enough that children can find, plan with and put away the materials themselves — and you end it with notes, because the assessment lives in what you observed.

In a room like this, documentation works best as a daily habit, not an end-of-term scramble, and the teachers who thrive in it build the note-taking reflex before the workload forces it.

The interview is where you find out how deeply a program runs the approach.

Four questions are worth asking:

• How is the daily schedule structured, and where do plan and recall sit in it?
• Which curriculum materials and training do you give new teachers, and when?
• Which assessment tool and version do you use, how often do teachers rate, and when does documentation happen?
• How is documentation time protected in a full week?

When you are ready to look, preschool teacher jobs list openings at centers and preschools — and the curriculum paragraph in each posting is the fastest signal for the rooms that plan the way you want to teach.

This page is career information about a curriculum, not licensing or legal advice. The qualifications and training your role requires come from your state's child care licensing rules, whichever curriculum the program runs — confirm them with your state's child care licensing agency.