Preschool Curriculum Models Teachers Use

A preschool curriculum is the operating plan a program uses for learning: what children work toward, how experiences are sequenced across the year, which materials sit on the shelves, and how staff record what children are doing.

The program adopts it before you are hired.

Your job as the teacher is to run it — plan from it, set the room up for it and document children's progress against it.

The clearest way to see what counts as a curriculum is to look at one.

Teaching Strategies describes The Creative Curriculum for Preschool as a curriculum for 3- and 4-year-olds, built on play-based studies, with components that include a Curriculum Guide, 9 Teaching Guides and 7 Foundation Volumes.

A curriculum, in other words, arrives as teacher-facing materials — not as a general philosophy posted on the wall.

A curriculum is also not the same thing as assessment, even when the two share a publisher.

Teaching Strategies publishes GOLD, an online observational assessment for children from birth through third grade, rated against objectives the company describes as research-based; Teaching Strategies cites 38 objectives.

GOLD checkpoint reports show which children are below, at or above widely held expectations.

The division of labor matters for your week: the curriculum is what you plan and teach, and the assessment is how the program documents where each child stands.

Checkpoint dates are the program's to set, so ask how that calendar runs where you interview.

Other things teachers meet under the curriculum banner are frameworks, not curricula.

The Pyramid Model is a framework of evidence-based practices for supporting young children's social-emotional development; it works with a program's curriculum but is not itself a curriculum.

NAEYC's Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) position statement, published in 2020, says each child from birth through age 8 has the right to equitable learning opportunities in centers, family child care homes or schools, and names three core considerations for teaching decisions: commonality in children's development and learning, individuality, and the context in which development and learning occur.

DAP shapes how you teach whichever curriculum your center runs — the companion book is in its fourth edition.

Content commitments can sit on top of any model, too.

Anti-bias education — the framework from Derman-Sparks and Olsen Edwards — names four core goals: identity, diversity, justice and activism.

A teacher can work those goals into a packaged curriculum's units or into fully emergent planning.

A comprehensive curriculum is a complete, bought system: scope and sequence across the learning domains, daily schedules and routines, teacher guides, materials lists and staff training, all from one publisher.

Programs adopt one so that every classroom runs on the same plan and a new teacher steps into a structure that already exists.

The Creative Curriculum for Preschool shows what that means on the ground.

Teaching Strategies' own description: a curriculum for 3- and 4-year-olds, built on play-based studies, with a Curriculum Guide, 9 Teaching Guides and 7 Foundation Volumes.

The studies give classrooms their themes and investigations; the guides are the teacher-facing volumes you plan from.

HighScope is the second comprehensive curriculum name on this page — and the one whose details we could not verify.

HighScope's own pages returned errors when we researched this guide, so we won't describe its model secondhand.

Treat it as an interview question instead: a program that runs HighScope can show you which materials its classrooms use, what training teachers get, and how the daily routine and planning are structured under it.

When a center runs a comprehensive curriculum, expect the model's structure to reach your week: lesson plans in the model's format, training in how to deliver it, and — in some programs — a director or coach reviewing how classrooms are implementing the model.

That is the trade a comprehensive adoption makes — less of the plan is yours to invent, and more of it is yours to deliver well.

An approach is a philosophy of how children learn, and programs organize classrooms around it.

An approach can ship with its own materials and training, or be adapted program by program.

A posting that names an approach is telling you how the day will be structured and what the classroom will ask of you.

Montessori classrooms are built around specially designed hands-on materials that children choose from and work through at their own pace, while the trained adult — sometimes called a guide rather than a teacher — demonstrates materials, observes, and steps in when a child is ready for the next piece of work.

If you are weighing that path, the Montessori career guide covers the role and how teachers prepare for it.

Reggio Emilia-inspired programs build projects out of the children's own questions and interests, treat documentation — photos, notes, displays of children's work — as a core teaching practice, and treat the classroom environment itself as part of the teaching.

As the teacher you plan flexibly, listen and record, and adjust projects as the group's thinking moves.

Waldorf programs put imagination, rhythm and the arts at the center: a predictable daily rhythm, storytelling, song and movement, practical work and generous play, with formal academics held back in the early years.

Bank Street — the developmental-interaction approach associated with New York's Bank Street College — organizes learning around direct experience.

Children learn by doing: handling real materials, exploring the social world around them and building ideas from what they encounter.

The teacher builds the curriculum out of that experience rather than out of a workbook page.

The same job title can sit over very different days depending on the approach.

Before you accept an offer, ask how the philosophy shows up in the schedule: how much of the day is child-directed, how lessons get planned and by whom, and what the finished room is expected to look like.

Play-based is both the simplest label to explain and the broadest to work under.

It means the program treats play — blocks, dramatic play, sensory tables, art, outdoor time — as the engine of learning, and it makes the teacher's craft one of setting that play up and extending it toward the skills the program wants children to build.

The line between packaged and play-based is blurrier than the labels suggest.

Teaching Strategies describes The Creative Curriculum for Preschool as built on play-based studies — a packaged curriculum with play at its center.

A center can run a published curriculum and still describe its practice as play-based.

Emergent curriculum is a planning stance inside that play-based world.

Instead of starting from a fixed theme calendar, the teacher starts from what the children are showing interest in — the trucks in the sandbox, the ice on the fence, a new sibling at home — and builds projects, vocabulary and skill work from there, documenting along the way.

Planning follows observation rather than preceding it.

The two overlap: an emergent classroom is play-based almost by definition, and a play-based program can run a published curriculum or plan emergently.

For you, the difference shows up in planning time and paperwork — emergent planning asks you to observe first, plan second, and show your thinking in what you document.

Whichever model a program runs, it reaches the specifics of your week: the lesson-plan template you fill in, the labels and shelf materials in the room, how group time runs, which songs and transitions are "the way we do it here", and who checks your plans.

The curriculum shapes much of what makes one preschool job feel different from another with the same title.

It also decides your paperwork.

If the center pairs its curriculum with an observational assessment, part of your week goes to writing notes on children against the tool's objectives — Teaching Strategies cites 38 objectives for GOLD — and to checkpoint reports that show where each child sits against widely held expectations.

Checkpoint dates are the program's to set, so ask how that calendar runs before you accept an offer.

Treat the curriculum as a screening question, then, in both directions.

Read postings for named models, and ask in interviews which curriculum and assessment each classroom uses, what training new teachers get, and who plans the weekly lessons.

When you are ready to look, preschool teacher jobs on ChildcareHires list early-education openings, and the preschool teacher career guide maps the rest of the role — ages, settings, requirements and pay.

One thing a curriculum does not change is the licensing floor under the classroom.

In a licensed center, whichever model the program adopts, it operates inside the staffing, training and safety rules its state's child care licensing agency administers — and those rules apply no matter which curriculum is on the shelf.

Programs outside licensed centers may answer to other authorities, so ask which rules govern the program where you interview.

This page is career information about curricula, not licensing or legal advice. Confirm the requirements that affect your role with your state's child care licensing agency, or the agency that governs your program.