Academic achievement in the earliest years of school often prepares young minds for a lifetime of learning and success. Ensuring that children are ready for kindergarten is an important first step, and that is the goal of an initiative administered by the college’s Schoenbaum Family Center.
Ready 4 Success works with early education providers in the community to foster high-quality learning environments so that the children who attend these programs are well prepared when they move on to kindergarten.
The initiative, supported by the city of Columbus’ Education Department, provides coaches from the Schoenbaum Family Center. They work with teachers in early childhood programs to assist in the teachers’ professional development.
The coaches offer training in effective instructional strategies designed to enhance early literacy and math skills in preschoolers. That training includes the Read It Again! pre-kindergarten supplemental curriculum, which was developed by researchers at the college’s Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy.
A recently introduced module in Ready 4 Success is Ready 4 Math. This curriculum supplement supports number learning and other math-related activities in the pre-K classroom.
A pilot version was tested in the 2023-24 program year, and after updates and revisions, Ready 4 Math was rolled out to all participating centers during this past program year.
“We were assessing children’s math skills, but we didn’t have curriculum to support math learning,” said Shelby Dowdy, the director of Ready 4 Success. To fill this void, the Ready 4 Success team created Ready 4 Math, a set of 30 ready-to-use math lessons that pairs well with Read It Again!, Dowdy said.
Measuring the benefits of Ready 4 Success
Each program year, which runs from August through July, Ready 4 Success works with teachers at approximately 55 community-based child care providers that serve around 1,200 children. The child care centers that are part of the initiative are selected by the city of Columbus.
While some teachers and early learning centers have been with the initiative since it began working with the city in 2016, the high turnover in the early education field means that every year, coaches are working with many teachers who are new to Ready 4 Success.
Teachers meet with coaches both in person and online during the course of the year. In addition, there are regular assessments on students’ language, numeracy and social-emotional skills carried out by field assessors.
The data from those assessments are shared with teachers, allowing teachers to see which students may need additional support in certain developmental areas.
“Our professional development training is not just about curriculum support,” Dowdy said. “We provide one-on-one support for the teachers. We are supporting them amid all the challenges they face teaching young children.”
Kim Osenga is one of the Ready 4 Success coaches.
“To support their professional development, our teachers need to learn the why, not just the how, of effective teaching. As coaches, we need to communicate why it’s important to employ certain methods to encourage and develop young minds,” Osenga said.
Teachers in the classroom day in and day out may not recognize all the progress their students are making. Ready 4 Success coaches, through both classroom observation and assessment data, can see the progress. They can offer encouragement to teachers in a field where burnout is strong.
“When you’re in the thick of it, you don’t see the progress. We have the ability to recognize teachers’ strengths and when they’re making a difference,” Dowdy said.
“One of the best feelings is to bring that encouragement to a center and its teachers,” Osenga said. “To be able to celebrate their successes as the year goes on is very rewarding.”
