In 2022, the First Five Years Impact Fact Sheet quoted that 40% of US children walk
into kindergarten 1 to 3 years behind where they should be cognitively and
academically. Their 2025 Federal Guidebook states that 90% of brain growth occurs
before kindergarten, and that the early learning programs can lay the foundation for
school readiness.

How do you ensure that your early learning environment is providing this foundation?
When you enter a classroom, you can often identify quality when you see it, but it is
hard to pinpoint or measure what it is about the classroom that makes it so wonderful. It
is even harder to replicate that magic as you bring new teachers into your school or
system.

CHALK is a newly launched classroom observation and professional development
platform for early childhood classrooms, built from years of rigorous research conducted
at Vanderbilt University.

This research led to the identification of nine classroom practices that, when
implemented, lead to increased self-regulation skills and academic gains for children.
These practices range from things like how much time is spent listening to children vs.
talking to them, to what types of math and literacy instruction are provided and at what
level.

CHALK empowers users to collect classroom observation data, immediately visualize
the results, develop collaborative action plans, and track changes over time. It was
designed and validated for use by instructional coaches, teachers, and administrators in
early learning and kindergarten classrooms. The platform is purposefully curriculum
agnostic, so it works well in all types of classrooms, and was developed with almost
$2.8M in support from the National Science Foundation. There are currently active
users in over 100 classrooms in four states.

“The thing that makes CHALK different than other solutions…teachers are able to have
control over their results and their data, and they’re able to be reflective and build goals
for themselves that are practical and useful and helping them make a difference in their
students’ lives in their classrooms.”

-Morgan M., Instructional Coach
United Way of Greater Nashville

Early learning experiences have an outsized impact for the rest of a child’s life - positive
early experiences can set students up for a lifetime love of learning. We set out on a
mission to make it easy to measure classroom practices that truly matter and improve
them in real time. Together with CHALK, we can lay a more solid foundation upon which
to build a child’s education.