Building a strong start: Scaling a fully comprehensive and integrated birth-to-five curriculum within Virginia’s unified early childhood system

This SEL in Policy paper describes the scaling of the STREAMin3 Curriculum within Virginia’s unified early childhood measurement and improvement system. STREAMin3 is a birth-to-five, fully integrated and comprehensive curriculum model focused on children’s social, emotional, and academic learning. It includes classroom activities and routines, formative assessments, and embedded and aligned professional development (PD) to support implementation. We describe the use of comprehensive curriculum within state and federal early learning systems and how STREAMin3 was developed to integrate social, emotional, and academic learning. We then describe the core tenets of STREAMin3 including the integration of academic and social-emotional skills across the curriculum and a PD system designed to be responsive to the needs of educators working across diverse programs. We describe how STREAMin3 was developed, piloted, and scaled within the context of a research-practice-policy partnership between the Virginia Department of Education and University of Virginia. We highlight how implementation data collected during scaling were used to refine the PD model, with particular attention to infant and toddler educators working in small private centers and family child care. We conclude by situating STREAMin3 within Virginia’s larger early childhood measurement and improvement system and describing the value of strong partnerships between universities and state departments of education.