Elevate Your Teaching: Why Skills and Strategies for the Child Care Teacher Is a Game Changer

If you already have some grounding in early childhood education—or if you’ve taken an introductory course and are ready to deepen your practice—Skills and Strategies for the Child Care Teacher is the next step in your professional journey. This foundational course takes you beyond theory and helps you translate what you know into high-quality, effective practice.

In this post, you’ll discover what this course is about, who it’s for, how it’s structured, what you’ll learn, and why it matters—not just for your career, but for the children and families you serve.

Why This Course Exists: Bridging Theory and Practice

The CCFT revisions were designed to update and unify Wisconsin’s foundational early childhood trainings, ensuring they reflect current research, equity principles, and real-world contexts. The Skills and Strategies course sits at the heart of that vision: it helps early childhood educators become more intentional, responsive, and effective in their daily work.

While the introductory course provides a conceptual foundation—roles, philosophies, child development basics—this course helps you do the work: designing lessons, managing the flow of a classroom, observing, guiding behavior, and tailoring activities to individual children’s needs.

In short: this is the bridge between knowing and doing.

Who Should Enroll?

This training is especially suited for:

• Child care staff (assistant or lead) who want to strengthen their hands-on teaching skills

• Individuals preparing to assume lead teacher roles or responsibilities

• Educators seeking to satisfy Wisconsin’s regulatory or certification requirements for child care teachers

• Anyone who has completed a foundational introductory course and wants to elevate their level of practice

You don’t need to be perfect or experienced—this course is designed to support growth. What's most important is your commitment to learning, reflection, and improvement.

Course Structure: Format & Logistics

Here’s how this course typically works:

• Credit / noncredit: It is a noncredit training, meaning it doesn’t confer college credit but does meet CCFT requirements.

• Delivery modes: It is often offered in a blended format—some live virtual sessions combined with independent online work. Some offerings may have more in-person segments depending on the provider. (For one offering, the split was 15 hours virtual meetings + 35 hours web-based work.)

• Total hours: The course is often structured to equal 50 hours of training.

• Requirements:• Attendance at virtual or in-person meetings (no skipping) • Completion of all web-based assignments, quizzes, reflections, etc. (often with a passing threshold, e.g. 80 %) • Access to a device, stable internet, and ability to participate synchronously and asynchronously in virtual formats

• Grading / evaluation: Learners are usually evaluated via quizzes, reflections, practical exercises, lesson planning assignments, and observed discussions or peer review

• Trainer support / interaction: Expect opportunities for Q&A, coaching, feedback, group work, and discussion rather than purely independent study

Because so much of effective teaching is reflection and adaptation, the blended model supports applying course content in real time, then revisiting and refining with instructor/peer guidance.

What You’ll Learn: Key Competencies & Topics

The Skills and Strategies course is rich and comprehensive. While providers may vary slightly in how they sequence modules, the core competencies include:

1. Linking Development and Curriculum Planning

   • Understanding how children grow and how those trajectories inform curriculum design (i.e. developmental domains)

   • Using developmental knowledge to scaffold learning

2. Lesson Planning & Unit Design

   • Constructing meaningful, coherent units or short-term lesson plans

   • Aligning activities to goals

   • Integrating multiple domains (cognitive, social-emotional, physical, language)

3. Observation, Documentation & Assessment

   • Using observational methods to understand what children are doing

   • Documenting growth, behavior, engagement

   • Using data from observations to inform planning and adaptations

4. Differentiation & Inclusion

   • Meeting children where they are—diverse needs, special needs, variation in pace

   • Adapting materials, scaffolds, supports

   • Promoting equitable access and responsiveness

5. Designing Effective Learning Environments

   • Organizing physical space, flow, materials, centers

   • Considering transitions, routines, and schedules

   • Ensuring safe and developmentally supportive settings

6. Subject Integration & Curriculum Content

   • Incorporating literacy, language, creative arts, science, math, social studies into everyday planning

   • Strategies for emergent literacy, language support

   • Creative and sensory-rich experiences (art, music, dramatic play, sensory centers)

7. Positive Guidance, Classroom Management & Behavior Support

   • Strategies for positive behavior guidance (proactive, relational approaches)

   • Conflict resolution, communication, coaching children

   • Cultural responsiveness in guidance

8. Communication, Collaboration & Family Engagement

   • Partnering with families, respecting cultural diversity, sharing observations, building trust

   • Managing communication, conflict, conferencing

   • Reflecting on one’s own cultural lenses and biases

9. Professionalism & Reflective Practice

   • Ongoing growth mindset, self-reflection, continuous improvement

   • Ethical standards, professional identity, advocacy

   • Leveraging feedback, coaching, peer learning

In many implementations of the training, each of these areas is broken into subunits, assignments, quizzes, reflections, and practical planning work.

Benefits You’ll Get from Completing This Course

For You as a Teacher

• Confidence & competence: Gain clarity on how to design lessons, select materials, manage classrooms, and scaffold learning

• Intentional teaching: Move from reactive “management” to thoughtful design and adaptation

• Stronger repertoire: More strategies for supporting multiple domains and diverse learners

• Professional credibility: You’ll meet or exceed many child care or educational program requirements

• Reflective practice: You’ll build habits of feedback, revision, and growth

For Children & Families

• Better learning experiences: Activities designed with purpose support depth rather than superficial engagement

• Responsive support: Adapting to individual child needs fosters inclusion and equity

• Stronger relationships: With thoughtful observation, communication, and family partnerships, children and caregivers feel seen, respected, and understood

• Safety & predictability: Well-planned environments, transitions, routines, and guidance reduce stress and promote trust

For the Program / Field

• Consistency & quality: Providers across settings using the same strategies help standardize better care practices

• Stronger workforce: When teachers feel supported and capable, retention improves and the field strengthens

• Advocacy & voice: Equipped professionals can better communicate needs, best practices, and evidence-based advocacy

What Success Looks Like: Sample Scenarios

To help you imagine the real impact, here are a few sample stories or vignettes you could reference or use in your own promotions:

• From “one-size-fits-all” to flexible teaching

  Before the course, a teacher used a single craft activity for all children. After taking Skills & Strategies, she redesigned the same topic into stations: one station for art, one for block play extension, one for language games, one for sensory play—letting children choose based on interest and need. She observed deeper engagement, less off-task behavior, and more peer interaction.

• Support for a child with extra needs

  In class, learners study how to adapt environments and scaffolds for children with varied needs. One attendee used a new approach to differentiate for a child who needed extra visual cues—embedding pictures, color-coding, and offering shorter chunks of transitions. That child’s transitions became smoother, and stress in the entire room decreased.

• Family partnership sharpened

  A teacher, applying strategies from the course, initiated regular “observation share” sessions with families—inviting caregivers to see a child’s documentation portfolio, discussing growth over time, and finding ways to extend learning at home. As a result, family trust and collaboration rose, and children’s continuity of learning strengthened.

When you tell stories like these—whether real or composite—you help prospective participants imagine what could happen in their own classrooms.

The Skills and Strategies for the Child Care Teacher course is a powerful bridge between theory and effective practice. It empowers participants to plan intentionally, observe deeply, differentiate thoughtfully, and guide behavior from a stance of connection and purpose. For educators who want more than “how to keep kids busy”—for those who want to influence how children learn, grow, and flourish—this training is essential.