Our Story

The research behind CHALK was developed at the prestigious Peabody College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University and funded by $2.8M in multiple research grants from the National Science Foundation.

The team at CHALK knows that high-quality early learning experiences are critically important for children’s cognitive development and future achievement. We set out on a mission to make it easy to learn about the classroom practices that are most important for this development, observe them, and improve them in real time. Together, we can lay a foundation that positively impacts the rest of a student’s life.

CHALK’s Mission

We support Early Childhood Educators to develop high quality environments that set the foundation for student success.

What CHALK is

CHALK is an easy to use classroom observation and professional development platform for early learning and kindergarten classrooms. CHALK empowers instructional coaches and administrators to collect meaningful classroom observation data, immediately visualize the results, share those results with teachers, develop collaborative action plans, and track changes over time. 

With CHALK, an embedded training process provides professional development for instructional coaches, teachers, and administrators on key classroom practices and coaching strategies that have been shown to impact gains across both academic and self-regulation skills for students. 

How CHALK works

CHALK is centered around nine research-based transformational classroom practices tied to children’s self regulation and educational outcomes.

Why CHALK matters

Early learning experiences have an outsized impact for the rest of a child’s life. CHALK was developed using insights from years of rigorous research collected from hundreds of classroom observations to uncover the instructional practices that are most predictive of academic and self-regulation gains for students. 

CHALK was designed to facilitate a collaborative development relationship between instructional coaches and teachers that is rooted in objective observations and data-driven goal setting. CHALK observations are curriculum agnostic and focus on the characteristics of the classroom that have been shown to have a direct and meaningful impact on children’s gains. With CHALK, teachers and educational coaches focus their efforts and professional development on practices with the highest value for students.

Who CHALK is for

CHALK was designed for instructional coaches and administrators of early learning and kindergarten classrooms. Our unique leader dashboard enables administrators to view data and track progress across multiple schools or sites.