If you teach kindergarten, you have probably felt the tension between what your students are developmentally ready to do and what the curriculum, standards, or schedule expects them to do. Creating a developmentally appropriate kindergarten classroom can be challenging when academic expectations keep increasing and instructional minutes are tightly scheduled. You may also be asked to move through curriculum even when students still need foundational skills. That leaves you trying to balance what you are required to teach with what you know your students need.
But what does the research actually say about kindergarten? Kate from Evidence Based Kate has spent years reading educational research and helping teachers understand what it means for their classrooms. After 20 years working in education as a classroom teacher and curriculum writer, she noticed a significant gap between educational researchers and the teachers actually working with students.
That gap matters because you need more than another person telling you what you should be doing. You need information that helps you understand why a practice works, whether the research actually supports it, and how it fits the developmental needs of the children sitting in front of you. When it comes to kindergarten, one thing is especially important to remember: five-year-olds are still five-year-olds.
Kindergarten Has Changed, But Five-Year-Olds Haven’t
One of the biggest challenges facing kindergarten teachers is the increasing academic expectation placed on young children. Research has examined how kindergarten has changed over time, including the shift toward expectations that were once associated with first grade. The world around children has changed significantly, and what schools expect from kindergarten students has changed too. But children’s developmental needs haven’t suddenly changed along with those expectations.
That creates a difficult situation for teachers. You may be expected to teach more academic content, spend longer periods on structured instruction, follow a specific curriculum, and prepare students for expectations coming in later grades. At the same time, you know your students still need movement, play, social-emotional development, problem-solving opportunities, and time to build foundational skills.
Just because a five-year-old can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that is where the majority of their time should be spent. You may be able to get your students to sit on the rug for a long lesson or push them through material that is technically within the standards. But if you start seeing increased behaviors, disengagement, or students struggling because they’re missing foundational skills, it’s worth looking at whether those expectations match where your students actually are.
Why Did Kindergarten Become So Academic?
There isn’t one simple explanation for the increasing academic expectations in kindergarten, but changes in accountability and assessment have played an important role. No Child Left Behind significantly changed the way schools approached assessment, accountability, and funding. When schools were under pressure to improve assessment results, one response was to increase academic instruction. If students weren’t meeting expectations at one grade level, it could seem logical to begin teaching those skills earlier.
Standards created another challenge. College and career readiness encouraged educators to consider what students eventually needed to know and work backward from there. Backward planning itself makes sense, but problems can arise when developmental readiness isn’t given enough consideration along the way.
For kindergarten teachers, that distinction matters. The question isn’t simply, “Can I teach this?” You also need to ask, “Is this what my students need developmentally right now?” A five-year-old may be capable of learning an academic skill, but that same instructional time could potentially be used to develop social skills, emotional regulation, oral language, number sense, problem-solving, independence, or other foundational abilities.
Foundational Skills Can’t Be Skipped
When students aren’t meeting later academic expectations, pushing advanced instruction into earlier grades can seem like an obvious solution. But if children haven’t developed the underlying skills necessary for that instruction, moving it earlier doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. This is why foundational skills matter so much in kindergarten. Those skills give students something solid to build on as academic expectations increase.
You may have a curriculum that keeps moving even when your students aren’t ready to move with it. You might be required to teach a lesson because it is next in the program while knowing that several students still need instruction in skills that came before it. You can’t always change the curriculum or your schedule, but you can look for small opportunities within the day to strengthen those foundations.
That might happen during small-group instruction, read-alouds, conversations, play, transitions, or everyday classroom routines. The important thing is recognizing that moving on doesn’t make a missing foundational skill disappear. Small adjustments that give students additional practice can matter.
Play and Recess Support the Conditions for Learning
One area kindergarten teachers frequently have to advocate for is play and recess. When the school day is already packed, play can be treated as something you include only after the “important” work is finished. But giving children opportunities to move, regulate their bodies, interact with one another, and experience less structured time helps create better conditions for learning.
You don’t need to argue that recess magically produces higher academic scores. Instead, consider what happens when children have opportunities to move and regulate themselves. They can return to instruction in a better position to engage with learning.
For kindergarten students especially, movement and less structured experiences also provide opportunities to practice skills that are difficult to replicate through direct instruction. Children have to negotiate, communicate, solve problems, wait, make decisions, handle disappointment, and figure out what to do when an adult isn’t immediately directing every moment. Those experiences are important parts of learning too.
When you advocate for these practices, research can give you something more concrete to bring into conversations with administrators. Instead of simply saying that you think your students need more recess, you can discuss evidence about how movement and regulation support the conditions students need for learning. That can make your advocacy more powerful.
What Does the Research Say About Kindergarten Redshirting?
Another complicated kindergarten question is whether children benefit from waiting an additional year before beginning kindergarten. The research discussed in this episode does not provide a simple answer. One reason this topic is complicated is that families who have the option to delay kindergarten may have access to resources other families don’t.
An additional year of childcare costs money, and families may also have different access to preschool, tutoring, enrichment, and other forms of support. That makes it difficult to separate the effects of starting kindergarten later from all of the other factors surrounding the child. A positive outcome can’t automatically be attributed to redshirting when there may be other important differences between the children being studied.
There is also another consideration that doesn’t always get as much attention: the classroom itself. When some children begin kindergarten immediately after becoming eligible while others have waited another year, teachers can end up working with a very large developmental age range. That can make Tier 1 instruction more complicated because students may enter the classroom at very different developmental points.
Instead of assuming that delaying kindergarten is automatically better, this is an area where the research needs to be read carefully. Look at who participated in a study, what other factors could have affected the results, and what conclusions the research actually supports. This is a good example of why the headline of a study doesn’t always tell you everything you need to know.
“Research-Based” Doesn’t Mean You Should Stop Asking Questions
Teachers are constantly told that programs, practices, and curricula are “research-based” or “evidence-based.” Those labels sound reassuring, especially when you are being handed a new curriculum and told to implement it. But those words shouldn’t be the end of the conversation.
Many teachers experienced a significant shift in how they thought about curriculum after questions arose about literacy practices they had previously been told were supported by evidence. If you followed a curriculum because you trusted the people who gave it to you, discovering problems later can make you want to see the research yourself. It can also make you more careful about accepting the words “research-based” without asking additional questions.
Curriculum companies may genuinely want to create effective materials for students and teachers, but they are also businesses. That doesn’t automatically mean their materials are bad or that their claims should be dismissed. It does mean you should continue to be a thoughtful consumer of what you’re given.
Look at the evidence, ask questions, and pay attention to what you’re observing in your classroom. As a teacher, it can become easy to assume that someone outside the classroom must know more because they created the curriculum, wrote the standards, or selected the program. But when something doesn’t seem to be working developmentally, pay attention to that observation and investigate further.
Your instincts shouldn’t replace research, but research doesn’t have to replace your knowledge of the children in front of you either. You spend every day watching your students respond to instruction. That experience gives you valuable information that can be considered alongside the evidence.
How to Start Reading Education Research Without Making It Another Job
You don’t need to become an educational researcher to become a more informed teacher. You also don’t have to read every study published about kindergarten. Start by finding accessible education publications that translate research and education news into language designed for educators.
Even regularly looking at headlines can help you notice what researchers are studying and which conversations are happening across education. Then, when something directly relates to a challenge you’re experiencing, you can look more closely. You can also use research clearinghouses and similar resources to investigate the evidence behind educational programs and practices.
The goal isn’t to know everything. It’s to become more comfortable asking what evidence supports a practice, who participated in the research, and whether that population resembles your students. You can also look at what researchers actually measured and whether the conclusion being presented matches what the study found.
Those questions can help you become a much more careful consumer of claims about education. You don’t need to analyze every statistical detail to start asking better questions. Over time, that can make it easier to distinguish between something that sounds research-based and something that has strong evidence behind it.
What If Your Curriculum Doesn’t Feel Developmentally Appropriate?
You might read all of this and think, “That’s great, but I still have to teach the curriculum my district gave me.” That’s true. Teachers don’t always have control over the curriculum, schedule, standards, or instructional minutes they’re expected to follow. If you work in a district with strict curriculum requirements, you also need to work within those expectations.
But you may still have places where you can make thoughtful adjustments. Read-alouds are one example. When you have flexibility in choosing books, you can select texts that better match the needs of the majority of your students while still creating opportunities to extend thinking for students who are ready for more.
Read-alouds can also protect something that can get lost when literacy instruction becomes heavily focused on individual skills: the joy of reading together. Students need foundational literacy instruction, but they can also benefit from hearing wonderful stories, talking about books, laughing together, wondering what happens next, and developing positive associations with reading. Those experiences can exist alongside explicit instruction.
Kindergarten instruction doesn’t need another giant pendulum swing. Instead, you can take the strongest parts of what you know, combine them with current evidence, and keep adjusting your instruction based on what your students need. The goal isn’t to throw everything out every time new research enters the conversation.
Start With One Change
When you begin paying closer attention to educational research, it is easy to start thinking about everything you could change. You might immediately start questioning your literacy instruction, math routines, classroom management, schedule, small groups, read-alouds, recess time, and play opportunities. Suddenly, learning more can make it feel like you need to change everything at once.
You don’t. Instead, choose one manageable area where you think your students could benefit from a change. Maybe you want to strengthen number sense during everyday classroom routines, protect more meaningful read-aloud time, investigate the evidence behind a strategy you’re already using, or give students more opportunities for movement and problem-solving.
Pick one thing and try it. Pay attention to what happens and give yourself time to get comfortable with the change. Once that practice feels manageable, you can decide what comes next. You don’t need to completely redesign kindergarten to make your classroom more developmentally appropriate.
Trust What You Know and Keep Learning
Research matters because it gives teachers evidence to support decisions and advocate for students. But research and teacher knowledge shouldn’t be competing forces. The strongest decisions can come from understanding the evidence while also paying attention to what is happening with the actual children in your classroom.
You spend every day watching how children respond to instruction. You notice when a lesson is too long, when students need movement, when a foundational skill is missing, or when a curriculum expects students to make a jump they aren’t ready to make. Those observations matter and can help you determine what questions you need to ask next.
The goal is to pair that knowledge with strong evidence so you can make thoughtful instructional decisions within the realities of your classroom. You don’t have to change everything tomorrow or chase every new idea that comes across your screen. Choose one part of your teaching that you want to strengthen, look at the evidence, think about what your students need, and make one manageable change.
If this conversation gave you something useful to think about, choose one developmentally appropriate practice you want to strengthen in your classroom this week. Start small, see how your students respond, and build from there. And if you know another kindergarten teacher who would benefit from this conversation, share the episode with them, subscribe to the Kindergarten Café podcast, and leave a review to help more kindergarten teachers find it.
Connect with Kate:
- TikTik – @evidencebasedkate
- Linktree – Evidence Based Kate
Resources
Connect with Zeba:
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- Facebook – @kindergartencafe
- Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
- Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe
