Strong Start: Early Care Education

Our Early Childhood Education Philosophy

I’m Marc Hoffman, founder and Executive Director of Strong Start Early Care and Education. I’m devoted to making sure that all children have access to quality education. Strong Start is the result of decades of experiences my team and I have had as educators, researchers and leaders of other successful early learning centers.

An educational philosophy for your child’s most important years.

All children deserve the best possible early care and education, which is why Strong Start’s philosophy is rooted in the Reggio Emilia Approach. Our goal is to facilitate learning from the inside out – creating an intrinsic motivation to learn. We believe that a child-centered, inquiry-based, open-ended, play-focused approach to learning does exactly that.

The children’s interests and curiosity drive curriculum, and often results in long-term project work, while facilitating the development of meaningful understandings and concepts.

This is the experience I would have wanted as a child myself.

Research tells us that no two children learn alike. So in creating Strong Start, I applied my experiences not only as an educator and social activist, but also as a young student who would have benefited from a program that acknowledged that we all learn in our own unique ways.

The Project Approach used at Strong Start is different from the theme-based and commercial curricula seen in many early childhood programs. It is highly child-responsive and emphasizes deep, integrated, inquiry-based learning. Evidence of effectiveness exceeded many approaches and commercial curricula in a comprehensive study by the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, under funding from the U.S. Department of Education.