Manage your skill catalog

The skill catalog is the list of developmental skills your teachers tag on observations. You curate it once as an admin, and teachers pull from it as they document what children are doing. Each skill belongs to a developmental domain and carries an age band, so the catalog stays organized as it grows.

Open the skill catalog

On the web, go to your School setup and open Skill catalog (/school/skills). The page header reads Skill catalog, with the note that these are the developmental skills teachers tag on observations, grouped by domain.

Only school admins can add, archive, or import skills, or change which standards frameworks are active. Directors and admins can view the catalog.

View skills by developmental domain

Skills are grouped into a collapsible panel per developmental domain (for example, Mathematics or Social-emotional). Domains are listed alphabetically, and each panel header shows a count of the skills inside it. Every panel is expanded by default.

Within a domain, each skill row shows:

• The skill short label and its description.
• An Archived tag if the skill is no longer active.
• A blue Standard tag if the skill came from an imported standards framework rather than being hand-entered.
• The age band in months (for example 0–72).

If the catalog is empty, you'll see a prompt to add a skill or import from standards.

Add a custom skill

Click Add skill to open the form. Fill in:

• Short label: what teachers see in the tag picker, like Counts to 10.
• Description: what the skill looks like in practice.
• Domain: the developmental domain it belongs to. Typing an existing domain name drops the skill into that panel; a new name creates a new panel.
• Age band min and age band max, in months. New skills default to a 0–72 month band.

Click Add skill to save. The new skill appears in its domain panel right away.

Archive and restore skills

Skills aren't deleted. They're archived, so any past observations that reference them stay intact. On a skill's row, click Archive to retire it. Archived skills show with a strikethrough label and an Archived tag, and they stop appearing for teachers tagging new observations. Click Restore on an archived skill to bring it back. The catalog shows both active and archived skills together.

Import from standards

Rather than hand-entering every skill, you can pull skills from a published standards corpus. Click Import from standards and provide:

• Jurisdiction: an ISO code like US-IL. A bare state code also works; IL is treated as US-IL.
• Framework: the published framework code, such as IELDS for the Illinois Early Learning and Development Standards.
• Domains (optional): a comma-separated list to limit the import; leave blank to import all domains.
• Age min and age max in months (optional): to limit the import to a band.

Click Import to run it. Clear Day tells you how many skills it imported out of the matched standards. Standards already in your catalog are skipped, so re-running an import won't create duplicates. If everything matched is already present, you'll see a note saying so. Imported skills carry the blue Standard tag.

Set active standards frameworks

Above the domain panels, the Active standards frameworks editor lists the frameworks your school imports skills from (for example, a state early learning framework). Add a framework name and it saves immediately; the field is briefly locked while each change saves so edits don't overwrite each other. This list records which frameworks your catalog is built on.

How the catalog reaches student profiles

Once skills are in the catalog, teachers tag them on observations, and those tags roll up onto each child's profile so you can see which skills a child has been observed practicing. For where that appears on the child record, see Manage student profiles.