By: Natalie Johnson
Roughly eight million children, ages two to six, miss preschool entirely, leaving substantial gaps in early learning access. Virtual learning for access during early childhood offers an opportunity to reach families who have traditionally been underserved by geography, economics, or circumstance.
As education leaders search for ways to expand access without sacrificing quality, one question sits at the center of the conversation: “What should actually scale?” For Shannon Penrose, Partner and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Growing Brilliant, the answer is “always child development.”
A platform can scale reach through technology, but scaling what children actually need to develop, from building focus, confidence, emotional regulation, and learning readiness, requires something different. As Growing Brilliant, a provider of live virtual preschool programs for young children, expands its model nationally, Penrose is focused on building high-quality education platforms that align business growth with measurable child development.
“Many education leaders assume recorded content is the most efficient way to scale, while live instruction is viewed as too costly to expand,” says Penrose, who has spent more than three decades working across classrooms, districts, publishers, nonprofits, and EdTech organizations.
Beyond Content: What Virtual Preschool Must Actually Deliver
Much of the EdTech industry has prioritized efficiency through recorded content, with automated experiences and feature-rich platforms. Penrose believes that explains how EdTech companies fail in the market. Young children develop across four interconnected capacities: body, mind, heart, and will. While recorded lessons can support cognitive learning, they cannot replicate the human interaction required for emotional regulation, resilience, and focus.
“A recording can hand information to the mind, but it can’t do the other three,” Penrose explains. “When people tell me recorded content is how you scale, I gently push back because what you’ll be scaling is reach, not actual development.” That distinction sits at the center of Growing Brilliant’s virtual preschool model. Rather than building around content libraries, the company scales a repeatable unit consisting of one trained teacher, a small group of children, and a structured learning rhythm.
From Pilot Program to National Scale
Growing Brilliant serves children from ages two to six through four age-based programs. Operationally, however, Penrose does not view them as separate products. “We’re following one arc,” she says. “Following the child all the way from the ages of two to six, and meeting the child where she is on it.”
This framework creates a powerful advantage for EdTech scaling. Instead of continuously building new offerings, the organization applies the same developmental model across different stages of child development. A two-year-old may need support with routine and regulation, while a five-year-old is building persistence and executive function, but the underlying framework remains consistent.
The result is a scalable product strategy grounded in continuity rather than complexity. It also strengthens retention, which Penrose identifies as the most important economic lever in creating sustainable EdTech business models. “The biggest lever for us hasn’t been squeezing cost, it’s been keeping our families longer,” she says. “When a parent stays long enough to actually watch her child’s focus and confidence grow, that relationship gets more valuable over time, not less.”
Measuring What Matters
One of the biggest obstacles to identifying product-market fit in EdTech is defining success correctly. “We’ve shrunk school readiness down to letters and numbers, mostly because those are the easy things to test.” Counter to this, Growing Brilliant measures progress across all four developmental capacities, rather than relying solely on traditional academic indicators. This is because research on child development consistently points to executive function and social-emotional capabilities as stronger predictors of long-term success.
Thanks to live instruction, teachers can observe behaviors that standardized assessments frequently miss. They can see whether a child can sustain attention, recover from frustration, or understand another child’s perspective. These observations are combined with family feedback to create a more complete view of readiness.
Scaling Through Strategic Partnerships
As the company expands beyond direct-to-family enrollment, district partnerships, hospital collaborations, and institutional relationships are becoming critical components of platform expansion.
Penrose describes the strategy as “one engine with different bodies on top of it.” The engine remains constant: live teaching, educator training, and the developmental framework. What changes is how services are delivered. Hospitalized children, for example, require different support structures than children learning from home. In those environments, emotional safety and connection often come before academic instruction.
“My rule is pretty simple,” Penrose says. “Keep the center fixed, let the edges flex.” Curriculum, teaching practices, and educator development remain standardized, while state-funding structures, policies, and operational requirements adapt around them.
Making Preschool Accessible Through Technology
For Penrose, leadership in the field is not about market share. It is about creating systems that make high-quality early education available regardless of where a child lives. “It is the mission of educating children regardless of where they wake up, regardless of economic status,” she says. “We believe very wholeheartedly in equity, access, and opportunity for all children.”
As education leaders continue building high-quality education platforms, Penrose’s approach offers a clear lesson: lasting scale comes not from distributing more content, but from expanding meaningful developmental experiences to more children.
Follow Shannon Penrose on LinkedIn or visit her Growing Brilliant for insights on early childhood education, virtual preschool innovation, child development, and expanding equitable access to high-quality learning opportunities.
