This is the first blog in a new series in which we share the curriculum journey for each of our Squad Members.

Q: In your district, what problem or data prompted you to adopt a new literacy curriculum? How did you hope the curriculum you chose would help you address it?

Our state testing data showed that some kids were not performing well. When we went into classrooms, we saw that one class was doing one thing and the next class was doing something else and the next class something else again. We wanted to equalize what was going on in our schools and to support every teacher and every student to be successful by exposing kids to high quality texts and making sure that instruction was consistent across the board. We started with Ed Reports and only brought curricula to the table that showed all-green.

Then right from the beginning, we started using the Instruction Partners Curriculum Support Guide, which really helped us to have an intentional process for bringing everyone on board. We used their Instructional Practices Guide when their coaches did virtual walkthroughs. We dialogued a lot with them about what we saw and our administrator who led a particular PLC would follow up with a coaching conversation designed specifically for individual teachers. So we were all learning together and leaning on Instruction Partners to help us build capacity where we needed it and basically just to be our shoulder partner in the work.

Q: What shifts in mindset were necessary for a successful implementation?

Changing teachers’ mindset was tough! I really don’t like the words “this is what we’ve always done” because if you do what you’ve always done, you’re going to get what you’ve always gotten. Teachers and leaders needed to understand that we’re not just pulling something out of the air here. There’s a research base and there’s a process for bringing students up to the level of rigor in our curriculum. Teachers always want to do what’s best for kids, but they have to change their mindset to believe that what’s best for all kids is truly complex, grade-level texts and kids engaging in the hard work of responding to and discussing those texts, not having the answers spoon-fed to them. 

Q: How is this curriculum work driving greater equity in your district?

We have inclusion teachers who work with students, and the EL curriculum has strategies for differentiation that we maximize. We’re not watering anything down for our special needs population. The beautiful thing about this work is you can walk into any classroom and most of the time you have no clue which students are receiving special services. Sometimes the kid raising his hand and asking more questions than anybody in the room has an IEP, but you can’t tell because they truly are fully included and empowered by this type of instruction.

What’s really driving equity is that this curriculum and instruction is rigorous for all students. My own son was in sixth grade when we started with the EL Education curriculum. I remember him coming home and saying, “Wow, this is tough. I don’t know if I can do this.” But the unit they were doing was about perseverance and people like Steve Jobs who have had to do really hard things, so he was able to tie it into what he was currently going through in his life. Now he’s getting ready to be a freshman in high school and he’s really ready for that level of reading. In fact, some of the things he’s doing now—writing and responding, having a dialogue with his peers—reminds me of what I was doing as an English major in college! He’s really prepared for that, and it’s because our school system made this shift.

What missteps did you make along the way that others can learn from? What would you do differently if you could do it over?

I think one of the hardest things is onboarding new teachers. One teacher might be on year three of the curriculum and really rocking and rolling, but then all of a sudden you have a teacher on that team who is in year one. We’ve learned to be much more intentional about how we bring those teachers up to speed without overwhelming them—and also not holding back the teachers who have already got it.

Now we differentiate our teacher groups and match them to different presenters and supports so that everyone gets what they need. We invite coaches from the curriculum providers and those from Instruction Partners to work more intensively with our new teachers, unpacking the lessons, and figuring out the instructional moves.  It’s a little like studying the owner’s manual of a new car so you understand which buttons to push and where all the parts are. We don’t need to do that again with teachers who’ve been teaching the curriculum already, but it makes a world of difference for our new teachers.

Can you share one exemplary aspect of your implementation that might be a model for other districts to follow?

One of the things that’s been crucial to our success is that we make sure that everybody who has contact with the kids—teachers, teachers’ assistants, principals, inclusion teachers—they’re all at the table and everybody knows what their role is in the process. All of these people are involved in regular PLCs that meet every week, and on other days they’re still working together as a team to unpack lessons and look at their data and bring student work to the table. Some days we look forward to what we’re going to do and other days we look back at what we have done. That reflective planning has really strengthened our teachers’ ownership of the work and their overall confidence. 

Before we had this curriculum it was almost like teachers were scared of each other. They didn’t want to talk about what they were doing, and they didn’t want others to know what they didn’t know. But we’ve witnessed a whole transformation of that culture to where teachers are getting better together and looking forward to walkthroughs and helping each other spot trends in their data. That collaboration and deliberate practice of the teacher moves that help all kids read well is a total game changer for our district.

My journey to understanding the research on how kids learn to read was decades longer than it should have been.

I started my career in the classroom, as a special education teacher. I hadn’t learned the essentials during my teacher preparation. Then, even though I worked with children with disabilities, I didn’t learn what I needed to know about reading on the job, either.

I went and got a Masters degree in Special Education, thinking that would be the magic solution to learning how to teach reading! Sadly, it was not.

Next, I trained to become a school psychologist. This increased my knowledge on how kids learn to read, but I still didn’t find the answers I needed.

I became a district Special Education Director. Then in 2014, I became the Director of Literacy in Lauderdale County. And finally, my role allowed me the time to study the research in greater depth, and in the years that followed, I began to have a command of the science of reading. (In 2019, when Robin McClellan, Jared Myracle, and Brian Kingsley shared that they’d only learned key reading research as district leaders, this felt all-too-familiar.) 

I thought to myself, “In this role, I can impact change in a larger way!” Yet here was the harsh reality: I had a lot of knowledge about literacy, but my teachers did not. And I didn’t have a way to bring this knowledge to our teachers at scale… districtwide, and in depth.

My first opportunity to influence instruction at scale came with our adoption of high-quality curriculum. The materials gave teachers a clear roadmap for research-aligned instruction, and more importantly, our professional learning partner TNTP was incredibly helpful in crafting a learning journey for our team.

Then, I watched as literacy networks like the SCORE LIFT network and the Curriculum Matters PLN augmented that learning. These networks give our teams opportunities to collaborate and grow professionally. Our teachers need these growth opportunities! We can only truly scale awareness of the science of reading with deep professional learning, at scale. 

That’s where the next chapter of my career comes in: I’m joining the Tennessee Department of Education during an exciting time, when the Reading 360 initiative is bringing this potential to fruition. 

I hope you’ll follow Reading 360, if you aren’t already. This summer, Tennessee is training almost 12,000+ teachers on sounds-first instruction, while providing an excellent, free foundational skills curriculum. More than 20% of K–2 parents have signed up to receive free decodable readers! All of this work ties back to the crucial role of curriculum; finally, a state is supporting extensive professional learning and aligned materials, in parallel.

At first, it felt bittersweet to leave Lauderdale County just as our work with high-quality curriculum was really taking off. Yet I have come to see this opportunity to network teachers across Tennessee through professional learning as the ultimate complement and accelerant to my goal, and the goals of the Curriculum Matters PLN: high-quality instruction at scale. Watch this space, y’all.

As high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) become increasingly prevalent in K-12 classrooms, the instructional landscape is undergoing significant change. We need teacher preparation programs to keep pace with this evolution.

Historically, teacher preparation programs have treated individual lesson plan creation as THE essential teaching skill. Teacher candidates are graded on their ability to create a lesson from scratch, with professors looking for criteria such as learning objectives, cognitively demanding questions, and opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery as measures of successful planning. The focus is almost entirely at the individual lesson level; rarely is a teacher candidate challenged to sequence lessons into coherent units of study.

While teacher preparation programs certainly shouldn’t be in the business of training teacher candidates in how to write entire curricula, are tomorrow’s teachers being prepared for the curriculum reality they will encounter in the classroom today?  

In addition to learning to write lesson plans, what constitutes much of teacher preparation is introduction to a rapid succession of topics like effective pedagogy, meeting individual student needs, and assessment. After such a course of study, newly-minted teachers head off to their classrooms and begin teaching their hearts out, satisfied to stay a lesson or two ahead of their students. Teachers burn midnight oil by the barrel, but particularly in their first few years. With little training in the actual demands of writing aligned curricula, teachers without an adopted curriculum have struggled.  

But now, as districts move away from asking teachers to create lessons and design curriculum, and they have increasingly high-quality options to tap into, everyone’s focus should shift from lesson creation to effective implementation. That goes for teacher preparation, too.  

Districts bear the main responsibility of training teachers to use their adopted curriculum effectively. But, unfortunately, though models of effective implementation exist, not all teachers receive the professional learning necessary to utilize them. A recent study found that teachers implementing HQIM are only receiving an average of 1.6 days of professional learning as they begin to use the new materials that will be the primary basis for teaching and learning in their classrooms (Kane, 2019). The reality is, teachers receive more professional learning in a week while in their teacher education program than they will in a year after they’ve been hired by a district.

Herein lies the big opportunity for teacher preparation programs. 

Rather than placing such significant emphasis on training teacher candidates to create lesson plans (as preparation for life as a content-creating teacher), time with future teachers can be leveraged to lay a firm foundation for the selection and effective implementation of high-quality instructional materials. How much better, for example, would our candidates be if their preparation included deep dives into the following topics:

• What are high-quality instructional materials?
• What is the research underpinning these materials?
• How can you distinguish high-quality instructional materials from lesser quality resources?
• What are examples of high-quality instructional materials in math and reading? 
• How do you access, plan, and assess with high-quality instructional materials?
• What do you do if your school or district isn’t implementing high-quality instructional materials? 

Evidence suggests that teachers who work closely with HQIM as part of their student teaching work hit the ground running in year one.  Given this is the case, in regions where districts are using specific HQIM, teacher prep could even consider taking things a step farther and offering training on the specific programs being implemented. Where districts aren’t using HQIM, a cohort of new teachers who can advocate for use of stronger instructional materials could spur transformative change in school communities. 

Teacher preparation programs have a lot of standards and regulations thrown at them, from accreditation processes to state policies. But they can do a real service to the field if they proactively respond to their ultimate clients, the districts that hire their teachers. Partnering to train new teachers on HQIM would have a dramatic impact on “Day 1” readiness, and could significantly improve teacher retention and student achievement. 

In Jackson, TN, where I was Chief Academic Officer, I saw firsthand that higher education leaders were willing to align teacher preparation with district needs. My district built relationships with our university partners, and once the leaders of the teacher preparation programs understood our goals for implementing HQIM, they were much more open to integrating its use into their programs.  

We saw a discernible difference in the effectiveness of teacher candidates who were able to incorporate our HQIM into their internship experiences over those who had not been given this opportunity.  They simply became valued members of the team more quickly, because their assignments were more aligned with our priorities and, therefore, our experienced teachers and school leaders were able to provide better guidance. Consequently, principals were more motivated to hire these candidates, as they knew they would have a running start as new teachers. Other Curriculum Matters leaders have sought similar changes from their local universities. Now we need to seek this shift in programs across the country. 

Burning the midnight oil preparing the next day’s lessons has always been a rite of passage for teachers, but we can make the transition to the classroom easier for new candidates by helping them tap a stronger materials landscape. The win for teacher prep?  As they begin to align their programs with the curricular reality on the ground, they will surely deepen their partnerships with local districts and carve a more meaningful role in the curriculum renaissance occuring in K–12 education.