This year, a national conversation about how we teach reading has led to numerous discussions about important research. Jared, Robin, and Brian wrote about it in an Education Week editorial, We Have a National Reading Crisis. One of its "essential insights" is the role of content knowledge in reading success: "Students’ background knowledge is essential … Continue reading Research into Practice: Building Background Knowledge to Support Reading Comprehension
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The most exciting and actionable innovation opportunity before us is the potential to improve reading instruction at scale. That’s the conversation we need to be having in every district office. Right now, you may be hearing more about reading concerns. And honestly, those issues are very real. I was proud to co-author a recent Education … Continue reading Literacy Is the Innovation Opportunity of 2019
We are proud to bring our voices to the pages of Education Week with our recent editorial, We Have a National Reading Crisis. It published on March 7th. Two weeks later, it's still flying around Twitter and it remains the most-emailed story on EdWeek, so we believe we aren't alone in thinking that these messages … Continue reading We Have a National Reading Crisis
There have been seismic shifts in the curriculum landscape in recent years, and increasingly, there’s buzz about this important, exciting development. Sue Pimentel, lead author of the CCSS in ELA, described it as a “curriculum renaissance” in Education Week. We've seen this firsthand in our curriculum & instruction work. In fact, three of us just … Continue reading How to Find the Curriculum Renaissance at ASCD #Empower19 – or From Home
Many of us have been sharing outcomes from our work with high-quality curriculum. We spy a trend: districts that have invested in high-quality curriculum in early elementary are seeing gains, especially in K–2. Our hunch is that much credit for these gains goes to the strong foundational skills instruction by our teachers, thanks to use … Continue reading Phonics and the Love of Reading Go Hand-in-Hand
We've had fun following the #CurriculumMatters hashtag in the last month. We always love seeing the passion that educators have for their work with high-quality curriculum, from the teacher time savings to the glimpses of excellent student work. But recently, all in the space of a few weeks, a series of outcome stories emerged that … Continue reading The Outcomes Stories We Should Be Talking About
I’m incredibly inspired by this moment. Right now, I’m seeing a growing interest in reading instruction, and judging from the chatter in social media, it seems like districts across the country are beginning to have the conversation that we have been having in my district: How to we improve our reading and math instruction system-wide, … Continue reading Mission Field: My Curriculum Journey
In Daviess County Public Schools, we think about curriculum as the combination of your standards, your resources, and your pedagogy. I know that’s not everyone’s definition… some folks hear curriculum and think “content” while others still seem to confuse curriculum with standards. One of the major problems in public education is that we aren’t always … Continue reading I’m passionate about curriculum because I’m passionate about pedagogy
In recent years, as I have sought to deeply understand our new standards and put them into practice, I’ve had my eyes widely opened to some serious issues and misunderstandings with the reading instruction in our schools – both in the districts where I served as an educator and in the 15+ districts where I … Continue reading The urgency I feel around instruction – and why I look to curriculum
We believe in the power of the Professional Learning Network (PLN), as we shared in our inaugural post, Its Time for a Curriculum PLN. Hopefully you've checked out our Resources page, where we have shared some of our favorite resources for understanding, selecting, and implementing curriculum. If you do, you'll probably notice two things: It's … Continue reading Our Suggestion Box Is Open
