Leaders of some of the nation’s largest school districts pledge to redouble efforts to see that our schools use high-quality instructional materials and offer curriculum-specific professional development.
A must-read primer (and more!) on “The Curriculum Effect.” Congratulations to Chiefs for Change for laying this out so clearly.
EdNext article by Robert Pondiscio documenting Louisiana’s (state-led) curriculum reform efforts and how other states are starting to take notice.
Mike Petrilli documents the journey taken by the KIPP organization to embrace curriculum as a vital reform lever – and knowledge-building curriculum in particular – throughout their network of schools.
A great Newsweek article makes the point, again, that “one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about” (Diane Ravitch, 2009).
A new book by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler provides practical suggestions for significantly improving writing instruction and supporting knowledge-building at the same time.
*We’ve changed the headline on this blog from how it originally ran to clarify this point: there IS a place for teaching comprehension strategies, but those strategies should not be the tail wagging the dog of reading instruction. Our concern is that when we focus primarily on strategies, which have characterized a great deal of reading instruction in […]
Constructing practice sets that prod student thinking.
by Susan Pimentel
Recently I contributed a piece to Education Week, “Why Doesn’t Every Teacher Know the Research on Reading Instruction?” My intention was to support and even broaden the important national conversation about reading instruction that was spawned by Emily Hanford’s “Hard Words” documentary. This conversation has continued to have a great deal of fuel, as local […]
By Chrys Dougherty
In her post, “Building the Curriculum Reform Plane While Flying It,” Barbara Davidson made a compelling call for on-the-ground research in schools and districts using high-quality curriculum. Following are some suggested questions to guide this research. Questions about student outcomes. One set of questions might look at student outcomes in schools implementing high-quality curricula across […]
By Barbara Davidson
Because StandardsWork has quite a few eggs in the basket of “better instructional materials will contribute to better instructional outcomes,” I’m of a mixed mind about Morgan Polikoff’s recent article outlining the undeniable difficulties of researching and recommending curriculum when we can’t even inventory the darn stuff across our thousands of local school districts. I […]