In 2020, the Aldine Independent School District became the first district in Texas to adopt a high-quality, knowledge-based reading curriculum. It was a seismic change for teachers, who had been using a familiar balanced literacy program with skills-focused lessons and leveled readers for several years. But it was a necessary change for students — in 2018-19, just 30 percent of Aldine third graders were reading at or above grade level.  

Despite the challenges of COVID-19 and its effect on academic achievement, we have made strides by implementing the Amplify CKLA curriculum. Today, teachers lead highly structured, thematic units that focus on the same content over a period of weeks. All students work with the same knowledge-rich, grade-level texts, whether they read them independently or with support. That gives every student the opportunity to build vocabulary and a base of common knowledge, which boosts reading comprehension and fosters inclusive communities of learning. 

Our students have made rapid progress — within the first two years, 50 percent of third graders were reading at or above grade level. The percentage of third graders scoring “well below” benchmark dropped from 48 percent to 36 percent. These are heavy lifts in Aldine, where about 90 percent of students are economically disadvantaged and more than half are English language learners. 

Students’ academic achievement and development rely on their teachers’ understanding and execution of the Amplify CKLA curriculum. As instructional specialists, we have implemented robust curriculum-based professional learning to ensure Aldine teachers are prepared to deliver strong instruction that meets the needs of all students.  

Curriculum-based professional learning brings teachers and instructional leaders together to probe and practice individual lessons, which has helped our teachers implement new curriculum with fidelity. During these sessions, teachers internalize, annotate, collaborate, and rehearse lessons within units of study. They identify the most critical ideas and skills students should encounter, the most likely misconceptions students may experience, and the scaffolds or learning supports needed to grant access to the content to all learners.  

This sort of study doesn’t happen overnight. Here are three key aspects of this work that have shaped our progress: 

Closing the Research-Practice Gap 

Too often, research stands a world apart from the educators who work directly with students. 

Aldine provided resources and time to close that gap. Even before the new curriculum was announced, both teachers and instructional specialists like us read Natalie Wexler’s and participated in related staff development sessions. Meanwhile, a literacy task force was studying curriculums and visiting out-of-state classrooms to make their recommendation. 

This shared reading assignment and attendant discussions helped teachers and specialists learn the science behind best practices and understand the role that building knowledge plays in literacy development. Both were critical when it came time for our teachers to trust that an unfamiliar and seemingly out-of-reach reading curriculum could be effective in Aldine classrooms. 

Revamping PLCs for Curriculum Study

In the past, meeting time for professional learning communities (PLCs) was spent on grade-level “business,” like planning field trips or sharing concerns from individual classroom observations. These are key issues, but they don’t necessarily translate into instructional innovation or academic progress. 

Even when meetings were focused on instruction, master teachers and teachers with outsized experience or confidence spoke up most often. As a result, meetings did not include the voices of all teachers, especially novices or those serving the most disadvantaged student groups. 

Our district revamped grade-level meetings to focus on in-depth curriculum study. Today, during Curriculum-based Professional Learning (CPLs), instructional specialists facilitate in-depth curriculum study sessions, which follow detailed discussion protocols. These one- and two-page discussion guides help teachers unpack and internalize the logic of each unit and lesson, identify opportunities to make cultural connections with and among students, and focus attention on the essential questions and tasks each lesson needs to ensure students master the learning goal.

This structure and guidance help ensure teachers’ time together is purposeful and driven by our common curriculum. In addition, by focusing attention on a shared resource, we’ve seen that more teachers speak up in CPLs, which gives a grade-level group a wider view of classroom practice and learning. 

Building Teachers’ Trust 

Changing curriculum means changing instructional practice and underlying beliefs. Teachers need to trust that a new curriculum will work with their students before they will teach it as intended.  

Often, teachers who work with struggling students are initially wary of high-quality, knowledge-based curriculum. In our district, second-grade teachers were concerned that students would not successfully engage with a unit based on grade-level texts about The War of 1812, for example.  

Ongoing curriculum-based professional learning with grade-level colleagues helped address these concerns. As teachers studied and practiced units and lessons together, they could see the logic and variety of ways students at all levels could access, understand, and make connections with rigorous content. And, as they experienced this new teaching in their classrooms, they could share challenges and evidence of growth. No one teacher was going it alone.  

Any change in curriculum requires strong leadership from the Central Office. But when it comes to changing what actually happens in classrooms and schools, teachers are the real decision-makers. By intentionally equipping teachers with curriculum-based professional learning, we are setting our schools up for long-lasting success. 

Edna Cruz is a bilingual skills specialist at Reed Academy in the Aldine Independent School District, which includes parts of Houston and Harris County, Tx. She is a member of the Curriculum Matters Professional Learning Network, which supports district leaders from around the country implementing high-quality instructional materials. Alaura Mack is an instructional skills specialist for English Language Arts at Reed Academy and is also a member of the Curriculum Matters Professional Learning Network.

Picture this: kindergarten students are excitedly discussing the life cycle of a tree. In a whole-class discussion, paired “turn and talk” chats with a partner, and responses to sentence stems, they describe bare limbs, falling leaves, and a tree’s dormant winter season. They compare evergreens and deciduous trees, using vocabulary that reappears in related texts. In this joyful learning community, students at all reading levels practice grade-level oral and literacy skills, grow vocabulary, and gain access to a common base of information.

This is what reading lessons look like today in the Roswell Independent School District, where I oversee elementary education. It’s a major difference from the not-so-distant past.

In Roswell, more than 75% of students are Hispanic and about one-third are English language learners. More than one-third are from low-income households. For many of our students, kindergarten is their first classroom experience. They haven’t yet mastered the oral-language skills needed for learning, like answering and asking questions in complete sentences, turn-taking, and following directions. Because these skills form the foundation for academic learning, building oral language and vocabulary are urgent priorities.

Five years ago, teachers would group students and assign texts by skill level and rotate between groups to offer targeted supports. While this approach was familiar to many of our educators, we also recognized that it wasn’t accelerating learning for the students who needed it most. Learning is a social activity, and students thrive when they can participate fully with their classmates. By keeping students separated, we were perpetuating differences in their levels of preparedness for school.

Today, our teachers are using a new, knowledge-based high-quality reading curriculum and students of all language levels work together with texts on a common topic. Students’ interaction with these texts can vary — some read independently, some in pairs, some in small groups, and some listen as the text is read to them. But they are working with the same vocabulary and building the same knowledge. In these classrooms, it’s hard to spot students who are working to catch up with their peers, because the entire class is working together on the same grade-level content. 

This transition didn’t happen overnight. There were three major moves that have helped us to adopt and implement a high-quality, knowledge-based reading curriculum.

Go Grassroots—But Be Ready to Leverage Leadership

Before we entertained switching curriculum, we invested in building knowledge and expertise about the science of reading in our district. Along with two-dozen colleagues, I participated in the LETRS professional learning program to learn about structured literacy. Some of those educators had been working to nudge our instruction toward evidence-based practices, but there was little momentum to do so across the board.

When our leadership changed and New Mexico passed a new literacy law, there was an opportunity to reassess current practices. Because we had already built a deep understanding of the science of reading, we were able to make the case for a new curriculum and include a variety of perspectives in choosing the right program for our students. 

Administrators, reading coaches, and teachers worked together to ensure the curriculum we chose, Amplify CKLA, is truly aligned to the science of reading. Better yet, we could base on decision on our earlier studies, not a sticker or marketing slogan.

Begin With the Believers and Share Their Success

Changing teacher practices is hard. But changing teacher beliefs is even harder. Teachers are motivated by seeing evidence of success from trusted colleagues. And so we rolled out the new curriculum in three waves, not all at once, and were intentional in deciding which educators went first. We also established internal communications channels to share their success stories across the district.

Our first group included principals who were fully on board with the switch and teachers who were part of that grassroots science of reading movement. They were excited to shift instruction and share their experiences with colleagues. The second group included educators who were hesitant and looking for someone else to take the first step. The last group included teachers who were not eager to move away from traditional instruction.

We capitalized on the energy and expertise in our first group of curriculum switchers by sharing their experiences with educators in the second and third waves of the rollout. Our internal communications director filmed teacher testimonials, which were posted on our website. I shared these videos with our elementary principals, and they also were featured in grade-level professional learning communities.

Respond to Teacher Concerns

A knowledge-based curriculum is necessarily topic-driven. Some teachers were concerned that parents could object to certain topics. For example, a second-grade unit about early civilizations includes information about archeology and world religions. Teachers flagged that reading about various religious could be a potential point of contention for families.

We reviewed our policies and reassured teachers that they would be fully supported and had established procedures to follow if a question was raised. Teachers could share the curriculum with parents and, if a family objected, did not have to resolve the issue on their own. An administrator could help provide an alternative. We reassured them that their job is to teach the curriculum as it is written. If there’s a question or concern, a principal or administrator like me is ready to handle it. And we haven’t experienced this sort of issue to date.

All students deserve to have access to grade-level rigor, vocabulary, and content. But not every child gets to experience holiday travel, weekend museum trips, or other opportunities to build their knowledge about the world. High-quality, knowledge-based curriculum empowers students with new tools to communicate and shared knowledge to speak and write about. If we don’t provide this opportunity to all students, we are essentially shutting the door on those least prepared to thrive in school. 

Karla Stinehart is the director for elementary education at New Mexico’s Roswell Independent School District and a member of the . 

Imagine observing a 3rd-grade classroom where students are working together to plan and carry out investigations to explain why two magnets stick together or push away from one another. If the investigations are derived from a phenomenon-driven curriculum, you’d likely also see groups of students enthusiastically moving around the room, placing magnets on different surfaces and objects to see what happens, exuding excitement with each result and using an array of literacy skills to make sense of and explain what they’re observing. 

This was exactly what I encountered in Rhondi Kennedy’s third-grade classroom at Central Intermediate School near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as part of my first visit with the Knowledge Matters School Tour and my first chance to see an elementary school implementing phenomenon-driven curriculum across all elementary grades.

Phenomena are observable events that occur in the universe that we use science knowledge to explain or predict. Students experience phenomena in their everyday lives when they see puddles disappear overnight or feel a wall vibrate when music is played loudly. 

Phenomena are also the context for the work of both scientists and engineers and can be used to drive learning experiences for students unlocking their natural curiosities, motivating them to want to make sense of why a phenomena occurs or how it works.

Phenomenon-driven instruction represents a shift in science education that began with The National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences’ 2012 release of Framework for K-12 Science Education which recommended science education be built around three major dimensions: science and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and core science ideas. Engaging students in making sense of phenomena supports the nexus of the three dimensions. It is how students construct meaning of science ideas and engage in scientific practices and ways of thinking. 

When we sat down with elementary teachers at Central Intermediate and asked them to share what surprised them the most since implementing a curriculum centered on phenomena, they talked about the confidence students exhibited when sharing science ideas and ways of thinking about science through talk and writing. One teacher noted that “the kids are just getting better at learning how to communicate with each other” and that “they’re getting the confidence to discuss and turn and talk”. 

We witnessed this confidence firsthand during our visit to various classrooms at Central Intermediate and could see how the curriculum provided ample opportunity for students to talk and share what they were thinking with their peers. One teacher noted that the students “are having to do so much more reasoning” and thinking about “Do I agree with this person? Why do I disagree?” Students like learning how the world works and enjoy talking about phenomena. 

Often, the phenomena students investigate in the classroom represent phenomena they have encountered outside the classroom, giving students a wealth of background experiences to bring to their discussions. Many of the students in Mrs. Kennedy’s classroom talked about experiences they had with magnets at home and used those experiences to make sense of what they were seeing in the classroom. 

The ability for students to pull from a wealth of experiences outside the classroom to explain phenomena in the classroom also helps students write with more confidence and ability. Brittany Lavergne, a fourth-grade teacher noted that “before [using the curriculum] we were just trying to get them [students] to have a complete answer, complete idea, a complete sentence. Now we’re getting claims with supporting evidence, with multiple pieces of evidence and student responses that are so much more in depth.”

Dramatic improvement in writing is one of the most oft-mentioned early benefits to implementing phenomenon-driven science curriculum because students write about what they are observing through direct experiences. In fact, they are often eager to write about something they’re curious about or have had experiences with in the past. 

Teachers at Central Intermediate have also seen student writing improve as students transition across grades. Mrs. Lavergne shared that “It just seems like every group we get, they’re better writers. They’re able to express what they’re learning and what they’re thinking. And it’s just an increase from what we had seen the years before.”

The students at Central Intermediate showcased remarkable motivation and confidence in discussing scientific ideas, demonstrating the effectiveness of phenomenon-driven instruction. This approach not only ensures access to quality science education but also acts as a dynamic catalyst for enhancing oral language, vocabulary, and writing skills. The visit to Central Intermediate vividly illustrated the transformative power of phenomenon-driven curriculum, shaping students into well-rounded individuals ready to excel in the scientific community and beyond.

My first career was not in teaching. I worked in an HIV Lab in New York City for five years before returning to my home in New Mexico in 2012. While away, I had developed a passion for science, and became convinced that one way I could make a contribution to the community I loved might be to help spark that passion in young people. I wanted to show students that science is more than the boring, read-and-take-notes course that I was subjected to in my youth.

And now, as more people express skepticism for data, I also want to help young people learn how you go about validating it; to understand that data is real and that understanding how to document and interpret it can give one real power.

When I began teaching, New Mexico was just preparing to transition to the . Our district didn’t have an aligned curriculum but, determined as I was to engage my students by sharing with them my lab experience, I embarked on designing lessons based on experimentation and data analysis. My results weren’t steller; the students were still bored. But my proof of concept came when I asked them to analyze video game data. It was here, in what they considered a relevant context, that they started to engage.  

As I became more familiar with the performance expectations of the NGSS, my instinct about the importance of students really understanding data, and how to conduct analyses, was confirmed. Because unlike traditional science assessments that required little math knowledge, the new standards challenged students to analyze charts, graphs, maps and data sets — and to recognize patterns. 

Video games notwithstanding, I struggled to find relevant data for students to use. I even attempted an assignment asking students to find local data and graphs, but that turned out to be far too complicated for middle schoolers. I spent long hours searching for information to fit the new standards, but my lesson plans often failed to engage the students. I found some good project-based lessons, but putting them in any kind of successive order felt disjointed and disconnected. Despite having good standards, understanding what they asked students to know and to be able to do, and with all the best of intentions, instruction in my classroom was still a bit of a mess.   

Things changed in 2018, when a neighboring school in our district that was field-testing OpenSciEd middle school units offered to demonstrate lessons. Because I’d become a bit discouraged by my own less-than-successful efforts, I was excited to give it a try. Our New Mexico Public Education Department offered OpenSciEd workshops, for which I was very grateful. 

What excited me the most about the OpenSciEd curriculum was that it’s modeled after real life scientific research. Standards that required students to memorize content knowledge were replaced by the new “Performance Expectations,” which, in addition to content knowledge, require the steps of scientific inquiry. Instead of teaching students to memorize the order —Observe, Question, Research, Hypothesis, Peer Review — OpenSciEd models the experience I had in the laboratory of solving problems.  

When I was working in a lab, I would become consumed with figuring out a solution to the myriad problems I encountered along the way — and, as we began using the curriculum, I was delighted to see that this was the experience my students were having as well. They really took to their role as scientific investigators! 

“It’s like a puzzle, it’s all out there, just sitting there, pieces broken off, it’s up to you to get that viewpoint,” eighth grade student Shawn Baker told our visitors from the Knowledge Matters Campaign. “Start with one piece and slowly add, add, add — until you have one big understanding.”

And, COVID couldn’t have been a more real-world example to demonstrate to our students the importance of solving problems by utilizing the scientific process. By the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, we collectively became consumed with the importance of scientific literacy and data sense-making.

Each lesson in the OpenSciEd curriculum asks students to look at information, analyze it, and ask themselves what makes sense and what doesn’t. We’re using science literacy skills to look at information and make evidence-based judgments. These are skills and attitudes I didn’t pick up until college. I am proud that I am helping my students learn this at such a young age. They know how to look at a problem and start solving it. If I were an employer, particularly if I were running a lab, I would absolutely be looking for people who have the skills my students are learning from this curriculum.  

These are some of my lessons learned from adopting and implementing OpenSciEd over the years:

1. Don’t be afraid to make the curriculum your own. 
2. There’s a lot of content in OpenSciEd and it can get overwhelming. We’ve all heard the expression, “Go slow to go fast.” That applies here. 
3. Students are doing the heavy lifting with this curriculum, and some of them might not be used to that much thinking. It may be tempting for teachers to revert to their traditional practice of giving students the answers and expecting them to retain it versus discovering it on their own. But investigating it on their own creates more engagement, which helps with information retention. 
4. Be careful what you omit (for pacing or other reasons). When I have omitted things in the past, I have often found that we’ve missed a crucial step in building student comprehension. Every year I teach this curriculum I appreciate more and more how thoughtfully it was constructed.  
5. Grading student work will take longer than in previous years, but it’s worth it. Because of the nature of what they’re doing, the work you’re reviewing provides a real opportunity to recognize where the students are in their understanding and use it to offer useful feedback.   

My best advice is to go for it. Having every student in every class engaged and learning is the payoff. Our kids need and deserve to have science made meaningful to them in the way we’ve been able to with this curriculum.

When you walk into a science classroom at West Feliciana Middle School you will likely see a lot of excited engagement — with students exploring scientific phenomena and making observations about what they see, asking questions and making predictions about the world around them, and conducting experiments to answer their research questions. These activities model the methods of a professional scientific researcher and, while relatively new to the school, are becoming commonplace for our student body.

Ten years ago I was a student at West Feliciana Middle School. While I have always been one of those who succeeded in the standard classroom environment, science classes rarely piqued my interest. Even though school came easily to me, I struggled to pay attention, or even stay awake, during science class. I yearned for opportunities to “get my hands dirty” and try things out for myself. Unfortunately, most of the science classes I experienced utilized what I now understand to be the “sit and get” model, with students sitting silently in their seats while the teacher presented information. Unsurprisingly, this was wildly boring for many of us.

I write this now as a student teacher in the same middle school where I grew up. I’m a senior at Louisiana State University’s GeauxTeach STEM program currently working to earn my full Louisiana teaching certificate. Science is my passion, and my interest in becoming an educator was to inspire that same passion in students from my hometown community. (I have since decided to pursue a medical degree; but that’s another story.)

Luckily for me, my assigned mentor teacher, Sarah Parkerson, was also my seventh-grade science teacher when I was a student at WFMS, providing me with the unique opportunity to compare my classroom experiences of 10 years ago to the experiences that students are currently receiving at WFMS. The contrast truly is remarkable.

WFMS now uses , a middle school science curriculum created to support the , that require so much more of students than those in place when I went through school. At the start of each unit, students are presented with a familiar “anchoring phenomenon.” This phenomenon is then used as a framework to explore the scientific principles and processes laid out in the standards.

In one of our units, for example, the curriculum used a bath bomb as its anchoring phenomenon to teach students about chemical reactions. Almost all of the students in my classes have been familiar with this common bathroom item, but, upon initial probing, my students realized they didn’t have any idea of why or how it worked. We started out the unit by asking questions about the bath bombs.

 â€œWhat is it made out of?” “Is the gas trapped inside?” “What happens if you put the bath bomb in a different liquid?” When they dropped the bath bomb in the water, we asked them to make and record their observations. They then performed experiments to see how the mass and properties change before and after dropping the bath bomb in water. We even analyzed the materials in the bath bomb to see what combinations of ingredients would give us similar reactions.

Throughout this entire process, the students were rarely sitting at their desks taking in information and being given explanations by their teacher. They were the ones asking questions and making observations. They took measurements. They conducted mini experiments and analyzed their results. While the activities may have been facilitated by the classroom teacher, it was unquestionably the students who were driving their learning. And it was extremely motivating to them to find answers to their questions. Their curiosity and engagement was sustained throughout the unit.

In the end, our students learned a ton about chemical reactions and how we identify them, based on a common bath item they’d never thought twice about. They came to class excited to do experiments to figure out an explanation behind something that they knew worked but never knew why it worked, bragging to their friends when their predictions turned out to be correct. I’m certain they would not have been nearly as excited to sit in a chemistry classroom and learn the same material from a lecture. I know that I would have preferred the “OpenSciEd” curriculum as a student 10 years ago. I wish I had been taught this way.

I also firmly believe that our student’s retention of scientific knowledge is enhanced by this approach. In our most recent unit, students are learning about the digestive system and our body’s metabolic reactions through the anchoring phenomena of a sick middle school girl named “M’Kenna.” Throughout the unit, these seventh graders are referencing things they learned in their sixth grade OpenSciEd unit about the body’s healing processes as building blocks for what they’re learning now. Through these small but significant references to their sixth grade experiences, my students have shown that they are not only improving their volume of learned science knowledge, but are also making connections to previously learned material. 

I’ve become convinced that inspiring a love for science in young people depends on falling in love with the scientific process itself. As functioning adults we ask questions, make observations and seek connections to answer our questions. On a fundamental level, this is the basic framework that scientific researchers, regardless of their chosen scientific field, work with every day. If we can model this process in our classroom, we can not only introduce the basic scientific process to our students but also improve their problem-solving skills.  

The enthusiasm my students at WFMS have for science, in contrast to the experience my classmates and I experienced a decade ago, makes it abundantly clear that utilizing the scientific process has the power to engage — far more than sitting and memorizing any particular tidbit of scientific knowledge. The fact that students are doing this in a collaborative environment, with their peers, also makes it so much more “real.” And I sincerely hope that this will inspire our students to live their lives as scientists, not just until state testing concludes. 

Robert Emery Godke is a senior at Louisiana State University’s GeauxTeach STEM program and a student teacher in the West Feliciana Parish Schools in Louisiana.

I, Shusheela Valdez, recently had the pleasure of joining the Knowledge Matters School Tour on a visit to Graves County, Kentucky — just down the road from where, a year ago, Mayfield, Kentucky was decimated by a Category 4 tornado. The School Tour traveled to this little community in the southwest corner of the state because of the reputation it had received as a model district for implementation of the OpenSciEd curriculum. We wanted to see what that looked like and learn how it happened. 

For the last eight years, I have trained educators from Kentucky to California on implementing , a high quality open source curriculum aligned with the . I can say without a shadow of a doubt that the instruction in Graves County — and the elegant way in which this amazing curriculum came to life — was the strongest I’ve seen anywhere.

Amanda Hanson is one of two instructional supervisors in the district. We spent some time together processing her district’s story. Below is a transcript of that conversation that has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Valdez: When did you adopt OpenSciEd and why?

Henson: Our journey began back in 2018, not long after the Next Generation Science Standards were adopted. I was visiting many classroom teachers’ rooms at the time and when we saw what our new state assessment in science entailed, we were like, “ow, we are not preparing our students to do this!” I talked to other teachers and we were all pretty overwhelmed at what our kids were expected to do. We knew we needed help and started looking around at what was available. OpenSciEd really rose to the top.

Why was it such a right fit for your district?

One thing is that we’re a huge “cooperative learning” district. All of our teachers are trained on and implement in their classrooms. Students are very familiar with talking and discussing as a group. Our structure is to have students talk in an organized manner, and not opt out — to ensure every voice is heard. So we had that in place and were making some important progress — and then we looked at OpenSciEd and recognized that that’s how it’s designed: it’s designed for that kind of student thinking and student talk. It just fit really well with what we were already doing in the district.

What would you say was the secret of your success?

Without a doubt it was the professional development we received. We knew we couldn’t throw a new curriculum at teachers without providing extensive support. We were extremely fortunate to receive a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York that enabled us to bring in an external partner, Tricia Shelton, chief learning officer for the National Science Teaching Association. We received two days per unit from her, so 12 days total. 

Because we were a “field test” — pilot — district for OpenSciEd, we got additional coaching from NSTA. They wanted to know how the curriculum was working in classrooms. What does this look like? Where do students struggle? Tricia would come in and watch our teachers, co teach with them, model lessons, etc. This was invaluable. The other thing that was great about this is that it conveyed to our teachers a culture of open, continuous improvement. Now we have teachers who can do that modeling, that coaching. If a teacher has a question, our more experienced teachers will say, “Come on in and watch me do this lesson.” And because we’re doing the same thing district wide, we have lots of opportunity for ongoing collaboration and support. 

Tell us a little bit more about the Kagan structure and how you think it’s such a powerful bedrock for OpenSciEd.

Kagan structures allow the teacher to be the facilitator of instruction and OpenSciEd is designed perfectly to encourage this. The OpenSciEd curriculum asks many open-ended, high-level questions. The teacher can pose the question and use a Kagan structure to facilitate student talk in a manner where all students must think and engage in the task. This allows for rich conversation in which the students want to explore the topic and they are in turn taking responsibility for their learning. Students are on task learning and having fun, as well as building a teamlike approach and collaborating with one another. Every student has a role, no one is left out and equal participation happens as students show positive interdependence where they need each other to learn.

What are some of the highlights of the student experience you’re seeing as a result of your implementation of this curriculum?

Students are really exploring, they’re learning, they’re talking, they’re discussing, they’re figuring things out. Most importantly, they’re excited. You saw it in the classrooms you visited. The students were all very focused. There’s not a single student off task. I really think we’re training our students to take ownership of their learning. That’s one of the beauties of this curriculum.  There are guiding questions but the teachers are taught to hold back so that students get engaged in finding the answers for themselves. Our students are really engaged in science.  Across our buildings, it’s one of their favorite subjects.

I also love how kids are learning that it’s ok to struggle, and it’s even OK to be wrong. We saw that in one of the classrooms you visited. One of the students, who happens to be very bright, was wrong about something he’d written down and another student came in and corrected him and it was OK. He even said, “Thank you for helping me”. That’s the culture we want to build for our students. 

Is implementation of this science curriculum supporting your literacy goals?

An additional bonus of OpenSciEd is how reading and writing are embedded into the curriculum. They do a lot of writing, but they hardly notice it because it’s just so natural for them to record what’s happening. And because of how much collaboration there is, they’re constantly explaining their thinking. The curriculum is designed to ensure that students grow in all areas, not just science.

I was two months into my dream job as Lafourche Parish’s director of elementary schools, ready to help lead our district back from COVID, when the second-most destructive hurricane in American history made landfall in south Louisiana. In one short week of 2021, Category 4 Hurricane Ida damaged nearly every one of our school buildings and wreaked havoc on the lives of our families. Our hopes for normalcy — that the pandemic was finally behind us — screeched to a halt. 

Some of our schools were left completely unusable. How were we going to provide for the needs of our 12,000 students? Our superintendent insisted students needed to be brought back on campus sooner than later. By nothing short of a miracle, all students were back to school in eight weeks. 

One year later, the Louisiana Department of Education for the district’s commitment to high quality science instruction and maintaining student growth on the state assessments, despite disruptions from the pandemic and Hurricane Ida. A large celebration, “Making the Impossible Possible,” was held at the local high school. State Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley presented our district with a banner marking our comeback. Finally, something to truly celebrate! It was a testament to the resolve of the bayou people. None of this could have been possible, however, had our district not gone through the extensive process four years ago of adopting Amplify Science, which “.”

I was in my former role as a school principal when we implemented the high-quality curriculum. In that position, I experienced first-hand the dramatic change in students being far more engaged and excited about the opportunities they were given with Amplify Science. No more sit-and-get. Science was now about hands-on learning, experiments and problems to solve relevant to their lives.   

When I met with parents, they talked about the topics in Amplify Science. There was a special excitement about the “floating train,” part of a third grade unit on balancing forces. I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “Wow, our students are so turned on, they’re teaching their parents. We’re developing future scientists here. We were engaging girls in science! Students, teachers and parents are all talking about science.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The implementation of Amplify was a pretty seamless one. Unlike with other newly adopted curriculums, we didn’t get much or any pushback. Louisiana had adopted new science standards in 2017 and our teachers were looking for support. Amplify Science addressed the standards and our teachers felt it really gave them confidence with the new content. They loved that everything was all right there for them and embraced learning this new “phenomenon-based” approach.  Any hesitation the teachers had about whether or not the kids could do it was overwhelmed by the kids’ excitement.  

The Knowledge Matters team toured Lockport Upper Elementary when they visited this spring. As I accompanied our visitors into classrooms, I had a chance to see the instruction with fresh eyes, and I was excited by what I saw. Topics were rich. Third graders were reading to find evidence about environmental changes and adaptive traits. Fourth graders were exploring how sound travels. Fifth graders were building terrariums and making predictions about what would happen in them over the coming weeks. In each classroom, science came alive — and evidence was abundant of students growing their speaking, listening, reading and writing skills right alongside their science content knowledge. This was in stark contrast to the direct instruction of science concepts we had used in the past.

Educators told our visitors they were grateful to have a curriculum that provided in one place all the pieces they needed to be effective. They no longer had to spend hours gathering and researching and putting lessons together on their own. They could now spend their time perfecting their craft. They quickly realized that their students were actively engaged in lessons, they were having fun, they were thinking critically, they were reading and writing about science — they were truly learning. There was an overwhelming consensus among educators and families that this shift in science instruction was a welcome one.  

What happened in those two days of the Knowledge Matters tour would give any educator the “frissons,” a French word we use in south Louisiana when we get the chills. It was more than I ever expected — a few of us were even brought to tears. Perhaps best were the students’ voices, saying things like, “Science is fun;” “It’s like magic, but it’s real;” “Science is my favorite subject.”

Our journey is far from complete. There is still much work to be done here in Lafourche Parish Schools. But we know we have laid the groundwork for future success with the help of a high-quality science curriculum. None of this could be done without the dedication of our classroom teachers and support from our families and community. The biggest winners in all of this are our students, the single reason we exist. We are definitely in this to win it for them!

Developing a sense of curiosity was the expectation in my house, so science had always been a part of my life. But, it wasn’t always my favorite class. So it’s been my goal as an educator to change that experience for students — to inspire them with the kind of science education that fills them with a sense of wonder, and to give them the agency that they, too, can be scientists, if they so choose. 

I have taught science for more than 20 years. I’ve been in hundreds of science classrooms, mostly witnessing students compliantly writing notes into graphic organizers, passively watching their teacher explain the parts of the digestive system, for example. I suffered through data reports showing that only certain students — generally those of a certain ethnicity, gender or ability — were successful in science while others were left woefully behind. I watched as teachers worked countless hours to write their own curriculum, gather their own materials and struggle to make lessons work. And, hardest of all, I listened to students share their distaste for their science classes. 

Science is a subject of curiosity, wonder and exploration, but our classrooms did not mirror this. I knew — and the talented educators I worked with knew — that something had to change. 

Then the stars aligned, in a way that rarely happens. California adopted , which, instead of treating learning like a “sit and get,” takes what they call a “three dimensional” approach that moves students from passive learners to curious architects of their own learning. Our teachers were hungry to learn about the new standards, and to better understand the pedagogical shifts they required. The district created a multiyear professional learning plan for all secondary teachers, which our teachers eagerly embraced, spending time away from their classroom and during the summers and weekends to dive deeply into NGSS and realign their instruction to meet those demands. 

And, we needed instructional materials! But, we specifically needed materials that could provide teachers with tools to help students make sense of what they’re learning. We knew that to achieve that, we would need to implement a curriculum that was designed around the pedagogy of NGSS rather than around isolated facts of science. 

In the 2020-21 school year, now on Zoom, our middle school science teachers used the to consider two open source curricula. Teachers were particularly impressed by , noting the curriculum’s intentional connections to sensemaking and previous learnings, while effectively progressing learning. We ultimately selected OpenSciEd for our middle schools. 

Implementing a new curriculum is never smooth, it never fits just right at first, and it never magically solves all of our problems. We knew the instructional shifts and changes required to implement Open SciEd were going to challenge teachers. We wanted to provide teachers the space to try out the pedagogy, to take risks in their classrooms and to be vulnerable as they learned new ways of learning, without high stakes accountability. So we implemented it slowly. We asked teachers to complete two units a year and continue to add two units each year until we implement all units. Teachers are supported in the implementation of each unit with professional learning, including Lesson Studies centered around certain pedagogical moves, such as what OpenSciEd calls the “.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

For the last decade, SMUSD has invested significant time and resources to improve the quality of science education, and the proof of our success is in our classrooms. Our students are engaging in learning that is centered around them, that cares about their understanding, and that teaches them to work together to strengthen their understanding of concepts. 

“This collaboration idea doesn’t just apply to science. It applies to everything we are going to do, no matter what career you pursue,” one student said during the Knowledge Matters School Tour visit. “You are going to have to collaborate with everyone else. You and other people are going to have to solve it and work together.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

While the change has been challenging, the students are already showing growth, one teacher said, adding that teaching the new lessons becomes easier as time goes on. “I think it’s through the science and engineering practices that we’re really getting kids to express what they know,” another teacher observed. We’re opening their eyes to becoming global citizens.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

We are moving in the right direction. We are moving towards a classroom environment where each and every student, no matter their ethnicity, gender or ability, is engaged in building their scientific knowledge and developing their critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills, and most importantly, their confidence in seeing themselves as potential scientists.

In the past, I considered curriculum to be a general guide to daily lessons — thick books with weekly plans that align to the state standards and are there to reference throughout the year. My students used to get a kick out of the anecdotes I would add to each lesson. I could grade the informal assessments quickly and then moved on to the next lesson. 

Having fun in class was always something I strived for. I got pretty expert at making theme, point of view, and text structure entertaining. I’m theatrical by nature and my students thrived on how entertaining my classes were. But now, after three years of using the high quality , I understand, regretfully, this does not mean I always had a successful classroom. How much my students like my personality is not something that’s on formal assessments that evaluate literacy proficiency. 

After receiving substantial implementation support from district and school leaders, and having time to work with my colleagues on making CKLA impactful, I still have a highly spirited, engaged classroom; it just has more depth. In the past, I think my students knew what they were learning and why — but now they have discussions that lead to them being more independent thinkers. Being more independent in their thinking has led to their being more detailed writers. Students who are capable of complex discussions about what they’re reading, independent thought and detailed writing are usually also successful on end-of-year tests!   

When our district selected CKLA as our English language arts/literacy curriculum from the state’s list of approved textbooks, I was lukewarm about the decision. I am the center of my students’ world when they’re in my room — the most knowledgeable, the expert. Students loved coming to my reading class because they enjoyed all my real-world connections, the jokes I told, the songs I sang. Giving me a nearly scripted curriculum felt like it would rob me of the creative engagement skills I had perfected over my 12 years as a teacher. 

I was pretty convinced this could go badly — if not for the district, for me personally. How would I ever get to the level of comfort by the time my new students arrived at the classroom door with this new teaching material that I’d felt in my classroom for years?

Thankfully, I work in a district that has a “we are in this together” culture that allowed teachers to learn how to implement this new curriculum together. First, our district leaders brought in CKLA experts to train us on how to use everything from the teacher’s manuals, to the student books, to the online resources. This launch training showed us that we didn’t need to be experts, because everything was right there for us.

Then, our principal prioritized watching other teachers execute lessons. At first, we cringed at the thought of being watched so closely, but as we walked away with tons of usable feedback, we began to welcome these visits. That experience became one of the most unique learning opportunities I’ve had as a teacher; it has been invaluable. Obviously, it was great to see — and celebrate — the success of other teachers. But it was also so helpful to witness their struggles with things like time management and student misconceptions, and to be a part of a team providing and receiving feedback in real time. It really increased my optimism about the process and helped me understand that we were all learning together. 

Ultimately, implementing the curriculum began to feel more like little sprints we were perfecting together, a little at a time, instead of a huge mission we needed to accomplish on our own.

Once we’d gotten our feet wet after the first year, district leaders decided it was time to bring in outside professional learning support to hone our ability to implement the curriculum even better. TNTP, , was identified as our partner. They were able to show us how much planning we were still trying to do ourselves when, in fact, CKLA had done it for us — we just needed to focus on our delivery. The TNTP training was largely designed to help us use our planning time to intellectually prepare. It was also done with teachers from all over the district, which was powerful. We took a deep dive as grade level teams into what the students should get from the lessons and how we would know they understood the standards. 

I am fortunate to work in a district that really understands the need for this time to intellectually prepare for an upcoming lesson. We are given two times each week to plan with our grade level reading teachers, which has really contributed to a culture of collaboration. 

Whereas I would have put myself at a “5” on a 10-point scale of my enthusiasm about the district-wide ELA adoption, I am now all in. That attitude shift didn’t just happen because I wanted to be a team player. It happened because I was never left alone throughout the transition process. From district leaders bringing in experts to train us, to our visits watching other teachers model lessons, to the way we have been effectively coached to plan, it has all helped me to appreciate the many ways in which our curriculum can lead to student success.

And, as my students are having more intelligent and thought-provoking conversations about texts, they are showing increased proficiency on standard assessments. Our school has seen a dramatic drop in the number of third through fifth grade students who need intervention referrals. Special education placements are also down considerably since we implemented CKLA.

Our district prides itself on supporting teachers and creating strong teams, and nowhere has that been on better display than with our ELA curriculum implementation. I have no doubt this is the key to the literacy success we’re beginning to experience!

It is no secret that change is hard. When my district announced an English Language Arts curriculum adoption cycle, I could feel teachers holding their breath as they waited to hear what would be the new direction of our literacy program. 

Hamilton County Schools is located in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and is a district as diverse as Tennessee’s geographical landscape, serving roughly 45,000 students from rural, suburban and urban communities. Although each school holds individual strengths, challenges and needs, a common thread across all K-5 buildings emerged as we considered this adoption: We needed a uniform, high quality ELA curriculum that had a solid “sounds first” approach to foundational literacy. As a district, we were underperforming in literacy measures and looking for a strong curriculum that would accelerate student achievement while reducing variability across buildings. 

Hamilton County formed a literacy adoption team that was charged with reviewing different literacy curricula to determine which would best meet the needs of our schools. The adoption committee developed a set of criteria for evaluating curriculum options, and it was ultimately decided that EL Education, formerly known as Expeditionary Learning, would be our new district-wide curriculum for K-5. EL is a knowledge-building curriculum with a strong sounds-first approach to foundational reading. We knew that implementing a complete shift in literacy instruction across 40 elementary schools would not be an easy task. But at Battle Academy, we knew that there is only one thing to do when everyone is standing around holding their breath: you dive in!

Our district leadership was wise to focus its initial efforts on getting the structures and frameworks in place — which meant that administrators, coaches and teachers all received in-depth, specific training in implementing the major elements of the curriculum. Hamilton County’s Office of Teaching and Learning made it clear that they would walk alongside us to support our schools as we navigated uncharted territory. Their message to us was that it was understandable to be uncomfortable as we pushed through this learning process. 

And we were uncomfortable. EL is a notoriously rich and complex curriculum. And although we had ample training, we faced major challenges as we attempted to navigate the large amount of instructional resources provided by EL while simultaneously wrapping our heads around a new curriculum that felt very different. 

As we were getting our feet wet with this new way of doing things, the Tennessee Department of Education also provided all of our teachers and administrators with training, which reinforced the value behind the major shifts we were making. Reading 360 supported our district in further internalizing the science of reading and reinforced why a sounds-first approach is so critical to building strong readers.

During that first year of implementation, it was often said across school circles that we were “building the plane while we were flying it.” But through this time of challenge, there was a real spirit of camaraderie as educators shared this common experience and reflected together on ways to improve our practice.

Three years later, the Knowledge Matters School Tour visit provided us an opportunity to reflect on that improvement. As I moved through the halls of Battle Academy with our guests, I saw vibrant displays created by first graders that capture the wonder of the sun, moon and stars. I walked into a fourth-grade classroom and listened to students engaging in EL protocols that promote discourse and high-level critical thinking as they discussed animal defense mechanisms. I visited our culinary lab and watched as third-grade students engaged in a “freaky foods chopped challenge” to draw deeper connections to their EL module on “freaky frogs.” I saw kindergarten students tapping out words and utilizing sound boxes as they smiled at their teacher, beaming with pride as new readers. I entered our digital fabrication space and observed a design challenge presented to our second graders, propelling them into the world of paleontology as they created tools to harvest fossils embedded in salt dough. 

Students were no longer sitting in desks that were arranged into neat arrays for independent work. I saw students actively learning through the implementation of 21st century skills as they demonstrate collaboration, critical thinking, creativity and communication. 

And equally important, I no longer saw apprehensive teachers filled with doubt about curriculum implementation. I saw confident practitioners who understand the science of reading and actively support students in building strong reading foundations through quality phonics instruction. The overarching theme that I see and feel at Battle Academy each day is one of joy — both in teaching and learning. 

I believe our curriculum has helped to create that joy. Organized into four topical modules for each grade level, students and teachers have a full quarter to dive deeply into each topic, steadily building vocabulary, background knowledge and experiences that promote strong reading comprehension and literacy skills. Our students have found a real sense of pride in becoming experts as they move through the modules. When first graders study birds, they approach their learning as ornithologists. In the fall, our kindergarteners are transformed into meteorologists who share weather predictions around our building. And if you ask our fifth-grade parents, they would fondly report that their children come home as environmental advocates during their module on biodiversity in the rainforest, purging their pantries of foods that are not rainforest friendly. (Sorry, again, about that, parents!) 

Our curriculum modules have the potential to be more than just lessons that teach the ELA standards. They are a foundation for teachers to create rich and meaningful learning experiences that build knowledge and confidence in our students, equipping them with skills to tackle complex literacy tasks and engage with high level texts as strong readers and writers. Learning at Battle Academy is an experience, not just an assignment. 

To see the experiential learning that is taking place in our building every day, so alive and so tangible, there is no need for us to hold our breath any longer. If we knew then what we know now, we wouldn’t hesitate to dive in; again and again, because the water feels just fine. 

Jennifer Whalen is assistant principal for Battle Academy for Teaching and Learning in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

As instructional leaders in our district, we are fortunate to spend lots of time in classrooms. Cathy loves to share the story of popping in on one fourth-grade lesson to observe student writing. The room was cool, dim and quiet; the only sound was the scratch of pencils on paper as students brainstormed ideas for the poems they were going to write, a culminating task to wrap up an EL Education module on poetry. The teacher circulated as students pondered topics that were especially important to them — topics that were worthy of an entire poem.

One word at the center of a student’s brainstorm was particularly striking: “education.”

We lead literacy work in our district, Murfreesboro City Schools, located about 30 miles south of Nashville in the geographic center of Tennessee. We’re a district of 13 schools serving students from preschool through 6th grade.

Our journey implementing a new literacy curriculum, , has been rewarding, though filled with twists and turns. It began in 2019, when only about a third of our students showed English proficiency on our state assessment. With teachers creating their own materials at the time, just deciding to implement a core curriculum represented a big shift. Teams of educators across the district worked together to select EL Education. Books and ancillary materials were purchased and delivered to schools and classrooms. Then COVID hit — midway into our first year of this new district-wide curriculum.  

The ensuing two years looked like they did elsewhere: navigating virtual learning, hybrid instructional models, absences due to illness and quarantines and the myriad other challenges the pandemic thrust into education. Teachers were stretched incredibly thin, and implementing a complex curriculum was even more challenging against this backdrop than it would normally have been. In our first year of state testing after COVID, we saw an expected decrease in student proficiency.

Coming out of the pandemic seemed like the perfect time for a reset around the use of our new curriculum: a time to cast a wider vision, set new and lofty goals, restructure systems and focus our efforts on deeply understanding the materials and bringing them to life in the classroom.  

Over this past year, we’ve focused heavily on deepening our understanding around foundational skills instruction. The Tennessee Department of Education to provide all teachers with sounds-first instruction aligned with the science of reading, and 99% of our district’s primary teachers and academic interventionists have completed this training. A great effort has been made by district leaders to ensure all foundational skills instruction aligns to the EL Education curriculum and the science of reading, ensuring teachers used a systematic, explicit phonological awareness and phonics approach. Our teachers are already seeing the impact of a sounds-first approach with a strong foundation skills curriculum.

“Student writing is far better than I’ve seen before,” kindergarten teacher Kim Taylor said. “I’m amazed at what my students are writing.”

We also created a protocol for educators to clarify the process by which teachers prepare to utilize the materials. Called the Prepare to Teach Cycle, it begins with a high-level overview of the unit of study: reading and annotating core texts; exploring the essential questions; articulating the knowledge students will gain and the thinking they will need to do on an anchor chart. Then, we take the assessments ourselves and explore the thinking that’s required for students to perform well and common misunderstandings that may hinder that success; we add these thinking demands to the chart as well. With this chart and student texts front and center, we then work to internalize, and sometimes, rehearse lessons together to deeply understand the purpose of the lesson and the teaching priorities required to accomplish that purpose. Last, we teach and reflect by looking at student work or instructional data from the , our walkthrough tool.

The entire Prepare to Teach protocol lives in an environment of teacher voice; they set enabling conditions such as choosing when to meet, how often, how long, what pre-work will be done, team roles, and the like. We’ve seen the cycle impact student work and teacher practice. As one teacher reflected, “I think for us to truly do this job effectively, we have to be together, planning together and talking through what we notice in different lessons. [The cycle] made me confident in my own abilities.”

Finally, we streamlined everything we do to consistently embed our work in the materials. All of our professional learning, cross-district teacher literacy networks, and school-based conversations are grounded in the materials. We talk a lot about how to keep the text at the center of instruction, how to focus on the knowledge students should get from the texts and how to provide just the right support so every student has access to — and the opportunity to truly grapple with — complex work.

That grappling is already paying off. In the spring of 2022, our students’ proficiency levels were the highest we’ve seen in our district since we adopted new standards in 2017, outperforming our pre-pandemic levels. This lines up with the reading, writing and conversations we see on a daily basis in classrooms.

“I think with this curriculum, it’s making those students really feel like they can be world changers and that they can access it,” said third grade teacher Bailey Rose. “We don’t have to lower it. We give it to them as it is, they are able to take it and feel like they can have an impact.”

Here in Murfreesboro, we still want to grow and improve, but we are well on our way and have a strong plan to get there.  And those poems — they were something else. Education, indeed.

In 2018, our school district conducted a serious reflection of our classroom and assessment data. We knew our students weren’t as successful in mathematics as they needed to be. Our performance data showed that, while our students performed similarly to the state, less than half of middle school students were demonstrating proficiency on the state mathematics assessment. The lack of quality discourse and cognitive engagement in our math classrooms was especially disheartening.

We used as an initial screener for materials, but knowing we wanted something that really encouraged student ownership of the prompted our own review for student-centeredness and inclusive student supports. Upon deeper review of the aligned curriculum materials, we decided that Illustrative Mathematics was the best choice for our needs, because the materials inherently included designs for an inclusive, challenging classroom environment where all students would be expected — and able — to engage in thoughtful discussions around thinking and problem solving.

Behavioral data from this dramatic shift in curriculum so far have been revealing. Classes utilizing this student-centered approach to mathematics saw a decrease in student behavior referrals. Qualitative surveys confirm that our students appreciate learning math in connected ways. Based on the leading indicators we are seeing, we expect in the coming years our assessment data will also reflect the success of our implementation. 

But, just bringing in a new set of high-quality instructional materials is not a silver bullet to boost student performance. Without comprehensive training and a continued system of support for educators on implementation, the curriculum itself is unlikely to be effective. This was not an easy journey. Many of our math teachers readily admit they had reservations in the beginning, particularly when thinking about their struggling students. 

With everything on teachers’ plates, it is easy to do what is familiar and comfortable. That’s exactly why we decided to invest substantial effort into building a shared vision and providing real-time support for teachers. Knowing that there would be high levels of support paired with high expectations, educators became less skeptical.

Teachers needed this support to develop a strong understanding of the material design, which in turn empowered them to make intentional decisions that maintained the integrity of the materials and focused on supporting students through productive struggle, rather than removing it.

All of the administrators — both in the school building and at the district level — committed personally to ensuring the new curriculum was a success. Principals even made it a point to remove any old learning materials in the building, sending a strong message of dedication to the new curriculum. We invested in intensive summer training, ongoing professional learning, an innovative coaching partnership with the University of Delaware, and unequivocal leadership support. Any time concerns arose, we collaborated with teachers on solutions rather than moving back into our comfort zones. 

I’ll be clear: making this kind of investment in professional learning wasn’t easy. 

“When I first heard we were pulling teachers for training, I was like, ‘You are killing me’ because it’s so hard to find subs,” said Dr. Tracy Woodson, principal of Springer Middle School. But, in the end, it was the smart thing to do because the ongoing training was key to getting our math instruction right. This is a long-term approach to teaching mathematics that everyone is invested in. I’m seeing kids excited about math—you wouldn’t have heard that from me three or four years ago.” 

Intensive summer training gave educators time to dive into the materials and understand the embedded content, structure and evidence-based routines. Professional learning focused on developing a deep understanding of the curriculum; considering the intentional coherence of units, lessons and activities; and understanding the authors’ intent for each activity. 

All of our mathematics teachers and administrators took part in this training, including our general and special education teachers. Noteworthy is that we coordinated our professional development efforts with other districts, something our teachers really appreciated. 

“Having administrators at the training was huge,” shared Janette Madison from Springer Middle School. “And working with folks in other districts who were also doing IM meant we could connect and clear up any of our confusion. We made anchor charts together and it was helpful to hear from folks who had already taught it.”

This summer PD time investment was critical. We saw changes early on, which reinforced a vision of what was possible if we executed with integrity. One of the first changes we noticed was the increase in student vocabulary use — particularly in our students with disabilities. Students weren’t at their desks working silently on problems. Instead, they were standing at whiteboards placed throughout the classroom, working in small groups with their peers, actively engaging and discussing how to solve problems. Students were no longer passive in their math classes, they were becoming empowered mathematicians. 

We asked our teams to follow the curriculum as written. This caused a massive shift in the climate of our professional learning communities. I have found that the culture of the students never exceeds the culture of the teachers. So we adopted similar problem-solving and discourse practices in our PLCs. Our teachers had to get comfortable talking, not having all the right answers all the time. Soon enough, teams were collaborating in ways they never could before, thanks to a shared vision and expectations. 

High-quality instructional materials alone will never be a silver bullet; but they can be a powerful place for starting a revolution. Any worthy curriculum adoption requires a commitment to continuous improvement and ongoing professional learning support. I can’t emphasize enough how critically important it is to invest in professional learning that is coordinated across roles and even across districts. We are now four years into the process of implementing this curriculum and we still see the tremendous value of having job-embedded coaching and meeting teachers where they are in their curriculum-based professional learning. As the years continue, our journey deepens. Active educator collaboration and the growing student engagement are just some of the daily reminders that this challenging adoption process has been incredibly worthwhile for teachers and students alike.  

Michelle Hawley is supervisor of mathematics, science, and gifted education services for Brandywine School District in Wilmington, Delaware.

The Appoquinimink School District is a rapidly growing district located in Middletown, Delaware. The district has expanded by nearly 45% — to more than 12,000 students from 9,000 10 years ago. This growth in student population also meant that there were more students with more diverse needs than ever before. 

Providing an equitable education for all of our students is what prompted our search for high-quality instructional materials that teachers didn’t have to cobble together themselves. In the past, while we had created learning maps for each unit of study, teachers were still responsible for identifying materials and resources to teach that unit. They were now asking for more curricular support to be able to adequately and optimally educate all students in the district.

A recent visit by the Knowledge Matters School Tour to celebrate our implementation of HQIM in elementary mathematics provided us with a wonderful opportunity to reflect on everything that came together to make our journey a success.

“Teachers writing their own lesson plans from start to finish was a lot of work,” said Jessica Spence, a special education specialist in the district. “It took a lot of time and energy, and we still felt like we were failing students. So burnout for teachers was much higher than versus when we have a resource that has the framework for us and we can really concentrate on giving kids access across the board.”

Instructional leadership has been central to our learning journey. From the very beginning, our math coordinator, Charlie Webb, recognized the importance of involving teachers in the curriculum selection process. She formed a committee consisting of five or six teachers in every grade, who selected two programs to pilot. Teachers didn’t like the first one but loved , a highly rated, comprehensive, PK-5 mathematics curriculum from that utilizes direct instruction, structured investigation and open exploration. Teachers are the ones who selected Bridges, and their collaboration in implementing it is what has been most notable about our experience.  

Bridges represents a dramatically different way for students to learn and for teachers to teach mathematics.

“I think there was a big learning curve between how we learned as children, how we were teaching prior, and the new curriculum,” instructional coach Lori Sebastian said. “Change is scary. Charlie’s good leadership — in making sure all teachers knew this wasn’t just a program that we darted and said, ‘We don’t like what we’re doing, we’ll do something different’; That there has been so much research, piloting, and teacher involvement was key. When you build that background, teacher buy-in is always going to be better.”

One of the most important things Charlie did was to insist we “start slow to go fast”. She knew that moving to a new curriculum was going to be a challenge. Her plan broke the learning down into manageable chunks. That first summer’s professional development, for example, largely focused on the first unit, increasing teachers’ confidence about starting the school year off successfully. School leaders participated in the training as well, so they had a clear understanding of the curriculum’s components and could support the staff. We are blessed to have great instructional coaches, but we believe our administrators need to be equally well versed in the curriculum so they can coach as well. They need to know what they should be hearing and seeing when they go into classrooms.

Throughout year one of implementation, teachers were given time to unpack each unit right before the unit was going to be taught. This was done during professional development days and in professional learning communities. Each school utilized its math lead teacher as a resource. Having someone in the building that could answer questions, model lessons and troubleshoot was key to our success that first year.  

Moving into year two, teachers were ready to dive deeper into the materials and lessons. Charlie shifted the focus to job-embedded professional learning. One of the authors of the Bridges program partnered with the district to assist with this professional learning. Schools focused on lesson studies where teams would co-plan the lessons during PLCs, execute the lesson in a classroom, and return to the PLC to debrief. We encouraged teachers to observe each other teaching. We do a lot of lesson study, which has been extremely valuable and has created a culture of collaboration that has been really important.

“We had so many opportunities to collaborate together to strengthen our knowledge of Bridges,” Brandi Luloffl, math content chair at Townsend Elementary School, shared with the visiting Knowledge Matters team. “We did unit get-togethers, digging into units together, looking at them one unit at a time, so teachers weren’t too overwhelmed with, ‘Here is an entire curriculum; just go with it.’ We were just chunking; and doing it together, playing the games, acting out the lessons — so we really felt in the moment what it was going to be like [to implement the curriculum]. These opportunities with teachers across the district built us together stronger.”

In addition to professional learning for teachers and administrators, math nights were implemented throughout the district where families were invited into schools and given an opportunity to engage with the math. As a result, parents began to feel more comfortable with what — and how — math was being learned in our classrooms.

We took a short break from professional development during the pandemic, during which we were ever so grateful to have a high-quality curriculum already in place, but knew we still had more learning to do. The current focus of our professional development, made possible in part by a state-supported , is to support inclusive classrooms and provide equitable access to grade-level/core curriculum in math classes for all students. The grant makes it possible for our instructional coaches to work with Pia Hansen, director of professional development at The Math Learning Center, who has become an integral part of our professional learning journey in effective mathematics instruction. 

Our educators shared a lot with our Knowledge Matters Campaign visitors about the confidence and mathematical “risk-taking” we’re now seeing in our classrooms, as a result of our implementation of Bridges. The instructional leadership demonstrated by Charlie Webb, our coaches, our external partners, and most of all our teachers has been what has made this possible.

Gina Robinson is director of early learning for Appoquinimink School District in Middletown, Delaware.

Rebecca Feathers is director of elementary curriculum for Appoquinimink School District.

During a visit by the Knowledge Matters Campaign to our district this spring, in answer to a question about what the panel of sixth- through eighth- grade students liked most about math, seventh grader Kacie said, “I like the problem-solving, and working as a team. And finding all the different solutions to one problem.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Sixth grader Maya echoed, “Yeah, I like how there are many different ways to get your answer. Not all are the same.”

These students’ responses brought big smiles to the faces of all the administrators in the room. This is exactly why we had embarked on our journey to implement new high-quality instructional materials four years ago.

Caesar Rodney School District was the first school district established in Delaware in 1919, and is located in the heart of the state. We serve approximately 8,000 students. Over the past 10 years, our district has grown dramatically, necessitating the opening of several new schools.

While our district was expanding, we looked at student achievement data and made a collective decision that, “we can do better.” We realized our previous materials consisted of a lot of procedural fluency problems and lacked opportunities for students to engage in conceptual mathematics and problem solving.

Our journey began in 2018, with the adoption of Illustrative Mathematics in grades 6-8. We wanted to provide our students with a global mathematical perspective, bringing the real world into math class, and IM provided that. We were fortunate to have Southern Regional Education Board’s Debbie Robertson, a school improvement instructional coach, help lay the foundation for the instructional shifts called for in this new curriculum. 

Our team was excited when the Knowledge Matters Campaign asked to visit us, to see inside middle school math classrooms. To the casual observer, our classrooms probably looked a lot like they had in pre-COVID times — but, in reality, much had changed.

Throughout COVID — during school closures and hybrid learning — our middle school teachers stayed the course with their new IM curriculum. IM provided us with instructional videos that teachers and students could use to support their virtual instruction, and provided “Adaptation Packs,” which consisted of adjusted units and lessons that supported our planning in the face of lost time due to COVID closures. They provided guidance on how to adjust instruction if students weren’t “getting it.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

In short, we had a curriculum partner supporting us in ways we never could have provided to each other, given everything else on our plates. As a result, not only did our teachers advance their understanding of the curriculum during those early days of the pandemic, our middle school iReady data showed no “summer slide” at the start of the 2020-21 school year.

Based on this experience, and even though a lot of people thought we were crazy, in the fall of 2020 (a hybrid year for us), we decided to pilot IM at the high school level for Algebra 1, Geometry and Algebra 2. We were awarded a from the Delaware Department of Education. Faith Muirhead, associate director of mathematics for the University of Delaware’s Professional Development Center for Educators, kicked off a two-year journey with our high school math teachers on learning how to effectively implement a problem-based curriculum with our students. The grant allowed teachers to spend more time participating in tailored professional learning sessions, which allowed them to learn more deeply about the paradigm shifts and instructional decisions called for in the curriculum.

“Students enter at different places in a problem,” Fifer Middle School Principal Kim Corbeil said. “It’s been really interesting to hear them say, ‘This is what I did.’ ”

Like the other high-quality mathematics curricula that were written in the wake of the Common Core State Standards, IM asks students to learn differently — to dialogue about mathematics, to engage with peers in problem solving, and to try multiple strategies for solving a problem. This is not the way most teachers were taught to teach mathematics. 

“If I would be stuck on a problem, I’ll go to my friend who can show me a different strategy that I have never done before,” sixth-grade student Faith said. “Going to the teacher might get the same strategy I had already been trying that has me stuck.”

Providing an environment for this kind of learning represents a big change. Our high school teachers, in particular, previously used a completely procedural set of traditional materials. But, a strange thing happened in the fall of 2020 when we did this crazy thing of piloting HQIM during hybrid schooling: teachers found their students were more interested in learning mathematics than ever before, due to the problem-based nature of the curriculum. 

We administered check-ins twice a year that revealed that students preferred learning math in a problem-based environment over a traditional approach — that they felt more confident, comfortable and excited about learning mathematics. (High School is now at the end of a two-year pilot and will vote on adoption this May.)

Returning from full hybrid learning this past year has been difficult, and we have found that the social-emotional needs of our middle school students, in particular, are great. Many of our eighth graders haven’t had to dialogue with classmates face-to-face throughout their entire middle school experience. 

But despite the challenges, our K-12 math teachers are reporting how grateful they are to have the IM curriculum in place, noting that the materials provide rich tasks that allow students to engage with others, come out of their shells, and explain their thinking and methodologies to other students. Kids are finally getting to be social again and play, which is the best way to learn math. IM — and the journey we took to make it the centerpiece of our mathematics instruction — provided the space and the opportunity for this to happen.

“I can read it!” “Me! Me! Me!” “I want to try!” my English as a Second Language students regularly exclaim, along with tiny waving hands and arms.

I get to see and hear and see this every day this year in my classroom, thanks to the new literacy curriculum we recently implemented at Byars Dowdy Elementary School.

Byars Dowdy is located in Lebanon, Tennessee, which is nestled just outside of the Country Music Capital of the World, and home to the first Cracker Barrel in the country. The Lebanon Special School District serves 3,770 students, nearly 600 of whom are enrolled at Byars Dowdy. At our school, 14% of the population are ESL students; 77% are economically disadvantaged. 

I have taught for 16 years. Of those, 10 were spent in the general education classroom in Kindergarten and third grade; six have been as an English as a Second Language teacher. 

Over the years, I struggled to find the best approach to teaching my kids to read. Like many of my colleagues, I felt that my undergraduate and graduate education programs didn’t really prepare me to do this. My programs were excellent, but they failed in this particular area.   

Trying to teach non-readers to read in third grade was particularly frustrating. I felt like I was doing them a disservice. We had a reading curriculum, with weekly stories that taught vocabulary and reading skills such as the main idea and drawing conclusions. But there wasn’t a phonics component. Like a lot of teachers, I had to find my own materials to piecemeal together instruction for kids that needed something more. I was basically guessing at what to teach and when to teach it. I suspected phonics was the solution, and desperately wanted a program that worked! 

My experience was not unique. When the Knowledge Matters Campaign visited our district as part of their schools tour, a number of my colleagues shared that they, too, had lacked knowledge about phonics and the importance of building phonemic awareness. 

While reading groups and reading strategies were lessons in school for teachers in training, ”sounds first” was not a part of that education, first-grade teacher Hannah Anderson said.

“In college, we learned reading strategies that told you what was missing, but not how to fill it in. I had one phonics course that was not in-depth at all,” second-grade teacher Tracy Tipton shared.

Fast forward to 2021: Much to my delight, our district adopted the curriculum for kindergarten through second grade that included both a phonics/skills portion and a knowledge-building component. This year, in addition to CKLA, we started to use the in those same grades. 

Last summer, our district hosted a week-long sounds first training put on by the Tennessee Department of Education — and a light bulb switched on for me. The training introduced me to the science behind teaching reading and even explained how the brain works. I now understood both how to teach reading, as well as why you teach reading skills in a certain order. 

Because of that, I entered this school year with excitement about the possibilities that lay ahead for my students. I didn’t teach kindergarten last year, so this was my first year to use the CKLA skills curriculum. I decided I was going to try it with my kindergarten group first. 

I have nine English language learners in my kindergarten group. At the beginning of the school year, half of them were Level I, which means their English language skills were extremely limited. Day one began with students learning how to draw lines that eventually turned into letter strokes. A few weeks later we got our first letter sound: /m/. The curriculum tells the students they are drawing a picture for the sound /m/. 

Not teaching the letter name with the sound was different from any way I had ever done it before. I had typically taught the letter names when I taught the sound. I decided to trust the process. By late September, some of my students were blending and writing consonant-vowel-consonant words, something that usually takes months rather than the six weeks it took with this method. I had never witnessed such progress so quickly in my ESL classroom. The curriculum also helped my students access vocabulary words they might not know yet by using visuals. 

In mid-November, a new student joined our group. He had just moved from Mexico and didn’t know any English. As of this April, I am proud to say, he is reading and writing words with blends and digraphs, and he knows all of his letter sounds. In the 16 years I’ve been teaching, I have never seen this much progress in such a short amount of time. What has typically required years with students in the past took him just five months.

The CKLA skills curriculum, paired with Tennessee Sounds First, is systematic and explicit. It takes the guesswork out of what to teach. The results I have witnessed this year have been phenomenal. We are now equipped with high-quality instructional materials, first-rate training, and our students are excelling. I am excited to see how the literacy skills of these kindergarten students progress over the next few years. 

“I didn’t know it could be this good. I thought we were doing OK; our kids seemed like they had the pieces,” kindergarten teacher Lisa Mullis told our Knowledge Matters visitors. “But now that I see where these kids are, I feel a little sad for how we sent some of the kids forward before. We are sending forward far more prepared students. Now I can see what they can do and it’s really amazing.”

My advice to anyone who is hesitant about getting started is to just trust the process.  Throughout our district, we have witnessed unbelievable growth in our students. Our kindergartners are ready for first grade thanks to CKLA and the Sounds First curriculum. Every child deserves the best education they can possibly receive, and with these high-quality literacy programs, that’s what we’re giving them.

The idea that “all students can learn” has driven me as an educator for more than 20 years. Beginning in my classroom as a teacher, extending to leading a school building as a principal, and now in my daily experience as a school superintendent guiding a district, making sure that belief is played out on a daily basis has often been challenging, and yet it has always been rewarding. 

This belief planted its roots in me during an experience with one of my earliest students. I met John as a first-year teacher. He walked into my middle school computer classroom with his fiery red hair and a personality and intelligence that were both tremendously above average. John could fix anything. His favorite was motorcycles, but that also included my often-broken classroom computers. However, John struggled to read and that bothered me. At the time, I didn’t know why such intelligent students were not able to perform the most important skill in education. It was then that literacy became the foundation of my belief that “all students can learn.”

As a principal, I learned from several passionate educators about phonemes, blends and dyslexia. Determined to create a school structure where “all students can learn,” I invested school resources into where students, including those students with strong dyslexic tendencies, experienced great success. Watching parents cry as they heard their struggling learners read with fluency was all the reward I needed to overcome the struggle of “doing school differently.” I clearly saw that our team was making a difference.

On October 18, 2012, the driving belief that “all students can learn” manifested itself into a personal mission for me and my family. Our son Trent was born completely perfect that day, including with one extra chromosome. His life with Down syndrome looks similar to the journey of those struggling students I had passionately served throughout the course of my career. Only this time, my experience would extend beyond the school day into my home. 

I asked the same questions I had been challenging myself and my colleagues with for years: “What does the student need?” and “How do we provide it?” Grounded in my belief that literacy is the foundation of learning, I was determined for Trent to be an independent reader. 

Trent is now a second-grader, living his life and having a ball. He is not yet an independent reader, but he has the foundational literacy skills to access the knowledge-based curriculum we use — and thus the path paved to get him there. The world is opening to him and his future is bright. There’s a vivid sense of accomplishment in his eyes when he knows he’s sounded out a new word on his own. I want that for all students.

Trent’s district, Milan Special School District â€” which I also lead — recently made the change to a “” literacy curriculum for all students, not just those receiving intervention. In the summer, 100% of our Pre-K-4 teachers, including special education teachers, participated in a robust two-week training program on the science of reading and sounds-first instruction provided by the Tennessee State Department of Education. As a result of this training, and the adoption of a powerful high-quality foundational skills program, I’m ecstatic to report that Trent is in good company, as anecdotal evidence from educators — which we expect to soon be confirmed in our data — says more of our students are learning to read than ever before.

And, they’re learning at a faster rate. Our teachers see the difference in their classrooms. 

“I see a lot of growth since the beginning of the year with my kids, especially my struggling readers,” first-grade teacher Anna Eaton told the Knowledge Matters Campaign. “I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that they like the readers; it makes them feel confident. When we have free time, it is awesome because they will pull out their readers to read ahead. I don’t mind because they want to read ahead. They want to see what happens next. Seeing them sound out the words and really use the tools we have been teaching them all year, it is awesome to see it transpire.”

Teachers overwhelmingly agree that our new curriculum is the missing piece we have been looking for in reading instruction. They have also expressed their appreciation for a developed curriculum that they don’t have to bootstrap themselves, particularly a uniform one, allowing teachers to collaborate and offering all students an equal education.

“We’re teachers, not curriculum writers,” kindergarten teacher Sarah Wilson said. â€œI’m thankful that now I can just teach it.”

Our students’ families are seeing big differences at home and on road trips as students are even helping their siblings learn to read and sound out road signs. Jackie Hopper, the district’s supervisor of secondary teaching and learning, said her granddaughter’s progress has been astounding — the kindergartner didn’t know the full alphabet at the beginning of the school year.

“I was trying to be patient. She didn’t do pre-K because of COVID,” Hopper said. “[The other day] I asked her to spell ‘pop’ to me, and she sounded it out ‘P-O-P.’ That’s how they learn now.”

All students can learn. I believe that and I am experiencing it. To watch teachers and administrators embrace the high-quality curriculum, to hear parents recognize their child’s success, and most importantly, to see students become independent readers, is the evidence of hard working teachers using high-quality curricula.

Jonathan Criswell is the director of schools for Milan Special School District in Tennessee.

“I can actually read this!” kindergartner Easton Malone exclaimed while reading a book during Dr. Seuss Week this spring.

Every teacher in primary grades longs to hear those words from their students. If you step foot in any of the classrooms from pre-K through second grade in Elizabethton City Schools, you are met with a palpable buzz of excitement and purpose as our youngest readers embrace a new reading approach. This enthusiasm has not always been present: getting to this point has been a journey. 

Elizabethton City Schools is a small, rural district nestled in the hills of East Tennessee where we spent years building a literacy model rooted in balanced literacy. Unfortunately, while we were meeting the needs of some of our students, we were not doing what was best for all students. Learning to read is one of the most empowering gifts we can foster for students in the early years, but how do we empower educators to teach reading confidently and effectively?

In the summer of 2021, every pre-K through fifth-grade teacher and administrator participated in a two-week provided by the Tennessee Department of Education. Over two weeks of professional learning, both virtually and in-person, our teachers were being challenged to consider new practices based on the science of reading. The content was rigorous, deep in knowledge and led to excellent discussions. Our teachers and leaders intentionally placed students at the heart of every conversation. The training was met with curiosity, some skepticism and a lot of questions. Armed with new knowledge, yet no concrete plan for change, our school year began.

Behind the scenes, administrators and coaches were working on a concrete plan: one that included both long-term and short-term goals. We knew effectively combining new, high-quality foundational skills instructional materials with the district’s current curriculum would not be easy. To succeed would require a team effort. Our teachers needed to feel safe and supported as they took risks with their literacy instructional practice. As a team of administrators, instructional coaches and teachers, we would work together to move in a direction toward reading proficiency for all students. 

Due to the major shift this represented for teachers, we agreed to a “year of grace.” Teachers would not be required to fully implement the new foundational skills materials with fidelity until the 2022-23 school year. Teachers were presented with a clear message from coaches: “Not only are the resources available for you to use in your own time, but we will meet you where you are and we will give you what you need. You are not alone.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The district started with small changes, beginning with the adoptive practice of teaching “” using the Tennessee Foundational Skills Curriculum Supplement. By implementing this daily, systematic phonemic awareness curriculum, teachers began the shift from traditional balanced literacy to instruction rooted in the science of reading.  

It didn’t take long before teachers started to feel the impact “sounds first” had on their students. This 10-minute, advanced phonological awareness block was the spark that ignited change. Students were engaged and teachers were seeing immediate results from all students. This one step opened the door for further collaboration. Teachers began to ask, “With such a huge impact on our students in only 10 minutes, how might students begin to grow when we use all pieces of the TNFSCS?” 

We knew we had lit a fire when a teacher grabbed their principal from the hallway and exclaimed, “You have got to come see what my kids can do!”

Curiosity was piqued. As coaches worked closely with teachers, an atmosphere of trust, respect and grace was established like never before. Teachers felt comfortable being open, honest and vulnerable. As teachers asked questions and communicated their needs, coaches and administrators were responsive. After a few weeks of implementing sounds first, we were shocked and delighted to learn that more than half of the Pre-K-2 teachers wanted to fully implement the systematic foundational skills instruction mid-year. As a second-grade teacher said, “If it’s best for our kids, what do we have to lose?”

Implementing a new curriculum mid-year is no easy task. Even with the support of coaches, our teachers had to put in a lot of effort. They had to study the content, collaborate with one another and intentionally reflect on their practice. Just like during the summer training, our teachers kept what was best for students at the center of every decision. 

“We were blown away with how well the children did with it,” reflected Whitney Birchfield, a kindergarten teacher who implemented the full program mid-year. “To us, it was so different from the way we were teaching children to read. We expected them to struggle the same way we did but they picked up things so quickly and so easily. It came so naturally for them.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

For our teachers who were hesitant, providing an avenue to meet with colleagues was so valuable. The proof of success was very powerful coming from educators who were doing the work and reporting it to others. The process was slow but meaningful as teachers took ownership and were supported by one another. The buy-in continued to strengthen as teachers began selling to other, more apprehensive teachers. They couldn’t contain their excitement as they continued to see unprecedented rates of reading growth with their students.

In the fall, just seven of Hannah Bowers’ first-graders were on grade level, based on an analysis by the district’s universal screener. Just two months into the new curriculum, that figure more than doubled to 15, and Bowers believes the number will continue to go up as students continue to receive high-quality instruction with high-quality materials.

Parents have seen the impact of this curriculum shift, too. One first-grade parent, who asked to remain unnamed for her child’s privacy, said that her daughter went from “really behind” in intervention at the beginning of the year to now writing her own stories and books. They’re even reading chapter books together.

“In these last few months, I have seen a complete about-face,” the parent said.“I have seen her completely change — she loves to read now. I’m amazed because I’ve sat at my kitchen table and seen her change.”

Using these high-quality instructional materials and the approaches supported by the evidence-based science of reading has been a great equalizer for teachers and students alike. Intervention group sizes have dwindled as explicit and systematic reading instruction has been made accessible to all students. By the end of the 2021-22 school year, all Pre-K through second-grade teachers will be fully implementing the materials, well before the anticipated start date of August 2022. 

“Empowered.” That’s how one first-grade teacher described how she feels after implementing instruction backed by the science of reading. Empowered teachers empower readers. We can’t wait to hear more of the sweet chorus of, “I can actually read this!” in the years to come. 

Rachel Darnell, Shannon Barnett and Jennifer Rickert are instructional coaches for Elizabethton City Schools in Tennessee.

Many Massachusetts public schools still use balanced literacy programs , a nonprofit that evaluates K-12 curriculum across English language arts, math and science. Around the same time, I happened to visit pioneering Massachusetts districts that have adopted evidence-based approaches to reading instruction. Educators there have much to teach us about the benefits of adopting strong curricula with professional learning support and why the timing is critical now. I was deeply interested in hearing what educators had to say about why they made the change and how it’s going.

EdReports’s recent reviews of and faulted them for text quality and for not including enough explicit teaching of phonological awareness. , Units of Study was the second most frequently used elementary English language arts curriculum in Massachusetts, and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom was the fourth.

Not Getting Results Compelled Change 

Roughly half of the third-grade students in our state are not reading on grade level — not because of students’ abilities, but because of our pattern of denying them access to evidence-based literacy instruction, high-quality curriculum materials, and culturally responsive environments. 

“We had seven years of data, and it had flatlined or only marginally improved for the past six years,” said Emily Whitcomb, director of curriculum and instruction of UP Academy of Holland, a school that previously used balanced literacy. “We were exiting kids, at best, [with] half of them on grade level. Our sense was that if we keep doing the same thing, we are going to get the same result.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

And Alix Lesser, a fourth grade teacher at the same school, said “90 percent of our teacher brainpower” was being spent on reading groups that were not yielding progress.

Kathleen Seifert, director of teaching, learning and talent development at Southbridge Public Schools explained that a look at fifth-grade data, where just nine students were on grade level heading to middle school, compelled the shift in her district.

Countless Hours Finding Background Materials 

We also heard about issues that were well beyond the scope of the EdReports reviews. Teachers described the workload associated with the reading workshop model within Units of Study in particular.

“The switching between content and demand on kids’ background knowledge was extraordinary,” said Salem Assistant Supt. Kate Carbone. “One day, fire trucks. The next day, butterflies — this was a real challenge for kids’ literacy and language development.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Often the texts’ topics were unfamiliar to students who did not yet have background knowledge on topics like firefighting or pollinators. Students who are multilingual learners or students living in poverty benefit the most from curricula that stays with one topic for a longer period of time, systematically building new knowledge and the language that goes with it, and that was missing. 

In response, teachers spent weekends and nights creating their own supplemental materials from places like Pinterest, Teachers Pay Teachers and other sources so that students could have the knowledge the curriculum required. Educators said shifting to a high-quality curriculum that embeds both the knowledge building and literacy development has lifted an enormous burden.

Benefits for Students 

Across our visits, we heard stories about increased equity for students, whose instruction no longer depended on teachers using fragmented supplemental materials that varied across schools. We heard in Salem, Southbridge, Pentucket, and UP Academy Holland how student work is stronger now, especially in decoding words and developing deeper knowledge. We heard from students, who described their appreciation for consistent and predictable instructional routines. We heard teachers describe their relief that high student mobility rates would not hamper student growth, since the district was using a unified curriculum; there had previously been so much variation in what was taught; now, moving to a new neighborhood and new school did not threaten access to the content. At UP Academy Holland, administrators shared that there were fewer disciplinary referrals during the ELA block because students were more engaged in the process and content of learning to read. Teachers of students with disabilities and multilingual learners said they and their students are better included. 

Benefits for Teachers 

One big benefit to the move away from balanced literacy and adoption of high-quality materials that we heard about from educators was how the shift has promoted professional collaboration and uses their time more effectively. Teachers know what colleagues are teaching across a school and district and can work together on how to best teach the materials, rather than spending time on what to teach. Teachers were relieved not to have to spend hours creating materials on their own; this was particularly true for new teachers, but also for veteran teachers who had struggled with how to support new teachers when there was no coherent curriculum. Investing in building teacher and administrator capacity has also been a benefit. “To get to the next level for students, we need highly knowledgeable professional teachers who know the way to close the gap in the moment…[we need] to build knowledge among all of us,” said Southbridge Supt. Jeffrey Villar. All of the districts we visited were providing professional learning on evidence-based reading for teachers and administrators.

Curriculum Matters. Now Is the Time  

When we asked educators what advice they would give to others considering a shift away from balanced literacy, the educators we engaged with said that while it is not easy to make these shifts, it has never mattered more. As we help students recover from the pandemic, it is imperative that we give them evidence-based, culturally responsive instruction and high-quality materials and that we support teachers with time and job-embedded professional learning. The districts we visited used federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money to support their efforts — a perfect use of the time-limited funds to build educator knowledge and capacity. 

“There’s a quote from Maya Angelou that we always use, ‘Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better,’” said the principal of a school we visited.

Now that we have the knowledge, we can do better for our students.

Heather G. Peske, Ed.D. is senior associate commissioner for the Center for Instructional Support at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

“So, when are you going to transition grades 3-5 to the new literacy materials; my teacher friends are asking?  They’re so °ůąđ˛šťĺ˛â!”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

I was reminded of this comment by a classroom teacher, which occured when I joined a second-grade common planning meeting earlier this fall, as I listened to what our teachers were telling recent visitors as part of the Knowledge Matters School Tour visit to our district. The excitement among the K-2 team was spreading and 3-5 wanted in on it.

In 2019, our district undertook a review of our early literacy curriculum and instructional model, which we acknowledged was simply not meeting the diverse needs of our students. While academic achievement had improved modestly, far too many students were still not reading on grade level, something that weighed heavily on everyone in the district. 

The review revealed many pain points beyond test results — a lack of alignment to standards, teachers feeling overwhelmed by cross checking between materials to ensure we were covering things, and a failure to build knowledge and skills in a systematic, sequential fashion. It also revealed that we’d not provided our staff with the training they needed to build their capacity and confidence to expertly teach foundational literacy skills.

“We were grabbing things from 125 different places, from any place, covering things not spelled out in the Units of Study curriculum,” second grade teacher Stacey Vaillancourt said. “And it was so subjective. What one teacher was reading was not what another one was; there was no consistency.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Maybe most importantly, we came to realize that our curriculum didn’t hold interest for many of our students. Too often texts emphasized Eurocentric characters and perspectives at the exclusion of providing a balance of windows and mirrors that connected knowledge to the lived experiences of all students. And because our old curriculum, Units of Study, was organized around text and writing genres as opposed to topics or themes, the scope and sequence made it difficult to cohesively build students’ background knowledge and vocabulary in a thoughtful and meaningful way, knowledge that all of our students need. 

To further complicate things, a third-party review conducted by Johns Hopkins University of the texts being used in our classrooms revealed that students were being exposed to a steady diet of texts that lacked the depth and complexity expected for the grade level.

Motivated by these growing concerns, early in 2019, a team of 25 classroom teachers, special educators, multilingual teachers, and school and district leaders dug into student performance and growth data, consulted the research, and examined available reviews from EdReports. While the process was slowed slightly by the pandemic, our team emerged with a set of criteria through which prospective materials were considered, and ultimately, Salem Public Schools landed on an evidence-based curriculum resource that all K-2 classrooms began implementing this school year.

Moving a whole district to a new curriculum is a huge undertaking at any time, and certainly so following a school year disrupted by a pandemic and school closures. 

“We are sending a message of grace, flexibility, and patience with this,” assistant principal Lauren Weaver said.

When visiting the second-grade common planning time session, I was prepared to be confronted by some level of frustration and dissent related to the new materials. What I experienced instead was a group of educators thoroughly immersed in learning how to integrate the materials into their practice, which included collaborative problem-solving around parts that did not yet make complete sense to them. I was so encouraged by the level to which the teachers were embracing the materials, and quite pleasantly surprised by the inquiry about when the district might consider including the upper elementary grades in the implementation.

While the pivot to new, high-quality curriculum was unquestionably a student-centered move, we are learning now that there are significant benefits for teachers as well. Resoundingly, teachers point to the enormous weight of planning that has been lifted off their shoulders. 

“Teachers want to do best by students; that’s their desire. But planning countless hours makes it difficult,” literacy coach Julie Lenocker said. 

Access to these resources is proving transformative for teachers. They no longer need to spend hours building lesson trajectories. Instead, teachers have a clearly defined roadmap of lessons and standards to work from. The new resource provides a clear scope and sequence for reading and writing lessons supported by diverse text sets to use both with the whole class and small groups. Teachers’ time is now spent collaborating with colleagues on how best to implement the new resources to meet the unique needs of the students in front of them which includes reviewing student work and formative assessment data.

The time teachers used to spend searching for mentor texts, read-alouds and book sets for small group instruction, they now use to preview the culturally relevant texts that come with the materials and for planning access and entry points so that all students can fully engage with these high-quality, grade-level texts. 

Going forward, we are targeting our professional learning for teachers, reading specialists, and school leaders on strategies that specifically support the implementation of our high-quality curriculum materials. Currently, we have 70 educators from across six elementary schools attending a graduate level course on the science of reading. This districtwide effort was launched to bolster knowledge of research-based literacy practices and will codify approaches used to explicitly teach students how to read.

In Salem Public Schools, we believe it is our moral obligation to ensure that all students have access to high-quality, evidence-based instructional materials. Who knew that the shift would come with many benefits for teachers, as well, by giving back valuable time they can use for planning to teach as opposed to gathering materials they need to teach.

Kate Carbone is deputy superintendent of Salem Public Schools.

“Teaching reading is rocket science,” Louisa Moats for saying. It is something we frequently referenced during our guided reading professional development for teachers. Sadly, until we started on our Science of Reading journey two-plus years ago, we had no idea how bereft our instruction was of the benefits of that science.  

Our collective awakening started as a result of listening to Emily Hanford’s podcast, “,” in which Hanford reveals that reading instruction in America has led children to read poorly based on a flawed theory of the mechanics of reading. While the three of us had different emotional reactions to hearing it, our powerful common experience was, “We have to do ˛ő´ÇłžąđłŮłóžą˛Ô˛ľ!”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The “do something” started with a lot of reading from Google searches, Facebook groups, and blog posts. Then came reflections on our own practices as teachers — practices we’d learned in our teacher prep programs and in professional development sessions in the years that followed — much of which has now been disproven (if, indeed, it was ever actually founded in evidence). As administrators, we came to recognize that we’d passed many of these ill-founded notions on to teachers at our school — and that has produced no small amount of guilt. How could we have taught students to read this way for so many years?! 

In a recent series of focus group meetings as part of a visit by the Knowledge Matters School Tour to UP Academy Holland, we had an opportunity to reflect on our past practices and how we got to where we are. While we had implemented a strong , on-grade-level phonics curriculum for all students in grades K-3 a few years back, in small groups, teachers were still using texts at students’ “just right” (which is to say, below grade level in many cases) reading level and basing their instruction on disproven strategies like “three-cueing” which asks them to use picture or context clues and guess at words based on syntax. We may have put on a “phonics patch,” but our small group instruction wasn’t complementing it; in fact it was likely competing with it. In addition, our whole group Reading Workshop curriculum featured units that were focused around decontextualized discrete comprehension skills, rather than knowledge building sets of texts. In talking to our visitors as part of the School Tour, teachers called what we were doing “a hodgepodge”, “segmented”, “disconnected”, “lacking cohesion.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč; 

“Students could be in [one level] for comprehension and another level for fluency”, one teacher said.  Another piped in, “Yeah, How do you group a student whose fluency and word-solving skills are excellent but she has no idea what the book is about?”

Even more importantly, students were bored and really didn’t enjoy their literacy instruction. They weren’t engaged, and we saw the most challenging behaviors of the day during our core ELA blocks. This is what you would have seen at our school three years ago. You also would have heard teachers describing our curriculum as “frustrating” and “hurting their soul” for both themselves and their students.  

So much is different now that we have fully implemented a structured literacy approach with the EL Education Language Arts curriculum. What you see now in our building is students engaged in knowledge-building modules, learning about topics like fossils and schools around the world. The 43 percent of our students who are English Learners get to engage in oral language strategies that are beneficial to their language development and participate in discussions about sets of texts that build knowledge and vocabulary right along with their non-EL peers. 

In our small groups, you’ll see teachers targeting phonemic awareness skills and working on decodable texts that give students the opportunity to apply the phonics patterns they are learning. When we teach high-frequency words, we make explicit connections between the phonemes and the graphemes, and all of our literacy teachers are engaged in . Happily, we’ve seen a significant decrease in behavioral issues during the ELA block. 

The list of early changes our teachers reported seeing in their students was long: 

• “I notice that their ability to respond orally to questions is more natural,” one second grade teacher said. 
• “We used to ask a pretty easy question and it was crickets. Now it’s more natural because we ask 40 questions in a lesson and they think about the text and have something to say about it.” one of our special educators shared. “Students take time to decode words instead of guessing or using pictures.”
• “Student writing looks better than it has ever looked,” said a third grade teacher.  
• “The kids know more about what they’re writing about. They’re more confident.  They’re using expert vocabulary words.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč; 

Teachers are responding enthusiastically as well. Not only do they enjoy teaching more because students are more excited, they aren’t feeling as overwhelmed.  One teacher told us, “[Before] we didn’t trust in the power of what was going to happen.” We now hear teachers saying, “This curriculum is much more specific.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč; “The clarity is powerful.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč; “Kids actually enjoy learning about these topics.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

We see increased engagement, joy, and growth from our students. And this has led to yet another realization that — at its core — our shift was one towards a more equitable education for our scholars. 

It was only after we started to implement evidence-based literacy instruction that we could really see the stark differences between balanced literacy practices and those that were more evidence-based. For us, this journey and shift has been personal — personal for ourselves as educators to do right by our students, personal in that we had been taught a way of teaching that was wrong and yet believed it for so many years, and personal for the students who we saw struggle every single day with the way things were taught. That first year, we must have said, “when you know better, you do better” hundreds of times — because it was true. And now that we’re on the other side of things, we can say that we’re doing better. 

Victoria Thompson is principal of UP Academy Holland in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Wolfson is UP Academy Holland’s reading specialist/instructional coach. Mandy Hollister is UP Academy Holland’s ESL teacher/ coordinator/ instructional coach.

“We all know that the teacher knows more than us,” an eighth-grader said during the Knowledge Matters School Tour last month. “They know more, so they have more power. I don’t feel that way in science anymore. My teacher wants to know what I know and what I’m thinking. Nowadays I raise my hand because I know that I have something important to share.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

This young man’s words were music to my ears.

Taunton is a small city in southeastern Massachusetts, located 40 miles south of Boston. Our students are culturally and linguistically diverse and come from a range of socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. Traditionally, we have struggled on the MCAS assessment — the state’s standardized exams — and this is especially true in middle school science, where we score at least 10 points below the state average. Our students are curious and engaged and our educators are passionate and dedicated, but this has not been enough to adequately prepare them for science, technology, engineering and mathematics education in high school and beyond.

Two years ago, we began implementing a new science curriculum, , which is available open-source and has gained a real foothold in Massachusetts, in part because we were a partner state in its development.

At the heart of our journey to implement a strong science curriculum has been our determination to provide equitable learning experiences that would help all of our students see themselves as scientists. Students’ reflection during the School Tour visit gives me hope that we are on our way.

“I love that we don’t have to answer every question with a right answer…I can share what I’m thinking and that can make my friend come up with a new idea that helps us both get us closer to understanding,” one student said. Contrasting OpenSciEd with what they used to do, most students cited the lack of endless worksheets and regurgitating of information. “I’m actually learning because I have to share my thoughts and back them up with evidence,” another student shared. 

Prior to our adoption of OpenSciEd, most middle school science teachers wrote their own curriculum. Unfortunately this led to vastly different educational experiences across our four middle schools, exacerbating knowledge and skill gaps when our students entered high school. In 2018, we began to explore what a unified curriculum might do for us and to look for something that was tightly aligned to standards and supported the unique learning needs of middle school students. We also wanted to find something that was culturally responsive, with an emphasis on student voice and choice so that students could see and believe that they are learners and doers of science.  

In OpenSciEd, each grade level has six units or storylines where students grapple with and learn about a scientific phenomenon. The curriculum is aligned to the and provides teachers a pathway to navigate science content and practices in a rigorous fashion while helping students with sensemaking.

In 2019, we had three teachers pilot two units in their classrooms. There was already so much inconsistency from school to school and classroom to classroom that this didn’t feel like a big risk. Once these educators saw their classrooms change — which happened pretty quickly — they were hooked. 

“I will admit that making a shift when I really didn’t have to wasn’t something I welcomed,” said one pilot teacher, who had over 30 years of teaching experience. “After seeing what happened in my first class, an inclusion class, where all of my students were sharing their thinking and learning together, it all changed for me.”

Word of these small successes spread quickly and, in a grassroots fashion, more teachers asked to be involved. One classroom teacher told our visitors from the School Tour that after sitting in on one of the pilot classrooms, seeing all of the post-it notes and posters displaying students’ different ideas and hearing rich scientific discussion happening, he walked away convinced. “After 20 years, I’ve been doing this all wrong,” he said.

Right now, thanks to a grant from the , which supports our professional development, every middle school educator in Taunton is implementing the OpenSciEd curriculum and the high school is piloting newly developed units. This has required a huge cultural and pedagogical shift for our educators.

The motto of OpenSciEd is “go slow to go fast,” and educators often have to remind themselves of this as they reflect on their own teaching. During a School Tour roundtable discussion, a 20-year veteran teacher said he felt like a first-year teacher. But while letting go of his decades-long practices was difficult, he started to see the method unfold successfully among his students.

Another teacher noted that the OpenSciEd pedagogy went against his instincts by letting students talk. But then it occurred to him, “Kids love to talk; the curriculum is leveraging this! We are building a learning community where students are trusting each other and their own thinking for the first time.”

Another teacher noted that she feels teachers sometimes “put kids in boxes based on what we think they are capable of…but if we just let them go, you would be amazed at the quality of their conversations.”

A unique component of the OpenSciEd training is that teachers are asked to play the role of students; to “put on their student hat.” Our teachers were initially hesitant but eventually learned that this shift in perspective is one of the most important aspects of the training. Teachers found it meaningful to be overwhelmed by the feeling of not knowing and then figuring it all out with a colleague.

“Collaborating with a partner to think through a solution is real life and we should be giving our students those experiences,” one veteran teacher noted.

OpenSciEd asks students to share what they know and think in order to make sense of novel phenomena with their peers. It requires a fair amount of vulnerability to share your ideas and not know the right answer. If we want this kind of bravery from our students, educators must be willing to engage in it themselves. Change is difficult. It should feel uncomfortable. From this experience, I’ve learned to lean into that discomfort and trust the curriculum. Be vulnerable in front of your students. That is the best way to teach them that it is OK not to know and to help them build a trusted learning community that will help them do the work of learning together.

Elizabeth Pawlowski is director of STEM for Taunton Public Schools in Massachusetts.

Claymont Elementary School was constructed in 1969 as a high school. It played a pivotal role in our nation’s fight to create fair and equitable schools for all students, being one of two northern Delaware schools named in the landmark Brown v. The Board of Education court order that declared school segregation unconstitutional.

Today, Claymont is a diverse, 800-student K-5 school serving a predominately low-income population. We house Spanish Immersion, the Brandywine Specialized Autism Program, and a gifted and talented program for grades four through eight, in addition to serving a large multilingual learner population.

Claymont’s journey of transformation through the implementation of high-quality instructional materials occurred just as we were being identified by the Delaware Department of Education as an underperforming school. In 2015, just 41 percent of our students were proficient in English Language Arts and only 39 percent were proficient in math. Based on these scores, we became a state “Focus School,” which required developing a plan together with the state for academic improvement.

Claymont was fortunate that, as this was going on in the background, our district office introduced as our response to intervention curriculum for reading. Using Bookworms, we were able to see our students who receive small-group and intensive interventions make progress much more quickly than they had in the past. We attribute this to the systematic focus on foundational skills contained in the program.

“By targeting decoding skills, we can get to fluency much faster,” says Kristen Cook, Brandywine School District’s reading specialist.

We had heard about Seaford’s success using Bookworms with all students in the class. We visited several other districts and asked our teachers to pilot the materials for one week — and everyone became excited to move forward with the curriculum. Rather than implementing at certain grade levels with certain teachers, we chose to dive all-in and bring the curriculum on across the board. We knew there would be growing pains, and we wanted to go through those together as a team. Everyone knew a change was needed — and everyone wanted to be part of the solution.

Our first priority was to map out our professional development plan, and it was extensive. We received support from our district office and coaches at the University of Delaware. We targeted professional development for specific grade levels and specific content. We differentiated our faculty meetings to address areas of concern revealed by the data, which was gathered both from walkthroughs and benchmark assessments. Coaches supported individual teacher needs. And for educators to share resources and strategies that were working, we devoted staff meeting time and made it the crux of our professional learning communities, in which our teachers regularly gather in small groups to collaborate and learn from each other.

What we’ve learned is that despite Bookworms being a relatively structured (some even say “scripted”) curriculum, it actually provides a framework that enables teachers to deliver powerful, student-centered instruction in their classrooms. One structure, for example, is a focus on a high volume of reading for all students. This is supported by a curated library of 275 whole-length, content-rich texts that students read and study across their K-5 experience. What is not to like about scripting that looks like that? What I find interesting is that our teachers don’t “feel the script.” Instead, they talk about how kids love the books.

“One of the parts that I love is hearing kids walking around talking about books,” fifth-grade teacher Brian Horne told us. “I have been teaching for over 20 years and I never remember [that].”

And it’s not just the students. Kindergarten teacher Meredith Allen said that she, herself, gets excited by every book she reads with her students. It might sound to some ears like an oxymoron: that a very structured curriculum is actually driving a much greater love of reading. But that’s our truth.

Just one year later during the 2018 and 2019 school year, based on the Department of Education criteria, Claymont Elementary was identified as an “Exceptional School.” English Language Arts proficiency scores after implementing Bookworms increased over three years to 62 percent from 41 percent. Proficiency scores in math (we adopted around the same time) rose to 60 percent from 39 percent over the same period.

“It’s been an amazing transformation,” fourth-grade teacher Jodi Engleman told our school tour visitors.

Whether with Bookworms or Eureka Math, we attribute our success to the following:

• Implementing the curriculum with full fidelity, monitored via walkthroughs and observations
• Buy-in by staff and teacher commitment to implementing the curriculum, all of which came as a result of staff seeing positive changes early on
• Staff professional development focused on areas of need that are data-driven and teacher-directed
• Coaches and district office staff providing professional development and individual support to staff as needed
• Professional learning community meetings focused on the curriculum including instruction, data, and strengths/weaknesses
• Ensuring we stayed student-focused. From our data to student’s reactions to the curriculum, we wanted to ensure our students were engaged

Change does not happen overnight. The work we do as educators is not easy, but it is necessary. In each student there is greatness, and it is the job of the educator to find it. As we continue this journey, we are excited about the future for our students — and we remain committed to the process of change so that we can help students achieve their greatness.

“If you, as a district leader, are looking at the data and it’s not producing results, change it,” says Lavina Jones-Davis, Brandywine School District’s director of elementary education.

We invite our fellow educators to embrace the change that high-quality curriculum and curriculum-based professional learning can produce. You’ll be glad you did.

Tamara Grimes Stewart is principal of Claymont Elementary School in Wilmington, Delaware.

“Maybe you don’t know about Sitting Bull”, fourth-grader Ellen told us. “When he was our age, he killed a buffalo with his bare hands.”

Ellen, a student at Richard Shields Elementary School in Lewes, Delaware, is part of a panel of seven students who came together to tell visitors from the Knowledge Matters School Tour and leaders from other districts what’s different about their literacy instruction.

Unlike other places the School Tour visits, however, these students couldn’t contrast their knowledge-rich literacy experience with the skills-focused one that is more typical of so many other young people’s English language arts lessons. Ellen and her peers know nothing else; we’ve been using since she was a kindergartener. Still, it was rewarding for us to hear these students share how much they like to research new topics, which is staple to their ELA time and the ARC curriculum.

Ellen and her classmates’ familiarity with the curriculum and its routines paid big dividends for us this past year when we had to shift to remote learning. Not only did our teachers have a roadmap that no pandemic was going to disrupt, but the kids knew what was expected of them. All they had to adjust to was the technology.

And we had a great partner. Working with a publisher who puts student learning at the core of its mission, who jumped in and created tools and resources to support the shift, made all the difference to us here in Cape Henlopen School District as we were thrust into remote learning and now operate on a hybrid model.

Our district made the decision to adopt ARC Core in 2016, but we engaged in a three-year rollout to fully implement, each year focusing on a new core feature of the curriculum. ARC lent itself nicely to this strategy. Every step of the way included ARC-provided professional development for teachers. It happened over the summer, during the school year, at district-wide professional development days, and our own professional learning community time. District goals and building goals for student growth were created and tackled through “Plan,” “Do,” “Study” and “Act” cycles. All PD focused on these goals but was differentiated to meet the needs of the students at each school. We continue to receive professional development from ARC five years into our journey.

The success we have seen at Richard Shields Elementary is inspiring. One example particularly impressed our visitors: As part of a newly introduced cadence of “data huddles,” we met weekly for less than 20 minutes with a fourth-grade classroom teacher and the EL teacher to discuss student progress and obstacles they felt were preventing EL students from showing more growth. It turns out the classroom teacher didn’t know how to use the phonics toolkit at a first-grade level, which is where the EL students were reading. The huddle team decided we would have her sit in with a first-grade teacher during targeted small group time where she used that toolkit. After seeing it modeled and implementing what the first-grade teacher had used into her own small group work, five of the six students had at least a year’s growth in reading — in just one month’s time.

One of the things our staff tells us is so powerful about the journey they’ve been on for the past five years is how they’ve grown as teacher leaders. I think our coaches, specialists and administrators can say the same.

The unique training that reading specialists have received has allowed them to serve as a main line of support to teachers. Working with ARC, reading specialists have built their own expertise in coaching, which has resulted in stronger relationships and rapport between them and the teaching staff. That has in turn improved everyone’s understanding of data, instruction and learning cycles.

Our students are showing growth in all areas as a result of this environment of aligned instructional support. Just as teachers, coaches and administrators now have a common language and shared vision of high-quality English language arts instruction, our students also display evidence of better relationships with their teachers. We attribute this to the engaging discussions the knowledge-rich texts enable and the one-on-one or small group skills conferencing that is a key feature of ARC Core. Teachers know their students not only as readers and writers but also as individuals. In the words of Aristotle, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” In Cape Henlopen, Delaware, our team genuinely believes we’re educating hearts. And I don’t think we would feel that way if we didn’t have a curriculum that helped us do it.

Kimberly Corbidge is principal of Richard Shields Elementary School in Lewes, Delaware.

Angela Shaeffer is Richard Shields Elementary School’s reading specialist.

Seaford is a small, 8,000-person town in southwestern Delaware — 3,500 of those residents are students in our school district. Previously known as the “Nylon Capital of the World,” Seaford, like so many small communities around the country, is struggling to reshape itself after its primary employer, DuPont, left town in 2003.

In the past 10 years, opportunity in the agricultural sector has attracted a growing immigrant population resulting in a doubling of our English learner student population to nearly 25 percent. For a small east coast town, we have a very ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse student body.

Being selected to take part in a national tour of schools that are models for implementation of high-quality instructional materials — referenced here later as HQIM — was a big thrill for us. We are always eager to have guests in our schools; welcoming visitors back after over a year due to COVID was even more exciting.

Seaford Central Elementary School has in many ways served as a “lab school” for , a relatively new English language arts curriculum that was developed by researchers at the University of Delaware. Our district has been implementing Bookworms for six years now. In that time, we’ve had amazing results.

In 2015, of 19 school districts in the state, Seaford was dead last in every single category and subgroup. Out of all the districts in Delaware, students in our district were least likely to meet Common Core expectations in the 2014-2015 academic year. We weren’t just a “focus school” — we were dangerously close to being taken over by the state.

Today we’re in Delaware as mea­­sured by English Language Arts state testing results. All subgroups of students (including ELs and students receiving special education services) had impressive gains in student achievement.

Unlike many districts that adopt HQIM, our journey did not begin with a decision to adopt a new curriculum. It began with a decision to dive into professional learning, specifically to build our understanding about the science of reading. First, we worked to develop a shared understanding among school leaders, including the school-based reading specialists and school administrators, which pushed us to keep going so that, in time, everyone in the building was involved and we became a community of learners together.

We have been extremely fortunate to have as a partner in this journey Bookworm’s author, Sharon Walpole, Ph. D. In our earliest days of working with Dr. Walpole, we recognized that the curriculum was uniquely designed to develop critical thinking skills, while maximizing daily reading and student engagement. Bookworms incorporates more than 265 whole books instead of the shorter reading passages that are often found in other curricula. Furthermore, the importance of oral language development is a consistent thread present in all Bookworms lessons.

Our recognition of these virtues helped convince us that we could end all pullout programs for our growing English learner population; Previously, we used an alternative English language arts curriculum with our English learners. But, with a quarter of our population now in this category, how could we justify that? Bookworms is a language learning curriculum – and we made the commitment that we were going to use it to provide grade-level instruction for all our students, together.

Our work has really been focused on the concept of shared ownership, utilizing a co-teaching service model. We ripped off the “pullout” band aid – and it was rough for some people. Teachers were fearful students would struggle. Roles changed and that was uncomfortable for some. But we were driven by the north star of giving all students access to grade-level content, and we knew they could meet high expectations if they had the proper support.

To facilitate this paradigm shift in how we served our students, we invested heavily in our educators. Previously, our EL teachers and para educators had not been included in professional learning alongside the core classroom teachers. Now they were learning the curriculum right with them. And with this training came new expectations, including that the EL team would support their students in meeting the standards alongside non-EL peers. Together, as a school-wide team, we operationalized a shared belief, “Don’t underestimate what your kids can do,” which required a shift in mindset to “How can I make sure my kids are ready to do this?”

This change impacted the work of our general educators as well. There wasn’t any more, “You take these kids and ‘fix them’ so I can then do my job to teach them.” The focus shifted to, “Let’s figure out how we can support students in meeting classroom expectations together.”

Seaford Supt. Corey Miklus put his bet on our principals to lead this charge, and they didn’t disappoint. At Seaford Central, Principal Becky Neubert and Asst. Principal Chandra Phillips are as capable of skillfully delivering Bookworms lessons as the best teacher in the building. In fact, they are who teachers called on when they were struggling with something. And it couldn’t be more critical that school leaders participated in the process right alongside the staff. “How can you coach someone unless you’ve been in the classroom and done it yourself?” they said.

Seaford School District’s stunning results didn’t happen overnight. We had to find our way through the fog just like everyone else. Our mantra became, “Trust the process.” Finding the right partner and investing in school leadership were keys to that process for us.

Kelly Carvajal Hageman is director of instruction for the Seaford School District in Delaware.

“Well, I’ll be!” first-grade teacher Stefanie Walker said, in an exaggerated Southern drawl, to her class of eager students sitting cross-legged in front of her on the carpet.

“Say it with me, class; ‘Well, I’ll be!’”

The phrase (which catches on throughout the lesson — and by us visitors throughout the day!) comes from a story, In the Cave, that the children are reading as part of their foundational skills lesson. The story is a “decodable” one, meaning it contains words and sounds the students are practicing. It also provides an opportunity to reinforce how to use commas, quotation marks, exclamation marks and contractions (e.g., “Well, I’ll be!”)

Earlier in the day, these same students — along with all the other first-graders in the building — had participated in a lively lesson about the focus sound for the day: /k/ (like in “cave”). But they didn’t just learn about the one spelling of the /k/ sound; they learned four different ways it’s spelled: “c,” “k,” “ck” and “cc.” The lesson was systematic and explicit, using spelling trees and power bars to teach when and how the /k/ sound is used in our very complex coding system. Students were so excited about finding things all over the room that had the /k/ sound, proving phonics is anything but boring!

A first-grade classroom in Putnam County would have looked very different four years ago. Phonics instruction would not have been explicit, systematic or even consistent from one class to the next, whether down the hall or across the district. Our teachers were spending a majority of their time searching for resources to teach the standards, rather than relying on a strong curriculum to do that work for them. They dedicated so much time to figuring out what to teach, they didn’t have time left to perfect their practice.

We all knew that what we were doing wasn’t working. Many of our children weren’t learning to read. In fact, a large majority — 62 percent — weren’t proficient in reading. That was unacceptable.

With help from our partner , the district made the decision five years ago this spring to pilot a curriculum that would address decoding while coherently building content knowledge. That was the beginning of a new journey for us. We started small, with 20 classroom teachers in pre-K-2 using the “Listening and Learning Strand” (the knowledge-building component) from Core Knowledge Language Arts, a “ for teaching skills in reading, writing, listening and speaking” that “also builds students’ knowledge and vocabulary in literature, history, geography and science.”

It was a heavy lift and a bumpy ride.

“It was a struggle in the beginning because it was hard,” one teacher said. “The other curriculum was easy; we just switched out readers for each lesson.”

But after that pilot year, teachers were already seeing how students were more engaged and excited about the topics they were reading about. This showed up very unexpectedly in their writing; we couldn’t believe how much more they were able to write, and the complex vocabulary they were using, even in kindergarten! Our teachers bought in based on the strength of these results.

In year two, we expanded by adding to K-2 classrooms the Skills Strand of the CKLA curriculum, which teaches the mechanics of reading, like explicit phonics instruction and spelling. We also added to the third and fourth grades the Listening & Learning Strand, which builds vocabulary and broad knowledge in science and history through a series of read-alouds of informational texts. Since then, we have been digging in as an elementary team, deeply studying and learning from the curriculum.

Our literacy coaches have been invaluable to this process. They have become experts, assisting teachers in planning and implementing quality lessons using the curriculum.

Recently, we had the opportunity to host the Knowledge Matters Campaign Tour in Putnam County. Over the course of two days, the team visited three schools, conducted interviews with students, teachers, administrators and parents, and got to watch some amazing lessons. For the past three years, we have seen classroom instruction improve significantly because of strong materials, but I wasn’t sure if others would see it as clearly as we did.

Guess what: They did! Every lesson we watched was beautiful. Teachers were invested in the lessons, bringing them to life as they and their students read about slavery, the planets, geology, inventors and on and on. I was personally on the edge of my seat as I listened to the read-alouds. I thought I would burst with pride, and I’m sure that I shed a few happy tears just watching our kids as they listened to their teacher with such rapt attention while she read about topics that interested them and as they shared with our visitors about what they loved about the “new” way of learning.

Change takes time, but we are encouraged and motivated to continue the journey. At this point, it feels as though the ship has turned, and the throttle is full steam ahead. We know that we have expert teachers who can lead the way for those who are more reluctant.

“Every year we get better. I am looking deeper into every lesson for ways to improve,” one of our teachers said.

“This curriculum levels the playing field,” said another. “It gives students the opportunity to experience things that they wouldn’t normally see because many of them may rarely leave their yard. When you look at student writing on the wall, you can’t tell which students are [special education] and which are not, which are poor, or which are wealthy.” Isn’t this the meaning of equity?

For too long, teachers had to be all things at all times, even creating their own curriculum. But that is not something they were trained to do.

“In the past, our principal would ask us the question, ‘Is this worthy of students’ time?’ And I would spend a lot of time trying to make it worthy,” one teacher said. “Now I know it’s worthy.”

I can imagine there will be many “Well, I’ll be!”s in the years ahead, as teachers learn the curriculum in greater depth and use their teacher knowledge to bring it to life.

Jill Ramsey is the pre-K-4 teaching and learning supervisor for Putnam County Schools in Tennessee.