One of the great privileges of my career has been leading the Knowledge Matters School Tour. The Tour, which will travel to its 50th district in early 2025, is designed to elevate the stories of educators who have been part of a community-wide big bet on curriculum reform.
As we move into this New Year, we are excited to slightly shift the focus of the Knowledge Matters School Tour. We want to celebrate (and learn from!) places where a district’s literacy goals are being fueled by high-quality curriculum in the content areas—specifically, history, geography, and civics!
But before we pivot, I want to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve learned. In doing so, I am channeling the voices of the more than 500 educators we’ve spoken with over this seven-year run, much of which has been chronicled in a Knowledge Matters School Tour series in The 74.
Without a doubt, the single biggest takeaway was teachers’ collective relief in no longer having to create curriculum on their own. They expressed deep appreciation for being provided with high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) and corresponding professional support to learn how to use the materials to deliver a coherent instructional experience for their students.
Life before curriculum-based school reform was filled with long evening and weekend hours at the kitchen table, scrutinizing state standards documents and combing the internet for lessons that might “align.” What was even more tragic than the opportunity costs of asking talented educators to spend their time “writing the score” instead of planning how to effectively “conduct the orchestra” was that few liked the sound of the music that resulted! Teachers were frustrated and discouraged; they were working so hard. Why weren’t things going better in their classrooms?
I don’t want to misrepresent what we heard from the teachers we spoke with. Shifting their practice and becoming master deliverers of a rigorous curriculum was hard work—some said that first adoption year was the hardest of their careers. But they also reported feeling more professionally confident and more successful than ever before. Many said the unifying power of a shared, coherent curriculum and the opportunity to engage with colleagues had been profound. The results they were finally seeing with students—the kind of impact that attracted them to teaching in the first place—kept them in the classroom when they were previously thinking about leaving.
Unsurprisingly (we are, after all, the Knowledge Matters School Tour), students’ engagement with the content made for the most animated discussions during our visits. Teachers shared concerns that they would be unable to teach lessons on topics like the War of 1812, the Great Depression, or the Renaissance, for which they had little prior preparation. Worse, they feared their students would be bored, or that the content would be hopelessly beyond their grasp. But, in almost every teacher panel we’ve convened over these past seven years, teachers told us they “trusted the process,” marched forward despite their doubts, and were blown away by the results.
Teachers talked most about their students’ enthusiasm for the content, with reports of kids groaning when they have to stop a lesson, playing games on the playground related to the topics they were learning, and dominating family dinnertime conversation with their newfound expertise. Dramatic improvements in writing was a consistently cited early win. Confidence to tackle the hard stuff was another.
Based on my visits to these 49 districts, I can claim, without hyperbole, that student enthusiasm for learning about interesting world topics is transformational for school culture. Much of what made it so is the fact that ALL students were sharing in the learning, not just the precocious “highflyers,” but even kids who had struggled with reading in the past.
The common denominator was the adoption of a shared, common, comprehensive curriculum. But, what does this mean? What was actually done? And how might these lessons be applied to the implementation of high-quality curriculum in other disciplines?
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve reread the series of articles generated from our visits to these 49 districts, which spanned the US—from California to Massachusetts, and Detroit to Lafourche, Louisiana. (We’ve recently reorganized the School Tour section of the Knowledge Matters website to make accessing these stories easier. In addition to articles written by local educators, there are video snippets from each visit that are both “feel good” and instructive.)
Here’s what I’ve discerned:
- All of these districts had a “why.” A fearless look at the data confirmed student achievement was stuck. Educators decided it simply was unacceptable for fewer than half their students to be proficient in reading: their students were capable of more, and they had a responsibility to do better by them.
- Curriculum adoption was accompanied by professional learning to help teachers better understand the research that underpins high-quality curriculum. In the case of ELA, that research included the science of reading. (In the case of science, it involved learning about the impact of phenomena-based instruction.)
- Building-level leadership was vital to successful implementation. Every teacher we spoke to credited not just their principal’s leadership but also his or her willingness to roll up their sleeves and become a learner alongside the staff. These principals made time for professional learning, hired coaches, and insisted the curriculum be followed and used. At the same time, they showed grace by not expecting perfection from the outset.
- Leaders found their champions. As Karla Stinehart in Roswell, New Mexico, said, “teachers are motivated by seeing evidence of success from trusted colleagues.” In many of the places we visited, it didn’t take more than a few firebrands.
- Don’t try to drink from a firehose. There’s a lot going on in these curricula: shifts in pedagogical practices, instructional routines, and academic rigor. The most successful districts focused on getting better with a few things in the first year, a few more the next. They recognized they were playing the long game. Again, there’s that word, “grace.”
Two mantras have animated the Knowledge Matters School Tour: 1) Positive education stories deserve to be told (thus our motto, “find the good and praise it,” which I borrowed from “Roots” author Alex Haley), and 2) Educators trust fellow educators (more than they do policymakers!).
The curriculum landscape for elementary “social studies” is in even worse shape than where we found the ELA market when the School Tour began. It’s mostly characterized by deadly boring basals that would turn off even the most precocious youngster, and some decent, well-intended supplementary materials that are extremely limited in scope. A few core products are headed in the right direction, but could be much stronger when it comes to how they support literacy.
The absence of common standards for social studies means we’re unlikely to see the equivalent of an EdReports “green light” to define the HQIM social studies universe. Publishers and philanthropists, both instrumental players in driving the high-quality instructional materials “movement” in literacy and math, have held back on social studies because of the paucity of class time devoted to it.
And yet, we know the public wants its children to learn about their history, to know where their state is situated in the country and the world, and to have a solid foundation in our democratic principles upon which to engage civically when they are old enough to do so.
The Knowledge Matters Campaign is excited to elevate where important elementary social studies work is starting to take root, despite the many reasons why it may be hard to do. We know there are good things happening—and we look forward to shining a light on the educators doing them, just as we’ve been fortunate to do for these past seven years in literacy.