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    Strong materials in the hands of great teachers

    A year of school visits highlights what makes curriculum work

    By Barbara Davidson and Susan Pimentel
    Categories: College- and career-ready standards, Instructional materials/curriculum
    December 2018
    Vol. 39 No. 6
    K-12 education has witnessed a sea change in attitudes about curriculum as a serious reform strategy. The movement gained traction in the wake of the Common Core State Standards, when newly created curriculum products emerged. Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called curriculum “the last, best, juiciest piece of low-hanging fruit left in our efforts to improve student outcomes” (Pondiscio, 2015). “One of the things I love about this is that I don’t have to keep looking for different things to work on specific skills [with students].” — Amanda Barger, 4th-grade teacher at Saville Elementary School in Riverside, Ohio While there are an increasing number of high-quality, content-rich curriculum products available, as well as venues

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    Authors

    Barbara Davidson and Susan Pimentel

    Barbara Davidson (bdavidson@standardswork.org) is executive director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign and president of StandardsWork. Susan Pimentel (spimentel@standardswork.org) is a co-founder of StandardsWork and Student Achievement Partners and was the lead author of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts/Literacy.

    The Knowledge Matters School Tour

    Knowledge Matters is a campaign to make building knowledge a priority for American education. Nearly every major educational goal — from improving reading comprehension and critical thinking to problem solving and creativity — is knowledge-based. Without a solid foundation of content knowledge built from the first days of school, students can’t achieve higher academic standards and better outcomes.

    Knowledge-rich schools focus on imparting knowledge of the world. They seek to restore wonder and excitement in the classroom by deepening students’ understanding on a wide range of topics.

    Our goal for the Knowledge Matters School Tour was to gather stories of schools that use the power of knowledge-rich schooling to promote excellence, provide equity, and inspire passion. We were particularly interested in drawing attention to schools that are closing the gap between students who grow up in poverty and their more privileged peers.

    The role played by high-quality English language arts curriculum — and the professional learning educators experienced to make this possible in their school — was our focus. Given the paucity of time devoted to social studies, science, and the arts in elementary schools across the country, if children don’t encounter these topics in their reading and don’t engage with them at home, they likely won’t be learned.

    The significant role that background knowledge and command of academic vocabulary plays in reading comprehension is not a new discovery, but curiosity has recently piqued about what “knowledge-rich schooling” really means and how it can be advanced through English language arts.

    Schools included in the Knowledge Matters School Tour

    • Bryant School of Arts & Innovation, Riverside, California.
    • Kinder Elementary School, Kinder, Louisiana.
    • Monticello-Brown Summit Elementary School, Greensboro, North Carolina.
    • Maryvale Preparatory Academy, Phoenix, Arizona.
    • Saville Elementary School, Riverside (Dayton), Ohio.
    • Detroit Prep and Detroit Achievement Academy, Detroit, Michigan.

    References

    Pondiscio, R. (2015, May 29). Common Core’s first breakout hit. U.S. News & World Report. Available at www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/05/29/is-common-core-spurring-a-curriculum-renaissance.


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    Categories: College- and career-ready standards, Instructional materials/curriculum

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