Is your district adopting a new English language arts/literacy curriculum? Have you wondered how to tell if an ELA curriculum is “knowledge-building?” Today we’ll be talking to Barbara Davidson and Sue Pimentel about a new curriculum review tool from Knowledge Matters which can be a helpful guide when navigating the curriculum adoption process.
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
Is your district adopting a new English language arts/literacy curriculum? Have you wondered how to tell if an ELA curriculum is “knowledge-building?” Today we’ll be talking to Barbara Davidson and Sue Pimentel about a new curriculum review tool from Knowledge Matters which can be a helpful guide when navigating the curriculum adoption process.
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
You're listening to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. Is your district adopting a new English language arts or literacy curriculum, or have you just ever wondered how to tell if an ELA curriculum is knowledge building? Well, today we'll be talking to Barbara Davidson and Sue Pimentel about a new curriculum review tool that can be found on the Knowledge Matters campaign website. They will walk through the different parts of the tool and explain how the tool can be used during a curriculum adoption process.
Speaker 2:Welcome teacher friend. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two literacy educators in Baltimore.
Speaker 1:We want the best for all kids and we know you do too, Our district recently adopted a new literacy curriculum, which meant a lot of change for everyone, lori and I can't wait to keep learning about literacy with you today.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone. Welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy. Today we're so excited because we're talking about a way to review curriculum, something that everyone seems to be talking about. These days?
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and we have two amazing guests to talk about it. We have Barbara Davidson, who we just had on in January and she's the executive director of the Knowledge Matters campaign and president of the nonprofit standards work, and returning guests from years ago, sue Pimentel, who is co-founder of standards work, and a million other things that we could say about Sue, but they will both talk to us today about the Knowledge Matters review tool. So welcome, barbara and Sue, thanks Great to be with you guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, we're really excited to dig into this tool. We know that it's a new tool on the scene, on the literacy scene, so we're wondering how did the review tool come to be and what need was there for this in the market space?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'll take that one for starters. It really was the result of sort of demand in the field, I would say. As many of your viewers, listeners, will probably know, we stood up an enhancement to the Knowledge Matters website a year ago and in doing so featured six now eight curricula that we think do a particularly fine job of building background knowledge, these ELA curricula, obviously. And a lot of people asked us well, how did you make that decision? I mean, how did you arrive at those that you did, and we thought that the website did a pretty fine job of describing that. We weren't so much interested in picking winners and losers. We were far more interested in showing people what good looks like, what it looks like and that it is possible and that it is possible to both build content knowledge and address literacy skills, and to do so with that. There are a variety of ways in which publishers might go about doing that.
Speaker 3:These eight curricula now eight that we recognize on the site and lift up and celebrate and ask people to sort of study, as good exemplars are very different, and so that was our purpose at that time.
Speaker 3:And yet people still asked well, what went into it and what criteria did you use and who did that work and so forth. So this is our way of being more sort of explicit about what we believe goes into great ELA curriculum that builds content knowledge along the way and that is really puts content knowledge sort of at the center of the enterprise. So there was a lot of demand, I would say. And then the second reason that we decided it was important to do is that as the science of reading has become more and more understood and embraced and understood to include the science about the importance of building background knowledge, I think that that has presented an opportunity to really get clear and there's more demand to really understand the connection between content knowledge and reading comprehension. So we felt that the field was sort of interested in going deeper and that's what we feel like or what our hope for the tool was.
Speaker 4:Can I add to a couple of sentences to that? So part of it is that when you think about knowledge building and when teachers think about knowledge building, almost anything we read builds our knowledge. But the problem is that it's more haphazard and a curricula isn't necessarily built to build knowledge and so it becomes gosh, I don't know. I guess it kind of builds knowledge, and a lot of curricula say they build knowledge and they don't do it sustainably, and so we wanted to be able to show a difference.
Speaker 4:The second thing is that we know there are lots of review tools out of there. We know ad reports. Goodness sakes, they've been important in the field in terms of telling us what's HQIM, but it's based on alignment to standards. Now that's a really important part of the equation, but it's not the full part of the equation. So that's what this tool is meant to do is to be an add to and and Barbara you might want to just talk a little bit about, you know, because it was Barbara's thought of what we aren't trying to create something totally new that people up to say, oh gosh, no, we just got to do it all over them, but something they could add when they're reviewing curricula.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know if you all want to ask something specifically about that, but yeah, this is. We consider this tool in addition to a way of really digging into the, the, the reading comprehension, the knowledge building piece, and and that is why we explicitly left out the foundational skills.
Speaker 4:We had a debate about that initially, but Barbara convinced me. I really got it and she was right. Go keep going, barbara, about that if you want to.
Speaker 3:We didn't want to suggest. I sort of worried that if we included that, which is not to say that those foundational skills aren't vitally important. We're real, real clear about that. Our website makes that clear. It all begins there, and yet there are other good tools out there that that do a pretty fine job of of laying those expectations out there. There aren't tools that do as the important job that we feel that this one does of laying out and really driving people's understanding and contributing to the field's understanding of what knowledge building is and and the important science that there is you know about, about that as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's such a good point, and that's. I'd love to go back to something that Sue said and that before we dive into the tool. Sue, you mentioned this idea of random acts of knowledge, right, that, and anytime we're reading something, we are building now our knowledge. But there's a difference between a coherent knowledge build and kind of like a randomized knowledge build. So I'm wondering if you can kind of elaborate on that, right, like what's the difference between these random acts of knowledge and a knowledge building curriculum? Because on the knowledge matters campaign site we do have eight uplifted as knowledge building curriculum and I'm just thinking if I were a teacher listening right now I'd be like, well, what is the difference between maybe what I have not one of those eight and those eight that are listed as knowledge building curricula?
Speaker 4:So do you want me to start my room? Then you can get from there.
Speaker 4:So part of it is a sustained attention to a topic. So you're reading several texts on a topic. You're building your knowledge about the world right. It's not based on a reading strategy or the standard of the day or whatever it is built on. We're going to take two to three weeks, could do more where we're really going to deepen our knowledge on a particular topic and that means that we're reading about it, we're writing about it, we're talking to each other about it, we're reading a volume of reading. So we're doing all those things that are interconnected to build our knowledge. And that's very different.
Speaker 4:And I'd also draw the difference between topics and themes. We've come down heavily on topics because sometimes you know you can look at a theme and, first of all, not your kids get things, but be that as it may. But then you look at them and then there's there's there. They're sort of big and loopy and they stuff a lot of stuff in. So one week you're reading about, you know, photosynthesis, and the next week you're reading about railroads, or you're reading about, you know, coming of age or something like that. It's amazing what they can stick on. So those are, those are curricula that mainly look at sort of a reading strategy or a standards that they're trying to get it. So this text you can do use a standard with this text you can use, and it's totally different when you're dealing with a curricula that's been designed for building knowledge. But I don't know if you have anything you want to add to that now I think that's great.
Speaker 3:I mean it's it's really all about this oral language development and the need to build these mental schemas so that students can attach as they're learning something new.
Speaker 3:It attaches to something and that, that, that, that that Velcro, that stickiness that Marilyn Adams and so many others have talked about, and and that's how I mean students learn, when more, when they know something about the topic and they can recognize familiar vocabulary and so forth.
Speaker 3:So we want to create that stickiness and that doesn't happen when you're switching from one topic to the next, when you're reading articles on you know all kinds of, whether these, whether these articles are put together primarily to provide an opportunity to, to focus on a comprehension strategy, or if they're just, you know, we're sort of thrown together for whatever other reason. We want to give students that sort of assist, that opportunity to become, to become experts and to begin to make those create those, those schemas in their, in their brains. And so that's you know really why these all of these curricula, doing it in different ways, obviously, but lean on that the importance of creating that familiarity and building, building knowledge. Not just. It's certainly not and you all have talked about this well in the past. It's not accessing knowledge. It's building a content, knowledge in the disciplines and and with rich vocabulary that is both academic and domain specific and and create so schemas in the brain and I don't want to leave out the joy of learning.
Speaker 4:I mean once, the last time I heard from my grandkids a strategy they learned, it's reading strategy they learned at school or the standard they're working. Now I hear about what they're reading about, what they're learning about, so it's partly that as well. And when you watch kids go deep into a topic, barbara does is done that through her knowledge matters to read. It's amazing what you hear students are able to share and do and they love being an expert.
Speaker 3:They love that and and I think you know you all asked so, why did we did this?
Speaker 3:And I kind of jumped over this.
Speaker 3:It became, it became increasingly important for us and I think Sue's gonna talk just a moment here about what these domain, what is what is sort of packed into these eight domains.
Speaker 3:But it became increasingly important for us to let folks know that there are curricula out there that are sort of wrapping themselves in the knowledge flag and and and and really aren't doing that in this sustained way, this sort of builds, those schemas, that that that build, build on knowledge and and and and do so for sustained, sustained period of time in the way that these curricula do. So that's that was a concern that we have, that as the importance of background knowledge is better understood and better valued, and that review committees and others are in state agencies and so forth are saying it's important that you have not, unlike back in the day with the Common Core folks, you know, putting slap in Common Core, you know, on to onto a book and saying that it is. We didn't. You know, we wanted to begin to distinguish those that at least we feel are are in a different, in a different league.
Speaker 1:I was thinking the same thing, barbara, with the Common Core aligned stickers, and then now science of reading aligned right, any any of the buzzwords that come out? Yep, we see them all the time. So, yeah, we do want to dig into the actual tool now so people can get a better understanding of it. Like you mentioned, barbara, there's eight different. Are they domains, dimensions, dimensions, dimensions. Thank you, sue, and I wanted to really pause at number one because when I personally read it, I you know the title is laser, like focus on what matters most for literacy, and I went to Lori and I go what matters most for literacy? Oh my, like what does that mean? That's what? That's a meaty statement for dimension number one. So I really was hoping we could spend a little bit more time probably on that one and just kind of unpacking it for us. So do you want to jump?
Speaker 4:in yeah, yeah, yeah. So what this is is an initial SWAT at bloated and bulky curricula that include everything in them, and we know. So in choosing curriculum, we want to say to people be careful of the bulk in the bloat. But people will also have to use a curriculum because it's what they've purchased, it's what they have. They aren't going to get another choice. Look for these things, because we've we've talked to people in districts that have one of these basals and you can find teachers that don't know what to focus on or focus on stuff they used to focus on, and so what we did is we laid out and you'll see here we know we don't have the dimension of foundational skills. We say foundational skills really important.
Speaker 4:Reading complex text in the communal reading, a complex text where students are working with one another. Is there volume of reading to build students knowledge and their vocabulary, because it's a great way to build, to build vocabulary. And then making sure that students are writing and talking about what they're reading, because sometimes you can see writing siloed or you can see students are going to be taught, have been in collaboration and it's all about how they're collaborating with one other, but we want it to be about what they're collaborating about. Then what this section does is it says and I say this as an author of the common core standards are not curriculum, and don't just pick one and put that for the Tuesday and Wednesday, move on. And there it shouldn't be the focus of daily instruction. And and and you all know, maureen Melissa, better than anybody about how important it is in literacy to to have sort of a holistic view so you're reading and writing and talking, and you know reporting on what it is that you're reading, and so there's a, there's a sense that we want people to, yes, pay attention to standards, because they do set out the complexity, the sophistication, the challenge of what you're supposed to be learning about, but it doesn't say the how and how to use the standard. So we want to say careful about the standards, because there's all this overaligned to standards or overaligned to standards.
Speaker 4:And then we take another look at reading strategies. Again, huge research base for reading strategies, really, really, really important. But once you teach them to kids, they should activate them when they're having trouble. You don't activate them every single day of your lives and every single time you're reading. So much time is spent on that.
Speaker 4:Now it's important because text structure is one of those Like how is the information coming to me? Is it problem solution? Is it sequential? What's going on? Because then I can begin to follow where the author is taking me. But is that the purpose of the reading? I want to be able to learn from what we're reading.
Speaker 4:And then the final criteria in that section is just all about bulk and load and it's also about sustained attention on a topic and how important that is. So it's sort of the whole kittin' caboodle. And then when you think about Melissa, the ideas that we say are most important, that have a substantial, formidable research base to them. Each one of those is taken on in one of the next four or five dimensions and it deals with both what the standards say, because it's important, what is the complexity, but then it tells you how, what the research tells us, not just what Barbara and Sue and Bara the Davises, but how the research tells us to handle those. So that's why it's so important that any rubric you're looking at isn't just about standards alignment, but it's also about knowledge building.
Speaker 1:I wanted to back up to one of those that you mentioned, sue, which was the strategies, because one of the things we've heard a lot for pushback against content-rich ELA is that they don't focus on these reading strategies and there is research behind it. Do you want to just reiterate?
Speaker 4:I will, I will, I will and I'll say that once students learn them, they can use them. You don't have to keep teaching them. And I remember there was something that Tim Shanahan and I communicated about and he was saying you know, it is a waste to use reading strategies on a text you're able to access and understand. What good readers do is they access the strategies, like if I'm reading about physics, right, I'm almost immediately lost. So what do I have to do? I have to kind of figure out what's where's the author, how's the author taking me, how's the author offering me this information? Oh, here's a question I have. Did the author here? She answered that earlier or later, or is it a question I want to ask myself? Those are things Once you teach them, kids have got them.
Speaker 4:Now you might, you might remind students to use them, right, and you may do do some more teaching on text structure, right With a particular text that maybe you know you want students to understand how the information comes from. All that's legitimate and important to do. But again, the reason we read is to learn stuff and I feel like for decades you know that we sort of got away from that. It was like about the reading strategies, it was about the standards, it wasn't about, well, what am I actually learning? And I think that's one reason why you sometimes hear kids say you know reading, because it's not about the joy of learning stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think.
Speaker 3:I think, oh, go ahead, barbara.
Speaker 3:It just seems to me to be one of the really, really important statements in this review tool that the curriculum is designed to seamlessly integrate these practices in reading, writing, speaking, listening and facility with language.
Speaker 3:And from my experience in visiting over 40, I think it's about 45 districts across the country now over the five-year history of the Knowledge Matter School Tour, that's what these curricula do so powerfully.
Speaker 3:Is that, yes, these strategies are important but absent guidance from either good curriculum or, you know, knowledge of how to do it themselves, teachers have been left to, you know, sort of largely sort of focus on the standards and the standards are in many ways sort of statements of strategies in many cases and to try to figure out how to do that themselves, whereas here you've got a, you know, a professional team that's labored for many years and curated elegant, rich texts with purpose and this build over the years and so forth and seamlessly integrated those strategies at the right place and in the right way.
Speaker 3:And not, I mean, I have just great empathy and regard for the attempt that teachers made in DIY, you know, do it themselves, sort of curriculum development over the years and taking the standards and, you know, started working back from there. But this is done so much more subtly but purposefully and integrated in appropriate ways, with the right sort of dosage, I guess, if you will, but with the premium, with the priority, with the purpose being the, you know, the content, putting the content in the foreground and really building that knowledge over time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say, barbara. Is that like what's in the foreground? It's not that we're getting rid of it. I mean, I don't even know what that would look like if we totally got rid of strategies and standards, like they just read a text and then write what they knowledge, they built. I don't think that's what any of the knowledge building curricula do. I'm not familiar with all of them, but what I've seen is like you said, but really integrated and smart, like use of. Okay, we're going to summarize here because it's going to help you understand what's happening, or let's talk about what the theme of this text is, because this is the time that it's going to help you make sense of this text and what you learn from it. So, so I think that that makes total sense to me is that they're all still there, but it's just that knowledge is in the foreground. Standards, strategies are helping.
Speaker 3:And the connection to the writing too and I know Sue will talk about this when she talks about that dimension particularly but it never ceases to surprise me how recent in our experience has been, and probably in many cases still is, the practice of completely separating writing instruction from what students are reading and discussing.
Speaker 3:And because when I talk with folks in you know, out on the school tour and and I think I might have shared this with you all before, honestly the first, when we start to sort of interrogate and ask interview educators like what's the first thing that changed for you?
Speaker 3:What did you notice, you know, even in those first couple months, and they talk about the writing and and then so we tease that out a little bit and find out that, you know, it's not so surprising because kids are writing about things that they, that, they know, that they just that they just learned, instead of it being, you know, later in the afternoon on some prompts that has nothing to do with what they're learning earlier in the day. I love the story of the little girl that said to me, you know, when I asked her why she you know she liked writing so much more now than she did the year before when they were using a different curriculum, and she said she looked at me and said, well, because now I have something to write about. You know, anyway it's this integrated. You know nature of the work that is so important about these curricula and that I think you'll see sort of embedded throughout this tool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I see that juxtaposition in the field as well. I've been in classrooms and teachers will say the same thing. Like I noticed, students are writing so much more and their writing is so much more powerful and cohesive. But then I also hear that same pushback of like oh, the curriculum doesn't not in the same classrooms usually, but the curriculum doesn't teach writing explicitly and I think it's because it is like we've talked about in the background instead of in the foreground. And it's really difficult if all we've known or all we've seen in the past has been the traditional basal types of curriculum that we're unfamiliar with. These new structures, right, like I've even heard. You know the curriculum doesn't teach reading strategies, this curriculum doesn't teach writing, all of these things.
Speaker 2:But then when you, barbara, like you said, when you kind of nail down, teachers are like wow, the writing is the biggest thing that I see improve. And I mean even personally my own daughter. When COVID hit, I was working with her at home using one of the high quality curricula and she was in third grade and her writing from then is eons better than it is now now in sixth grade with a workshop model, because she's not writing about anything connected to reading. So it's just these like stories, you know. And when I look at the third grade stuff, I'm like, oh my gosh, you were.
Speaker 2:Your writing was so much better because it's you have something to write about. You've become a vocabulary expert on the topic. You are implementing all of the cool skills that you've learned because you don't have to think about the content as much. Right Like your brain is free to do that. So I think that's like really important, that it just it's it's different in how it's laid out, and so just really encourage anyone listening, like teachers, leaders, like really be detectives here with this tool. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Right, I love that you said that, because that's the advice that I give to folks too. I mean, when you really look at and begin to sort of study these eight dimensions, you'll see. Sue uses the metaphor of sort of how it all gets knitted together, and I really like that because, yeah, you're sort of describing the experience of, oh, it doesn't have strategies, it doesn't have writing. That's because it's not being sort of a separate thing that's taught in isolation. But I remember the first this happened to actually be a Witten Wisdom the first visit that we made to a district using the Witten Wisdom curriculum, and they said, the folks said we could never have put this together as elegantly as it was done here, and it's just that sort of that knitting that Sue talks about. Anyway, sue, I'm sure that we're ready for you to start to talk about some of the other ones, right?
Speaker 4:You want me to do like a little whirlwind so I'll take you through it. It's really really quick because I know people can look at it and say but just so you kind of understand what's there and how it works together. So the first one is about the communal close reading of complex text. Now in standards they've got complex text, grade level complex text very important to pay attention to. But what the tool does is talks to you about what the research says about repeated encounters. And now what we're talking about is also some sort of a sort of a culminating assignment which there's a lot of research about, is, once I've read a lot and talked a lot, it's really good for me to pull my knowledge together and ask me to talk to you about it or write to you about it, and really important. So that's what one of the research says. So again, this is going beyond the standards into the research.
Speaker 4:Then we come to we've talked about vocabulary and how important it is to have routines so that it's built in. We talk some because those standards deal with vocabulary really important. But we also know one of the most important things is that you don't just teach a word with a definition that students have to in context. Many things in context you can play games into out of context, but the students use the vocabulary. You mentioned at Lori in the writing that when your daughter was writing she was pulling some of the vocabulary that she had learned about that. That's how it gets stuck in our brains. It doesn't get stuck in our brain by just looking at oh, here's a word and here's a definition.
Speaker 4:So again, going beyond the standards and the connection to reading. So when you're, when you're learning vocabulary, one of the best ways and fastest way to learn vocabulary is to read a volume of reading which. What comes next? Right? So one and Barbara referenced this earlier there's one text sort of bootstraps the next text, so that I'm reading in a context and so I get. I'm sort of getting them, getting the vocabulary and getting the syntax. Vocabulary may be expanding, maybe a little bit different, but I understand more so I can get more of the vocabulary which becomes really, really important.
Speaker 4:And this is a place to where we actually name that. You should stay with a topic for two to three weeks. We know that's what students like to do, it's what, it's how you can go, how you can go deep, and then you want to them talking about it, and here what we really want to do is make sure that there are lots of the curriculum talks a lot about talking together and building sort of a community of learners. So goes beyond the standards. Again, here's what you want to be as a good collaborator, but here's what we want you to do when, when you build the knowledge and then writing. We've just done that sort of in space about how important it is to be able to do that and the fundamentals of writing, which we've talked about, but again, those can be in the background, in the context of your writing about what you're reading. And so that takes us through the content pieces.
Speaker 4:And then we have two more. One of them is making sure that all students have access to grade level content. It sounds like a duh, but it still is happening. In places you can use a basil and do level reading and that's all you do, and we've heard places that do that because that's what they've done before. And then this notion, of which I know there's a lot more talk about now, about what's relevant, sort of the, the mirrors, the windows, the sliding doors really important, not that students only read about themselves, but they learn about others, but they also see themselves reflected in their readings, which which feels relevant and powerful to them.
Speaker 4:And then the last one is about ease of enacting curriculum. Now, if you ask us about the eight that are there that we have on the website, they're different and, depending upon your, your teaching staff and the turnover and everything else, you might choose one or the other, but what's really important is that there are. You can watch, as you know, as we dig into those curricula to be able to write the little blurbs. You can see that there are routines that that come in and tick tick and they're helpful to teachers, right, because you don't have to teach something new each time.
Speaker 4:Students get used to it. So they know when they're going into a group to discuss what they're going to do, you know, and when they're going to write how they're going to do it, maybe they're going to talk about it first, etc. So there are these routines that are really helpful to teachers. And then there's an educative part of it and and and Barbara's done interviews with, with folks that have taken on a new curriculum how important it is that they understand the why, the why of the how of what's being done. That is not just okay. Here you do go do a new thing, don't worry about it. We're telling you now to do it. But they actually explain the why.
Speaker 3:And that's the deal. I think that's another really important feature of these curricula that I like to talk about and I think is maybe undervalued, and that is the extent to which and so we're inviting this is an invitation to those who are reviewing curriculum to consider and give weight to because it's important the fact that it's not just a design to advance student learning, but it's designed to support and advance educators' understanding of the why and how this knitting, this very sort of advanced level of knitting, gets accomplished. So there's some examples of these curricula include samples of student responses, tips for effective feedback, models of exemplary practice, explanations of how program elements facilitate student learning, and so forth. So that is one of the other things that we hear so often when we're out on the school tour that teachers will say that they things like I was getting ready to leave, I had about decided I was done, and this has rejuvenated my passion for teaching.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I mean me too, Laurie. I mean it's moving, and so, in fact, on the Knowledge Matters website, where we actually curate a number of the videos that we have amassed over these many different school districts that we visited, you can sort by benefit Certainly benefits for social, emotional learning and academic progress and student engagement and equity and these kinds of things. But we also have some of these teacher benefits, professional satisfaction, opportunities for collaboration and that kind of thing. So I think holding a curriculum to that kind of expecting that a curriculum can support educators in being better and better at their craft is not an unreasonable thing and in fact we feel that these eight curricula that we identify do that quite well and that it is a reasonable expectation of reviewing committees to look for that.
Speaker 1:And I just love the idea. The knitting idea is sticking with me. I just I think it's amazing because when I look at all those dimensions, I still see people who are asking for a separate writing curriculum or a vocabulary program and wanting those separate. We did it Laurie's been there too where we had our separate vocabulary book and we did that at a different time. We did our writing over here, and so I just love hearing you all talk about the way it's all knitted together and it comes together, and all for this purpose of building knowledge in the end.
Speaker 3:You know, I think this is a nice opportunity for me to to acknowledge that this tool was developed by the three individuals, susan Pimentel, meredith Leibn and David Leibn, who really were the authors of the publisher's criteria and the, the instructional shifts that were unveiled and that so many educators studied and suffered over and really, you know, sort of increasingly made their own as this shift in practice, in the wake of the Common Core, occurred, and I, as head of the organization that has, you know, is, is offering this to the world, thinks of this as sort of the next chapter in that work.
Speaker 3:And so it really does represent Sue and Meredith and David's evolution, you know, and and and contains their best sort of thinking about how the standards really do show up and how we should be expecting publishers, you know, in the early days of the publisher's criteria though well, sue could probably speak to this, it'd be an interesting, you know. They sort of did the best, you know, the best that they could and sort of discerning what it was going to take for publishers to achieve these standards. But we've learned an awful lot since then and we've seen how some publishers have been able to do it and some of the you know the things that have worked and not in their, in their you know next versions of those curricula. And that really is that, that learning, that observation, the results of those some, in some cases, experiments, in some cases, you know, really, success is sort of baked into this tool, we think.
Speaker 4:And you know I'm going to underscore just one point, because we've done so much talking about the joy of building knowledge, the importance of building knowledge, and I don't know that. I know people probably know this, but there's like 50 years of research that says the more I know about the world, the better reader I become, the better reader I become, the more knowledge I can access and learn. So they're they're deeply, deeply intertwined and so it isn't. It isn't like well, all of a sudden we all care about reading comprehension anymore, because of course we do, and knowledge is a pathway towards it, a huge pathway towards towards that. So I just wanted to put that out there, since we've people have talked about sort of siloed, or do you still care about what kind of readers students like? Yeah, that's kind of. That's one of the whole points, besides being great thinkers and and knowing a lot about the world.
Speaker 3:So this gives me a nice opportunity to announce that Sue and Meredith and David have developed and we will be releasing, probably later this month, not this month, november, this month, december a research compendium. So for each of the criteria that make up these eight dimensions, we will be, you know, sort of annotating what, where, the research for that, for that claim that, that expectation, that demand that we should have of curricula. You know why, why that's there, what, what the research says about that.
Speaker 2:So we're going to eat that up, we're going to dig into that and bring that. Bring that to our listeners for sure. So thank you for doing that. That's awesome.
Speaker 4:Well, you know, people ask you know. I mean, you know, people ask you know. Yeah, well, is this just like what y'all think you know, or is it it? Can you substantiate it?
Speaker 1:So we say, yeah, we can substantiate, we want to think we just have a couple of quick questions of like sort of myths or things we've heard that we just wanted you all to, you know, give your thoughts on, one of them, being you kind of brought this up with younger readers. You know, we know foundational skills are really important for those younger readers. Where does this, where does this knowledge building and where does this tool specifically, how does it fit for students who are just learning how to read? Right, if they they might not be able to read those books on their own, how does this work for them?
Speaker 4:Well, I just can't, I just have to dig in here. So, yeah, knowledge building right from the start. I mean, yeah, they can't read the text, so they're not going to. You know the text they're learning to read, which is three or four words on a page, and you know repeats and does all that. But read aloud. You know talking about things and read aloud that are obviously above grade level, what they can't do themselves.
Speaker 4:So and Barbara will say this, because on the Knowledge Matters website it says right from the start and one that interests the students, so there's joy of learning. But it's also that that I think that and this was partly when we were putting the tool together you know we think about read aloud a lot and sort of K2, but they're still useful for several grades later. Now that doesn't mean that all students should be doing is listening to something, but it is. I think our, I think our reading ability and our listening ability doesn't catch up until I remember Eddie Hirsted this to me then it doesn't catch up until in the middle, middle school years, and so there's lots of ways when the little young ins they want to learn about all kinds of things, and so right from the start, yeah, I'm trying to flip through quickly and I'm not going to be able to a rubric from a state that will remain nameless that talks about students only reading text that they have some you know knowledge of, or something like that.
Speaker 3:And it's kind of crazy making this idea that you know, we, we learn to read and then we read to learn, because the fact is you that can, that cannon should begin at the very youngest of grades. I mean, increasingly there are wonderful decodable texts that build knowledge at the same time too, but what Sue's talking about and what we're, you know, sort of most familiar with, is the opportunity for kids to, at least in their first or second reading of a text, for that to be done communally and, you know, through, through a read aloud. So, and then they, you know, get exposed to these wonderful words and start. One of the most popular blogs that we've ever put out was one that Sue and Meredith and David wrote. That's on the Knowledge Matters website. Gosh, I don't even remember the name of it, so it's called the dinosaurs, but you know this one too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's the dinosaur effect. I'll link it in the show notes. I'm linking everything.
Speaker 3:It's sort of that phenomenon like why, how is it that two and three-year-olds yeah, two and three-year-olds know so much about dinosaurs? And because they?
Speaker 4:like they can say the names, these names that are like 25 letters or something like that.
Speaker 3:Little kids like being experts as much as any of us right, maybe even more so, and so we need to give them the opportunity to be so.
Speaker 4:Read-Allows are under one of the dimensions. We specifically call them out.
Speaker 2:That's really important. Awesome. I just linked actually an episode we did on Read-Allows very recently in our show notes. If you haven't listened to it and you're looking for a direct complement to this conversation, there's a link in the show notes to that. Within those show notes there's a resource to a book. Great. But I have one more question and this is one we get all the time. I'm so excited for this particular question. If ELA curriculum is content rich, can it replace social studies and science? And why not?
Speaker 3:There are two important notes that accompany this tool on the first page of the document, the first one being the one that we've talked about, and that is that we specifically did not include criteria for evaluating a curriculum's foundational skills build, because we think that there are other tools out there that do that and we wanted to be really clear that this wasn't trying to be an all-encompassing tool. The second one says that building knowledge through content. Rich ELA curricula should never be considered a substitute for strong history, social studies and science instruction in the elementary grades. In the presence of high quality curriculum and instruction in these disciplines, which will include opportunities to use and practice one's literacy skills, we can imagine that time dedicated to English language arts might be brought back in line with other disciplines. I mean, this is my dream is that increasingly high quality social studies and science curriculum will become the norm in elementary schools. That, as a consequence because what I consider to be high quality science and social studies curriculum teaches a lot of important content and in doing so, has students read, write, speak and listen about those things that they will be doing more of it, but it won't necessarily all be during the ELA block. The reason for it is obvious in the passion that students have about learning those areas that content.
Speaker 3:I've been out on a over this past year. We've probably visited more schools to learn about their implementation of high quality science instruction at the elementary grades than we have even in the ELA classrooms to districts that have adopted ELA curricula. Those visits don't feel a whole lot different in many ways in the sense in the presence that we're seeing of the literacy skills that are being, that are being practiced, that are being used Boy in a well run in a classroom where they're using some of these better science curricula. These kids don't even know that they are getting the writing practice that they are because they're just so feverishly taking their notes about their experiments and so forth, but certainly the passion that these kids have for, in this case, science.
Speaker 3:We haven't started visiting schools that are using high quality history and social studies curriculum kind of chomping at the bit to do that, but we obviously need some improvement in that universe of HQIM social studies. A lot of progress been made on the science front but, yeah, I mean to say nothing of the knowledge that we need our young people to have in these content areas. They animate the heck out of little kids to be learning about these topics and I will you know whenever. Even before I went on a school tour visit that was focused on a particular content area, but more on ELA, when I asked kids what their favorite subjects are, history and science always come up as first, you know, at the top of the list.
Speaker 1:Well, to wrap things up with you all, a couple of things about the tool that we've learned, one. This is just one tool that people should use as they are reviewing curricula not the only tool, but one, especially if they are digging into looking for a knowledge building curriculum. It can be found on the Knowledge Matters website. Correct, that's where I found it.
Speaker 3:Knowledge Matters campaignorg. That's right. It's right on the hard page and is there?
Speaker 1:are there any other tips that you want to give if people are interested in using the tool?
Speaker 4:One thing that, oh, I was just going to say one thing we heard when we did a webinar on it, where people said, well, are you doing trainings on it? And we said, well, no, but people can use what's on the Knowledge Matters campaign website. So we have blurbs about each one of the eight that we think are superb and you can see, you can train people and say you know, here's the dimension, here's the criteria for this dimension, go see if you can find it in the right. So the blurbs are small, short, not made to be whatever, but it's a way for people to kind of get a sense of what they should be looking for. So that was one of the questions that had come up for us.
Speaker 3:Sorry, barbara. No, I think the only other thing that I would say and that we didn't really have a chance to talk about maybe we can come back and talk about it when we've got a little bit more to say and claim as success and that is that you know, because of so many of the so much legislation that has been passed in recent years about the science of reading, a number of state departments of education are being required to develop review processes to ensure, you know, not all of those laws, but many of those laws have a curriculum component and say that you know that the state education agency needs to identify a list of curriculum that is the science of reading aligned. And so we have been in conversation with a few states I would say almost like a number of states already that are interested in using this tool and asking us sort of how to your question, melissa, you know, given that it's not the entire, we're not trying to replace anything that's out there, we're not trying to replace it reports. We're saying this is your add on, you know, for digging really deep on the knowledge piece, if that is of interest to you and it should be. And actually there's one state already Wisconsin that has recently issued a in response to legislation.
Speaker 3:A committee was put together that was tasked with creating a rubric, and this tool is adopted almost in total, along with other things. But there are many of these criteria that you will that we've been talking about today that are embedded in that. That states rubric already that will be used to, you know, create a list of curriculum coming up and, as I said, there are about five other states that we've been some conversation with already about that. So, and so that's my last way of saying it's on the website poach it, take it, use it, adapt it, make it your own, you know.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, it's in our show notes as well. It's here. Please use it. If you're listening, reach out with questions. We always respond and answer and we can't thank you enough, sue and Barbara, for everything that you've done to make this come to the hands of educators who so desperately need it. So thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Well, and we can't thank you all enough for the great work that you do. We're big fans and your work is really really important, so thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening. Literacy Lovers, To stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom.
Speaker 1:And to keep learning together. Join the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast Facebook group and be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
Speaker 2:If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share with a teacher friend or leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 1:Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.
Speaker 2:We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.