Curious About Knowledge-Building Curricula? Check Out This Website

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Educators, parents, and others searching for hard-to-find information about what works in education now have a valuable new resource: a website loaded with well-organized articles, videos, and recommendations about curricula that do a good job of building crucial academic knowledge.

Back in 2015, an initiative was launched called the Knowledge Matters Campaign, soon followed by a website. The purpose of both was to make the case for devoting more class time to rich content in history, science, and the arts, especially at the elementary level.

For decades, younger students had been spending hours every week practicing supposed reading comprehension skills like “finding the main idea,” using easy-to-read fiction or books on random topics. Enabling kids to acquire substantive academic knowledge and vocabulary was considered relatively unimportant. That left many students, and especially those from less educated families, ill-equipped to meet expectations at higher grade levels.

In most schools, that’s still the case. But a lot has changed since 2015—and the Knowledge Matters Campaign’s newly revamped website, unveiled on August 15, makes the most of it. (Disclosure: I’m a board member of the Knowledge Matters Campaign’s parent organization, StandardsWork, and I provided some help on the website revision.)

One big change over the past seven years has been the emergence of several literacy curricula that put rich content rather than skills in the foreground. Cognitive science and empirical studies show that a knowledge-building approach in the elementary grades is far more likely to provide all children with what they need to succeed at higher grade levels—and in life. And an increasing number of schools and districts across the country have been adopting one of the new curricula that follow that science.

The new website builds on the Knowledge Matters School Tour, which has spent the last several years visiting classrooms around the country that have switched to one of seven new curricula, including some in math and science as well as literacy. There are articles, blog posts, and social media threads describing the visits, but perhaps most compelling are the video clips of teachers talking about what the change has meant for them and their students. There are about 130 snippets in all on the site, including some that show classroom instruction and interviews with parents and students.

“It’s so helpful to have the rigor come from the curriculum and not be some added piece the teacher is having to fit in,” says one Boston teacher about a curriculum called Fishtank ELA.

“They are so engaged in it and so involved in it,” comments a teacher in Tennessee who initially thought the Core Knowledge curriculum would be too difficult for her third-graders. “They are capable of so much more than what I even thought they could be.”

The videos and posts are searchable both by the curriculum discussed and by the benefits teachers talk about, such as “Academic Rigor,” “Equitable Learning,” and “Student Engagement.”

The website also features a page describing six English Language Arts or literacy curricula that the Campaign has determined to be effective in “coherently building knowledge of words and the world” as well as providing systematic instruction in foundational reading skills and giving every student access to complex texts. The six curricula are:

· ARC Core

· Bookworms

· Core Knowledge/Amplify

· EL Education

· Fishtank ELA

· Wit & Wisdom

Accompanying text explains what generally makes an ELA curriculum effective and also goes into detail about each of the featured curricula and what topics and texts they cover. Curriculum publishers have provided additional material, including samples of student work. More knowledge-building curricula may be added to the list in the future.

For those interested in learning more generally about the importance of building knowledge beginning in the elementary grades, another page on the website offers links to articles on various aspects of that topic. The resources are briefly summarized and divided into three categories, depending on how deeply a reader wants to explore the issues.

The Campaign also has a 13-member Scientific Advisory Committee composed of well-respected figures in the field. All have signed a statement, posted on the site, calling on the “Science of Reading” movement to more explicitly embrace the importance of building the knowledge that fuels reading comprehension.

While the authors applaud the recent attention focused on efforts to align instruction in phonics and other foundational reading skills with scientific evidence, they caution that such skills are “literally meaningless unless readers can make sense of words and texts. This sense-making requires knowledge that must be systematically built (not just activated!) through instructional experiences and curricula that evoke curiosity and the desire to learn more. In short, knowledge matters.”

The academics call not only on education leaders but also “K-12 journalists” to “bring the role of knowledge to the forefront of Science of Reading conversations.” High-profile articles on reading and literacy, including one in Time magazine and another in the New York Times, have focused solely on foundational skills. Journalists have largely overlooked the problems with the way schools approach comprehension, and their enormous ramifications.

The website also offers suggestions for educators, parents, and policymakers who want to take action—and an opportunity to sign up for emails from the Campaign.

While the interest in knowledge-building curricula appears to be growing rapidly, there are still many who are unaware of the issue or skeptical of its importance. Among those already on board, there’s often confusion about which curricula truly do an effective job of building kids’ knowledge, or what to do if their school or district uses a curriculum that isn’t working.

The new Knowledge Matters Campaign website may not answer every question about the topic, and it probably won’t be the final stop on the road to an improved education system. But it makes a great beginning—and it’s a sign of hope for anyone who aims to enable all students to reach their full potential and participate fully and responsibly in a democratic society.

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