Core Knowledge School Ranks First in Colorado SAT Scores

In Memphis, Tennessee, the Libertas School combines the Montessori approach with Core Knowledge Language Arts. To some educators, that may sound paradoxical—how can Montessori’s emphasis on hands-on inquiry be reconciled with the Core Knowledge emphasis on a carefully sequenced content-rich curriculum? According to Bob Nardo, Head of Libertas, Montessori and Core Knowledge work together symbiotically at this school whose mission is “to cultivate minds, hands and hearts for lives of Wonder, Work and Love.”

Libertas School serves 390 students in prekindergarten through grade 4, mostly African American, and with 96% from families that are low-income or live in failing school zones. Since the school made the transition to Montessori and CKLA four years ago, students have made steady academic progress.

On July 24, Head of Libertas Bob Nardo and Core Knowledge founder and chairman E. D. (Don) Hirsch, Jr. engaged in a conversation. Here follows an edited transcript of their discussion of how Montessori and Core Knowledge should be understood not as “either-or” but as “both-and.”

Don Hirsch and Bob Nardo

Bob Nardo:  We are going into our fourth year of operation in a high poverty area of Memphis. Along with family engagement, two distinctive characteristics of our school are that we fully implement the CKLA Listening and Learning strand (while partially implementing the Skills strand), and that we are a Montessori School. What’s interesting is that Maria Montessori is very much misunderstood, often seen as simply a progressive educator, despite her emphatic view of the importance of sequence in learning as well as content knowledge.

I have always understood your work [at Core Knowledge] as saying that whole class direct instruction at a grade level basis is not the only way, or the best way, to fully implement your approach, but just one way.  So, what our school has tried to do is to take the content that the Core Knowledge Foundation has developed and apply that to a personalized teaching approach.

Don Hirsch:  Yes, the idea of sequencing topics is not limited to one teaching approach. It’s just that one ought to follow a sequence of topics because that lets you build one thing on another, and especially for disadvantaged kids that seems to me to make a big difference.

You have to think of the classroom as being a speech community, a language community.  All the people that belong to that speech community need some of the same unspoken knowledge to understand what is spoken.  Which means that you do need to build up the background knowledge simultaneously for any particular group. To think of the classroom as a speech community explains a lot about comprehension, particularly for disadvantaged kids

Bob Nardo:  I think that is very powerful. Our experience shows that the specific sequence of domain knowledge, while certainly important to a degree, is more instrumental than absolute—it’s not that exactly these facts must be learned in precisely this order. Which is not to belittle the importance of the substantive information—we are very strong on the importance of rich content domain knowledge and how domain knowledge builds on itself. The content is shared, and even the sequence is very similar, but the pacing is a little bit different. In our classrooms it’s not 100% individualized; there is a fair amount of time reading aloud and discussing together. This is not dissimilar to how, for example, Montessori would have the children working with their hands, maybe sewing, while she was reading great literature to the group of children.

You could say Maria Montessori had some “progressive” educational insights without losing certain traditional educational principles. Not all Montessori schools today implement her vision of content, with her rigor.  In her writings, she is somewhat ambivalent about nature, in that nature can take both good and bad forms. Something being “natural” does not necessarily make it good. So, there is a lot of student freedom in our classrooms but also a lot of structure at the micro-level. The teachers all have lessons developed and designed with a certain sequence, and check student work throughout the week.

Don Hirsch: So, that is how she differed from the Progressives. Saying that, how are you using the Core Knowledge Curriculum?

Bob Nardo: We use the CKLA Listening and Learning strand fully from Kindergarten up, with 45 minutes to an hour group time every single day. The teachers present the Listening and Learning lessons with all of the interactive discussion. In alignment with Montessori’s vision of “cultural” and “cosmic” education, students go forth from the lessons to individualized follow-up work. The students go out and use our beautiful library of domain literature throughout the rest of the day and the week. They do additional research, explore their interests, and extend their work with writing reports that they present to the class—about ancient Greece or botany or astronomy, or whatever they have learned about from all the CKLA domains.

So it’s built around the backbone of content, with the additional motivation of student inquiry and desire to learn and to share with each other. Let me to assure you that the children are hungry to learn more about the world. They love their CKLA time. It’s a beautiful time when we all gather around to share these discussions.

Don Hirsch: That is what I was going to ask you, how the children are responding.

Bob Nardo:  Our kids want to learn about the world and master their environment.  It makes the children more confident. They love it. They love having common discussions and learning about the world.

Don Hirsch:  If children are confident in that way, they are likely to accomplish more.

Bob Nardo: We agree. So, like other schools we use the Listening and Learning, but the follow-up work is more personalized.

Don Hirsch: Personalizing in that sense—to the child’s interests, abilities, and talents—is simply good teaching!  What about standardized testing, which itself is not content-based?

Bob Nardo: Most standardized tests assess only what is easy to teach and measure in the short-term (and governments reward and punish schools based on this), while a content-rich curriculum is a long term investment. We don’t sacrifice content knowledge, which is necessary but not tested, for the sake of maximizing short term scores.

Don Hirsch:  So, you say they are using all the Listening and Learning lessons, but the readings are organized by grade. How do you use CKLA in your multi-age classrooms?

Bob Nardo: The follow-up work and the independent practice are individualized. Our classrooms are organized in multi-age groups based on Montessori’s insights about child development. These include Primary (pre-K and K), Lower Elementary (1 through 3), and Upper Elementary (3 or 4 and 5). For the Listening and Learning hour, most of the children break out into two or three small groups. The teacher works with these groups separately, while the other children are working on something else, perhaps with the other adult in the room.  While the groups are generally organized by age, sometimes a younger or older child will be asked by the teacher to work with another age group. Or it may be driven by the child who inches over to listen, for a beautiful multi-age interaction, as it was prior to industrialized schooling.

Don Hirsch: A central tenet of my research is that in the early grades, a broad rich curriculum of specific sequenced knowledge is necessary as a base for the later grades of exploration. What I am hearing is that the first graders are doing first grade work in the early part of the day with more flexibility in a later part of the day?

Bob Nardo:  Essentially, yes, with some important exceptions for children’s abilities or interest in listening in to another group for the part of the day explicitly dedicated to CKLA. There is nothing contrary to Montessori about that. She was all about reading aloud to kids, sharing oral stories and sharing knowledge in that way. The difference in our school is that we do not interrupt kids and make the whole group shift to another subject all at once. In our interdisciplinary, three-hour “work cycle,” children choose from a set of meaningful work options prepared by the teacher. So a child might proceed to choose among books within the domain of knowledge the group is exploring; after the group read-aloud, they follow up with their own research and exploration. We encourage each child to take a book of their interest and have a rich experience within this common knowledge domain. We do not have all these schedule transitions that schools typically have that frankly waste valued time.

Don Hirsch: What about writing? One of the reasons for great writers is that they are also great orators. What is your process for oral expression and then writing? How about having the kids make speeches to their classmates? Maybe that is one thing we have forgotten, that our great writers knew how to make the case orally, with rhetoric.

Bob Nardo:  First, writing. One thing we are doing in response to standards, especially in the later elementary grades, is increasing expectations for student writing. We are developing our own fourth grade language program around the content of CKLA, but referencing state standards for the writing expectations. Similar to how CKLA distinguishes between decoding and comprehension in reading, we have Montessori and other resources to develop the mechanics of writing, and then we use great literature as models of richness and expression of language for the children. It’s embarrassing and tragic to see the quality of texts now used in many schools. Core Knowledge, especially with the domain trade books, has done a great job of raising the quality of nonfiction texts.

For oral language, we do lots of work on blending and segmenting, and vocabulary, and we encourage the kids to recite poetry and stories together. We don’t want to neglect the expression and style of language. We do all the CKLA domains, and often the teacher presents amazing literature consistent with the domain.

Don Hirsch: Let’s get agreement on this: The actual ordering of topics in many cases is arbitrary, but it’s incredibly important to have an agreement on the ordering. Especially with all of this student mobility in big city districts, sometimes up to 30%, there is an obligation to have some sort of common sequence.

Bob Nardo: We are very comfortable with that. We deepen CKLA with classic literature, but we stay within the same domain.

Don Hirsch: That’s fine!  One can rely on all sorts of very good curriculum.  But the agreed-upon sequence should be sacrosanct.

Bob Nardo: CKLA really assists our lift. Providing CKLA everywhere would improve education. Finding teachers who are as knowledgeable about the world as they need to be is a significant limitation. Our teachers need to be curious about the world and well prepared to engage students with it. Mario Montessori said that the best preparation for a teacher in their method was a liberal arts education.We find people who have a sense of wonder, invite them to become our teachers, and offer lots of professional development.

We meet with our teachers for a full month before school starts to learn among ourselves, and then continue this learning throughout the year. We work with our hands, read poetry as a group of educators, and classics such as Shakespeare. Our kids need educated adults to talk to and listen to. We are building that knowledge within ourselves.

Don Hirsch: It sounds like your teachers are getting a splendid continuing education!  To get back to where we started: How do Montessori principles mesh with Core Knowledge?

Bob Nardo:  A great insight Maria Montessori had was “from the hand to the mind”—thinking about the concrete experiences we can invite children to have with beautiful things in the world. We spend thousands of dollars on hands-on physical materials, but I would emphasize that we do not consider our work to be “project-based.”We present beautiful and high-quality materials, Core Knowledge lessons, read-alouds followed by discussions, integrated in the cultural and cosmic curriculum of Montessori—great lessons on the fundamental needs of human beings—inviting kids to inquire and investigate in a disciplined way through their own research and work. We invite children into a world of wonder.

Give a first-grader the chance to pick a theme for his birthday party and what will he choose? Super-heroes? Monster trucks? Star Wars? Or, as recently happened in the eastern corner of the state of Tennessee, a Colonial Times birthday party, featuring soap-making and eating cake by candlelight.

What inspired that theme? The curriculum chosen by the student’s school district, Sullivan County. The district is now in its third year of using Core Knowledge Language Arts® (CKLA) to strengthen early literacy instruction.

Sullivan County’s Supervisor of Elementary Education, Dr. Robin McClellan, is excited about the promising early results. Sullivan County is a mostly rural Appalachian district, with more than 60 percent of its elementary school students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Over the course of the 2017-2018 school year, Dr. McClellan notes, many students who were initially identified as academically at risk—in the lower tiers correlated to the benchmarks of the aimswebPlus progress monitoring tool—advanced to Tier 1 and are no longer at risk. (See Dr. McClellan’s Twitter post about the representative results at one school.)

Sullivan County’s efforts reflect a general statewide focus on strengthening early literacy instruction, and are specifically tied to LIFT (Leading Innovation for Tennessee), a network of twelve Tennessee district superintendents focused on “new classroom strategies, practices, and curriculum to improve reading in the early grades.” LIFT receives support from SCORE (State Collaborative on Reforming Education), an independent, nonprofit, and nonpartisan educational research and advocacy group based in Nashville.

According to Courtney Bell, SCORE’s Director of Educator Engagement, after SCORE worked with the LIFT districts to identify targets for improvement, they decided to focus on strengthening early literacy by “providing more universal access to high-quality curricular resources for teachers” and “making sure that school leaders understand what strong literacy instruction looks like, so they can prioritize the time, the resources, and the support that teachers need to implement with fidelity.”

SCORE has helped schools in the LIFT network identify high-quality, standards-aligned resources—a task made more pressing and challenging when, in 2016, the state adopted new and more rigorous academic standards. Tennessee is a textbook adoption state, but the last adoption took place in 2010. So, Mrs. Bell notes, “many districts are using materials not aligned to the state’s new college- and career-ready standards.”

To help LIFT districts fill the gap until the next ELA adoption in 2020, SCORE engaged TNTP as a “technical assistance provider.” (Founded in 1997 as The New Teacher Project, TNTP now works as a partner for change in more than 200 public school systems nationwide.) In instructional reviews of classrooms across the LIFT districts, TNTP found that in most K-2 classrooms, text complexity was too low and students spent very little time thoughtfully interacting with the text. TNTP then undertook a national search for high-quality early literacy curricular materials, especially ELA programs with strong read-aloud components. In 2016, TNTP identified only a few qualified programs, including CKLA; since then, the list has grown to include Expeditionary Learning, Wit and Wisdom, and other options.

“The big thing we’ve learned,” says Mrs. Bell, “is how critically important systematically building knowledge is for kids, particularly kids who may come from an impoverished background or not come from a well-resourced home. Having high-quality instructional materials that systematically build knowledge over time really is an equity issue. It allows the playing field to be leveled for all kids so they are able to succeed. Kids really rise to the occasion—it’s just been so miraculous to see.” (For one example, see the student work samples from Sullivan County first-grade teacher Lize Kinsler, which compares one student’s first day writing sample to her writing at the end of the school year.)

On the first day of class, this first-grader wrote fragments about “drinking jitter juice.” At the end of the school year, she wrote complete and excited sentences: “So we have learned about the Maya, and the Inca, and the Aztec. We also learned about the human body, and fables, and eating healthy, and astronomy, and geologist, and palientolegist [sic], and fairy tales, and the thirteen colonies.”

A recent statewide survey of Tennessee educators revealed that K-2 teachers spend an average of 4.5 hours per week in sourcing ELA materials—“that’s four and a half hours,” notes Mrs. Bell, “that they’re not planning how to differentiate instruction or not really digging in so they can have a strong understanding of the content.” Mrs. Bell argues that “we have to stop expecting teachers to be curriculum curators. If you just give teachers the materials they need, and allow them to do what they do best, which is to teach and to lead learning, then that really has a dramatic impact on student learning.” In short, Mrs. Bell summarizes, “Knowledge matters, and teachers need high-quality materials.” Sullivan County’s Dr. McClellan agrees: “The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t write the score. Now that our teachers have strong curriculum in their hands, they are able to focus on the students’ learning.”

In most LIFT districts, schools began by piloting the recommended curricular options and then choosing their preferred program for expanded implementation. Sullivan County was drawn to CKLA for reasons both pedagogical and practical. First, as Dr. McClellan explains, CKLA filled two big gaps in the county’s existing ELA curriculum: “lack of explicit skills instruction, and lack of knowledge building.” Second, the Core Knowledge Foundation makes CKLA available as Open Educational Resources, which helps when, as Dr. McClellan recalls, “we didn’t have the resources to purchase new literacy curriculum.”

Mrs. Bell, who has worked closely with Dr. McClellan, praises Sullivan County for “the way that they’ve empowered their teachers to lead the learning.” Initially, three Sullivan County schools piloted CKLA. TNTP helped train the teachers in these three pilot schools. In the second year of the initiative, these pioneering teachers, dubbed “Game Changers,” took on the responsibility for training the “Difference Makers,” the teachers in the remaining eight elementary schools in the district.

Both SCORE and TNTP have worked to ensure that the early literacy initiative is “deeply embedded” so that it continues even when district leadership changes. “We want to make sure the work is sustainable,” says Mrs. Bell: “We’ve had a couple of districts undergo leadership changes at the district level and so far the work has continued seamlessly because there is such strong buy-in from the school leaders and other district-level staff and the teachers as well.”

SCORE insists that district leaders roll up their sleeves and actively participate in understanding the nuts and bolts of effective early literacy instruction. Four times per year, SCORE convenes LIFT superintendents to meet in one of the participating districts, where they visit classrooms and then use an instructional rubric to guide discussion of the strengths and shortcomings of the teaching they observed. The goal, says, Mrs. Bell, is to “make sure everyone has a vision for high-quality literacy instruction.”

Instructional leaders at work: A group of Sullivan County principals discuss the CKLA lesson they have just observed.

Similarly, in Sullivan County, once a month all eleven elementary school principals gather at one of the school sites. They break into teams to observe teachers and students engaged in a specific CKLA domain. Guided by the same rubric that the superintendents use, the principals then gather as a group for discussions that lead to practical feedback to the teachers, for example: “We saw these strengths, let’s celebrate these things, and why don’t you visit Mrs. B’s classroom to see how her questions lead to enduring understanding.”

In early 2018, after visiting one of these gatherings at a Sullivan County school, Core Knowledge Foundation President Linda Bevilacqua noted the shared commitment to involving instructional leaders in understanding the curriculum and providing feedback to teachers. “In building the competency of instructional leaders,” says Ms. Bevilacqua, the Sullivan County schools, with SCORE and TNTP, are “building lasting infrastructure—even when trainers leave, there will be lasting understanding of the program, with teachers trained as mentors and coaches.” As Dr. McClellan affirms, “We’re just all in it together.”

From now through May 6^th, it’s National Children’s Book Week. This long-running initiative of the Children’s Book Council promotes literacy with events at schools, libraries, and bookstores celebrating books for children and teens. Throughout this week (and beyond!), it’s a great time to revisit favorite classics like Charlotte’s Web and Little Women, and also an opportunity to explore the wide range of voices and perspectives in works by contemporary authors.

Where to begin? You might start with recent Newberry and Caldecott winners, or peruse the titles selected by the Association for Library Service to Children as this year’s Notable Children’s Books.

Here at the Core Knowledge Foundation, we’d like to share with you the works of an author suggested to us by teachers in the Core Knowledge network, Jacqueline Woodson. Ms. Woodson has authored eighteen books in genres varying from picture books to young adult fiction to poetry. Ms. Woodson’s work has garnered many awards, including the Coretta Scott King Award. She is a four-time Newberry Honor Medalist. Ms. Woodson has also recently been named the sixth National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2018-2019.

Children in grades K-5 might enjoy The Other Side (2000), a picture book that tells the story of two girls, Clover and Annie, who live in a segregated town and use the power of friendship to bring down the barriers separating them. In another picture book, Each Kindness (2012), the narrator, Chloe, is unkind to the new girl at school, Maya. When Maya stops coming to school, Chloe realizes, through a lesson taught by her teacher, that she lost the opportunity to make a new friend. The book dramatizes the ripple effect of acts of kindness.

In Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), a “memoir in free verse,” Ms. Woodson describes growing up in the 1960s and 1970s as an African American girl in Greenville, South Carolina and Brooklyn, New York. In these narrative poems, Ms. Woodson recalls how she never felt quite at home in either place, and lets us see through her eyes her growing awareness of the Civil Rights Movement.

Brown Girl Dreaming, suitable for grades four and up, will soon be the focus of a new Language Arts unit to be developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation as part of a forthcoming initiative to expand our offering of Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) materials offered for free download on our website. An OER (Open Educational Resources) Teacher Guide to accompany Brown Girl Dreaming is currently under development and will soon be added to our offering of Grade 4 CKLA units.

To learn more about Jacqueline Woodson and her other works, check out her website. And you can learn more about National Children’s Book Week and find activities that you can do with your students here.

This post is published with permission from Amplify, the Core Knowledge Foundation’s publishing partner for the Core Knowledge Language Arts® (CKLA) program. 

We are excited to announce that, as of November 30th, teachers and students are now able to explore areas of CKLA’s Knowledge Strand in an entirely new way.

Select domain lessons and bundles will now be available for purchase on Nearpod, a digital lesson delivery platform that provides interactive experiences for both students and teachers. With Nearpod, teachers can purchase ready-made lessons in the store or create their own.

As a special offer, the first 3 lessons of each domain are FREE! Just sign up for a free Nearpod account to access the lessons.

Learn More About CKLA on Nearpod

Can you tell we’re excited? Because we are. Nearpod allows teachers at any school to access CKLA’s engaging read-alouds and interactive discussions on cross-curricular topics. Through Nearpod, teachers can:

• Boost engagement during Read-Alouds through interactive student-facing activities.
• Access ready-made instruction to increase the efficiency of Read-Aloud instruction.
• Build deep knowledge through informational and literary Read-Alouds on topics in social studies, science, and literature.

Do I have to use CKLA to use the Nearpod lessons?
We encourage everyone to use these lessons, whether you’re using CKLA in your classroom already or not.

In the first release, 9 total domains will be available. They are as follows:

Kindergarten: Domain 5 Farms, Domain 7 Kings and Queens, Domain 12 Presidents and American Symbols
1st Grade: Domain 2 The Human Body, Domain 6 Astronomy, Domain 9 Fairy Tales
2nd Grade: Domain 6 Greek Myths, Domain 8 Insects, Domain 12 Fighting for a Cause

Which devices will I need?
Nearpod can be used on any device, but we do encourage students to use a tablet or Chromebook with a touch screen because students will often be called upon to draw a picture in response to a prompt. Sounds like fun, right?

It’s CKLA, in a whole new way. We’re thrilled to be able to offer this new solution to you, and hope you find the content and platform to be as educationally enriching as we envision it to be.

[To learn more about CKLA and its new Nearpod integration, please email CKLA@amplify.com]