Education Leadership With 2020 coming to a close, and the New Year just around the corner, many school leaders are starting to think about the ways in which they can better support staff. Numerous principals have asked us: What can I do to build more buy-in, or enthusiasm, around Core Knowledge? How can I support my teachers…
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Curriculum As COVID-19 has forced countless schools to abruptly shift instructional delivery from face-to-face to online instruction, parents and guardians who were already wearing multiple hats, were left to take on a new role—teacher. If you are one of those parents, you may feel overwhelmed by the task that you now face. We want to help…
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Core Knowledge Language Arts Deanna Zarichansky is the Assistant Principal at Trousdale County Elementary School in Hartsville, TN
Our district adopted Core Knowledge [Language Arts] at the beginning of this school year. This has been the single most powerful curriculum implementation I have seen in my 16 years of education. We are a small district with a high rate of poverty, with many students who enter school with little to no experiences with literacy…
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Education Practice Our blog post title above is in quotation marks because it is quoted from an article by Doug Lemov (author of Teach Like a Champion). Lemov offers guidance to teachers asked to incorporate more nonfiction in their reading instruction. He notes that “many language arts teachers approach nonfiction structurally” and focus students’ attention on “how information is presented.” But, says Lemov, “how information is presented” is less important than what students know, since the text assumes (as all texts do) prior background knowledge.
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Curriculum Harriet Tubman will grace the front of our $20 bill—a long overdue tribute to a woman who lived up to the best of American values. But do most Americans know who she was? Anecdotal evidence and test scores indicate that they don’t.
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Curriculum Back in 2003, Sam Wineburg, a history professor at Stanford, published a little essay (or quick rant) titled “Power Pointless.” I can’t find it online now, but it amounted to a plea to have students write papers instead of merely creating presentations. Bullet points can hide incomplete understandings; essays tend to reveal them. Wineburg’s piece…
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Curriculum By Brooke Haycock Brooke Haycock, senior playwright-researcher with The Education Trust, primarily develops and performs docudramas based on interviews with students and educators to deepen understanding of educational data and the equity debate. This post was originally published as part of Ed Trust’s Between the Echoes blog series, which offers glimpses of students’ experiences. As Ed Trust notes, “All stories…
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Curriculum Missouri: Jefferson City, Corn. Kansas: Topeka, Corn. States, capitals, crops. That’s pretty much what my geography education consisted of. I didn’t even see a topographic map until I was in college—a boyfriend took me hiking. It was as an adult, reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, that I realized…
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Curriculum Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never seen a position description for a good job that didn’t have a long list of knowledge, skill, and character requirements. It makes me wonder why those focused on “21st century” careers seem to place skills and character—or problem solving, team work, and perseverance—far above knowledge. David Brooks provides…
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Curriculum I have a very simple proposition: The more we teach, the more students learn—but some students get taught more than others. There’s plenty of evidence to back me up, so I’ll just go with the most recent study I’ve seen that make this point. Bill Schmidt and his research team found that all around the…
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