A collaborative effort to illuminate the K-12 curriculum landscape for educators & advocates. We get into the important weeds for popular and emerging programs.
Joined September 2018
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Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
I've looked up the sources of some the excerpts in our HMH textbook.
Imagine trying to slog through these boring texts everyday as an 8th grader.
Here's a thread 🧵
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
I've always thought highly of the Rocket Math Fact Fluency program. I've had students that were completing less than 10 multiplication facts correctly in two minutes at the beginning of the year. Most are above 30, some above 40 now with 6 weeks of practice. Yesterday, I asked them if they really liked doing fact practice in school and for homework. Only a couple raised their hands. I followed up with a particular student. She has improved significantly. She doesn't love doing it, but she said (with a smile) that it has really improved her fact fluency - practice has. This is a good learning experience for kids. Deliberate practice might not be fun, but in many instances is necessary in life. Within the first six weeks my math students completed just over 10,000 facts in the four operations (just over 2,500 facts for each operation). I'm moving to fraction fluency practice on Monday.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
Sobering article. Teachers feel they must limit writing assignments to classroom time, to combat AI cheating.
The downstream cost: students aren't being asked to do longer-form writing anywhere.
"Now she limits essay writing to the classroom, by hand, where students have little opportunity to develop longer, more complex arguments. The result, she admits, is that they may be unprepared for college-level writing.
Even her best students’ “eyes would fall out of their head,” she said, if she asked them to write an eight-page paper.
Her solution ensures that kids do their own work, but it may come at a cost. They lose the long, messy practice of learning how to compose at length and, some argue, how to think."
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
A former student stopped me in the hall today to tell me how lost she feels in social studies this year. She wishes they still did retrieval practice like we did in my class last year.
She explained that she struggles to recall information when she needs it, which leaves her confused as new content builds on what she can’t readily remember. She didn’t articulate it in these terms, but she described exactly what I used retrieval practice to prevent: essential knowledge and vocabulary that aren’t sufficiently secure in long-term memory competing for limited working memory resources when learning new information.
When students can automatically recall essential knowledge, they have more working memory available to make connections, interpret new information, and encode it meaningfully. It all builds. New knowledge is understood through the lens of what students already know and can readily retrieve from long-term memory. The more secure that knowledge, the more effectively students can make sense of what comes next avoiding potential feelings of being “lost” and “confused.”
Regardless of content or grade level, every teacher needs a deliberate plan for securing essential knowledge in students’ long-term memory. Without one, you’re teaching based more on vibes and feelings than science.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
One of the signature differences I often see between students with disparities in prior knowledge is their ability to make educated guesses. Students with substantial prior knowledge can make educated guesses even when they aren’t 100% sure. Students who lack that knowledge don’t have the same foundation to draw from. This causes a difference in students’ ability to reason through unfamiliar, novel situations based on the amount of primary knowledge they have secured in long-term memory.
I’m also reflective about how this can become my own curse of knowledge. When I have substantial knowledge of a subject, it’s easy to assume students will make the same connections I do. I might find myself thinking, “How could they not make that connection?” The answer is that they don’t yet have the knowledge I’m drawing on to make it.
This is why I place so much value on explicit instruction, making essential knowledge clear and obvious to all students, and making expert thinking visible and repeatable. I work to secure that knowledge in students’ long-term memory and provide sufficient guided and independent practice using it in the ways experts think within their disciplines. In other words, I’m trying to level the playing field so that educated guesses become less necessary because students have the knowledge and disciplinary thinking securely stored in long-term memory. Avoiding my own curse of knowledge means recognizing the connections I take for granted and deliberately teaching them to students.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
My kingdom for more content focused PD
A new study of teacher educators found they answered a third of questions wrongly about English spelling. link.springer.com/article/10…
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
Excellent! A fave of mine is “you’re showing us that the author was kind of confusing there.”
At workshops we often talk about having “back pocket phrases” to use when a student answers incorrectly but you want to build a culture of error. That is you want to say: “that was wrong but it’s fine because your answer is still really valuable!”
Today Catherine Garland shared one of my favorite all time examples: “I was hoping to hear that mistake.”
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
One of the most beneficial aspects of FASE reading is helping students cut through the seductive details that often appear in social studies textbooks. While these details may provide interesting context, they aren’t necessarily essential knowledge worth devoting students’ limited working memory to processing.
FASE reading allows me to direct students’ attention more explicitly toward the most important details in a text and prompt them to think meaningfully about those details while minimizing the cognitive resources spent on less relevant information.
If students spend more time thinking about contextual, seductive details than essential conceptual details, they’re more likely to remember the former rather than the latter. I often accomplish this by posing key questions and claims, before, during, and after reading, giving students a clear purpose for their thinking as they work through the text.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
Some personal news:
I've joined the Learning Science team at Alpha. You can probably guess what I'm there to do.
I suspect this news will come as a surprise to many. Frankly, it surprised me!
More in my latest post.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
This needs to go. Implied accusations of prejudice should never be injected into conversations about pedagogy.
Whatever the intent, the impact has been a weaponization of SJ language to promote techniques that are enormously *inequitable*.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
“A lot of our problems in mathematics are caused by the fact that students aren’t clearing the fluency stage of learning.” Great @rastokke presentation at @ResearchEd_CL
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
We have been overdue for a conversation about math curriculum, and every teacher I know sounds like this RN.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
Creating my own scripted lessons, allows me to anticipate Ss misconceptions and know how to respond to them. It gives me a clear direction and intention to my instruction. Scripts are not meant to restrict a teacher. They help keep the focus on student learning.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
In this blog post, my colleague Sarah Engstrom addresses common misconceptions about FASE reading & shares examples of what preparation for student reading can look like.
teachlikeachampion.org/blog/…
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
My favorite part of the teaching day is when I'm teaching students a pair of contrasting words like civil and hostile. I enjoy this part of the day because it teaches students new words AND students try to connect these new words to previously learned ones. I use a script. At the end of the script students have to discern between the contrasting word pair. I provide a sentence and students choose which word by spelling it on their mini white boards. For example, students discern between the words civil and hostile. I encourage students to quickly write words that are associated with either civil or hostile underneath. The words don't have to be synonyms, but should be related in some way. I'm trying to get students to solidify word networks so to speak. Here is an example from one of my students on Friday. What I like about this routine is that it is pretty quick. Students learn two new words through pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. They also are building word networks by retrieving previously learned vocabulary. There seems to be a lot of student thinking going on in this short amount of time. I might quickly ask the class to turn and talk and discuss how these words are related. I might come up with a paragraph describing how these words are related with examples for the entire class to read the following day. This has worked exceptionally well over the years. Students are not only learning words, but linking them to other ones, AND getting a lot of spelling practice with both newly learned words and retrieving previously learned words. Just for context, students previously learned the words benevolent & malevolent during novel study (Walk Two Moons) and learned belligerent earlier in this Word Mapping Project unit through Structure Word Inquiry working with the matrix and base bell meaning war.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
Megan is one of the Great Explainers in literacy spaces.
She has incredible depth and breadth of knowledge on literacy research (including her own research), paired with the teacher's natural instinct to translate the information clearly to parents, teachers, Me.
This book will be superb, and I can't wait to read my copy.
Just in time for Dyslexia Awareness Month.
@MissyPurcell @brett_tingley @Veggievangelist
💜 Dyslexia for Dummies starts shipping next week... and will be sold in select Barnes & Noble stores!
💜 Designed to be a clear, practical guide for families of struggling readers
💜 Dedicated to Penelope, my brilliant student who has testified on Capitol Hill about the power of early reading intervention
#DyslexiaAwarenessMonth
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
So now we are going to have months+ of debate because everyone has different definitions of DI/di. 😩. Can we just call it Englemann's Program. Or ZI, Zig's Ideas.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
I can’t make this stuff up.
Yesterday, during parent-teacher conferences, another teacher told me that several parents had mentioned their students taking what they learned about memory, forgetting, and retrieval practice in my class and applying it in their other classes.
I don’t share this to be performative. I share it because I regularly hear pushback against explicitly teaching students how they learn, the science behind how learning happens, and what they can do to become better learners.
Time and time again, I see evidence that students take this knowledge and use it beyond my classroom. Will it help every student? Probably not. Will every student apply it consistently? Of course not. But the idea that explicitly teaching students how to learn isn’t worth the instructional time is, in my view, fundamentally misguided.
The opportunity cost of teaching students how to learn is one I’m willing to pay. The potential payoff extends far beyond my classroom.
A former student stops me in the hallway and says, “Mr. Benson, thank you so much for teaching me that method last year. It’s working great in all my classes.”
I asked her which method she was talking about.
Retrieval practice.
Explicitly teach students how they learn, then explicitly show them what they should do based on that knowledge. Many of them will take it from there.
We shouldn’t underestimate what happens when we equip students with the knowledge and strategies to take ownership of their own learning.
Curriculum Insight Project retweeted
Yet another empirical investigation concludes no validity to VAK learning styles. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d…
