Bringing the Vision to Life with Curriculum, Assessments and Schedule
Your early literacy model is the cornerstone for bringing your vision to life. A successful model lays out the research-based curriculum, assessments, and instructional minutes that serve as the pillars of strong literacy instruction. A strong early literacy model ensures your students are set up for lifelong success as readers, writers, and learners.
Leaders have built early literacy models by:
- Focusing on building students’ foundational skills and comprehension by thoughtfully selecting research-aligned curricula
- Making connections between curriculum and assessment
- Using daily instructional minutes strategically, including allocating time for science and social studies
Selecting Research-Aligned Curricula
As leaders learn more about the science of reading and become experts in research-aligned instructional practices, literacy leaders recommend starting the curriculum-selection process with an evaluation of existing literacy programming to determine what shifts, if any, need to be made.
At Impact Public Schools, the leadership team leveraged The Reading League’s Curriculum Evaluation Guidelines to review past practices and flag those that weren’t aligned to the research. These guidelines provided the team with common language and goals in their evaluation process and allowed them to approach evaluation more objectively.
The team identified “opportunities for growth” (see below) using the guidelines and communicated areas for shifts as shown in their deck.
Equipped with a clear and shared view on the changes needed, network leaders then designed a curricular review and pilot process that involved many voices. “I wanted to make sure teachers and the dean were fully invested, so we designed a process that had tangible deliverables to get people in the weeds,” explains Stephanie Bennetts, Chief Academic Officer at Blackstone Valley Prep (BVP). The BVP team started by selecting and bringing together a committee for each grade span where teachers and leaders rated curricular options from EdReports and shared their thoughts and evidence after evaluating each curriculum during review meetings. Additionally, the team leveraged NYU’s Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecard to evaluate each curriculum.
This led the K-12 team to pilot 13 potential curricula across three schools, which provided lessons learned and implementation best practices that informed their curriculum decisions. After voting on and finalizing their curricular decisions, committee members helped to lead the change by creating planning resources, facilitating summer professional development, and sharing their lessons learned from the pilots.
A few words of advice from Stephanie Bennetts on this curricula process:
- Choose your team. Set up the team as a combination of colleagues “opting in” and asking/encouraging participation. Bennetts learned that asking and encouraging key staff (like respected teachers, informal influencers, and high performers) made a huge difference to the buy-in after the process. Bennetts shares, “I said we must have someone with Special Education expertise on this committee. I wanted a diversity of deans and leaders and teachers. I asked a few key people to participate, but also opened it to everyone.”
- Create time for the work. The BVP team engaged in a rigorous process that took time–around 1.5 hours/week during the school day and an additional 2-3 hours outside of school. Bennetts worked with the committee’s managers to make sure that participants had time to do the pre-work thoughtfully and thoroughly. This sometimes meant covering classes or giving space during check-ins to engage in the committee work–reviewing curriculum, observing pilots, preparing sample lessons.
- Build in space to pilot before the school year is out. Bennetts shares that their selection timeline allowed time in the late Spring to pilot the selected curriculum in a few classrooms. That time was critical to working out some wrinkles and going into the next school year with a clear view of the pain points in executing the new curriculum.
- Leverage your “curriculum selection team." Bennetts shares, “Being on the selection committee came with additional opportunities. I prioritized summer work for the selection committee, they had a stipend to work on curriculum. We had lots of subcommittees and distributed leadership–not everything sat with me.”
Making Clear Connections between Curriculum and Assessment
Leaders at KIPP New Orleans Schools (KNOS) shared that by explicitly naming how assessment and curriculum work together, teachers and leaders better understand the connections between the components of instructional materials and how they align to the reading research. By showing how each benchmark probe on DIBELS connects to the reading research and relevant components of the curriculum, teachers better understand the purpose of each component and ensure that no components are missed. “We’re constantly bringing connections between probes and curriculum into the conversation,” says Todd Purvis, Chief Academic Officer at KNOS. “Now, our team’s understanding of the curriculum is strong and that means people aren’t questioning what is going on.”
See below for how KNOS made explicit the alignment between their curriculum and the DIBELS probes. See additional details in the KNOS Blueprint (pp. 19-20).
| Assessment | The Why - Connection to Structured Literacy | What is it? | Connection to Instruction - when taught? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dibels-Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF) | Phonological Awareness | Phoneme Segmentation assesses a students’ ability to identify and make each individual sound within a word that is spoken by the examiner. Hearing, identifying and reproducing separate word sounds is related to reading decoding. This is an example of phonemic awareness, the most sophisticated and most important level of phonological awareness. Phonemic awareness is also the level of phonological awareness that is most closely linked with long term reading success. The examiner says each test word and the student responds with the individual three or four phonemes for each word. This is an untimed test. |
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| Dibels-Letter Name Fluency (LNF) | Sight Recognition | Letter Naming Fluency assesses a student’s knowledge of upper- and lower-case letter names. Knowing letter names is an essential pre-literacy skill. Because it is a timed measure, Letter Naming Fluency can also measure the level of automaticity of this skill. |
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| Dibels-Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) | Decoding | Nonsense Word Fluency measures students ability to make individual letter sounds and make letter sounds in groups of two or three. Because it’s a timed measure, NWF can also measure the level of automaticity of these skills. The student sees rows of nonsense words and says as many letter sounds (individually as sounds or blended as words) as possible in one minute. This single assessment gives two scores-one for Nonsense Word Fluency Correct Letter Sounds (NWF_CLS) and one for Nonsense Word Fluency Words Read Correctly (NWF_WRC). |
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Establishing New Parameters for Instructional Time
In addition to ensuring all the five essential components of reading instruction are covered in both curriculum and assessment, one sometimes forgotten element is ensuring there is enough instructional time for each component. Curricular programs provide time recommendations in their resources, but often schools use multiple programs, and it’s not always clear how the timing all fits together.
Below is an overview of how DREAM Charter Schools laid out their K-2 literacy instructional minutes:
| DREAM’s K-2 ELA Curriculum and Minutes | |
| Instructional Block | Minutes | Amplify CKLA Skills | 60 minutes per day |
|---|---|
| Wit & Wisdom | 90 minutes four days per week |
| WIN Block (individualized instruction) | 30 minutes four days per week |
See here for other examples of early literacy models and instructional minutes from portfolio schools.
Save Time for Science and Social Studies
As KIPP Nashville Public Schools went through their curriculum process, they also selected science and social studies curricula as part of their literacy model. Research has found that content instruction boosts reading comprehension, and it’s also an opportunity to spark student interest and curiosity. “Science and social studies motivate a lot of kids [to read]. Students love it. In kindergarten through second grade, we use Mystery Science, because it has hands-on experiments, and we use Amplify Science for third and fourth grade. For social studies, we use Studies Weekly. I think that’s been helpful in reminding people that good content drives literacy growth and student interest," shares Kate Baker, Head of Elementary Academics at KIPP Nashville.
Charting the Course for Early Literacy Excellence
Crafting a comprehensive early literacy model aligned to your vision will create a roadmap for your team to deliver effective early literacy instruction. Building a model that is research-based, includes collaborative decision-making, and makes time for all components of literacy will help ensure schools have the tools they need to teach the foundational skills and knowledge necessary for lifelong reading.
