This article originally appeared in The Conversation.
Philadelphia’s K-12 public school students will be taught a new literacy curriculum starting in the 2024-2025 school year. It’s called Expeditionary Learning, and it corresponds to what literacy experts call the science of reading, which are research-based skills needed to become a strong reader.
Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo is a clinical professor of literacy studies at Drexel University and previously worked for 18 years as an elementary school teacher, teaching children to read and write. She spoke to The Conversation US about the strengths and challenges of Philly’s new curriculum.
How is the new literacy curriculum different?
In recent years, the Philadelphia School District has used a homegrown curriculum developed by Philadelphia teachers. This curriculum, shared with teachers in Google Drive, focused on using state standards to organize and teach reading, writing, and speaking.
The district believes the new and more structured curriculum better aligns with the science of reading and will help standardize instruction across classrooms and schools.
The new curriculum combines what it calls ‘word knowledge’ and ‘world knowledge’.
Word knowledge refers to structured, synthetic sounds. This is a way to teach the letter-sound relationships used in spelling and decoding new words. Readers start by learning letter sounds and then put the sounds together to form a word. Structured phonics follow a specific order and differ from analytic phonics, where letter-sound relationships are learned by first looking at a word and then breaking the word down into its parts. For example, if you know how to read ‘bat’, you can also read other words that end in ‘-at’.
World literacy refers to building strong background knowledge using nonfiction texts that students might traditionally read in a science or social studies class. These texts also address social justice and environmental themes.
The lessons in this program are organized in a specific order. This differs from the previous curriculum, which provided teachers with specific teaching standards, along with texts and supporting materials, but did not have a specific sequence of lessons. The new curriculum also provides scripts for what to say to students, as well as additional activities for English language learners, students with learning disabilities, and students who are above curriculum level in some skills.
The curriculum is organized into modules that generally last six weeks and have a theme such as What’s Up in the Sky: A Study of the Sun, Moon and Stars or Stories of Human Rights. Each module covers a specific set of literacy skills. This includes, for example, reading with comprehension narrative poems or revising and editing a non-fiction piece.
This theme-oriented instruction lasts one hour per school day.
In grades K-2, there is a second hour called Foundations, dedicated to the phonics curriculum. In the upper grades there is a second hour, called ALL, in which basic skills in reading and writing are discussed and in which fluency in reading and writing and the development of grammar and vocabulary are practiced.
Schools still invest money in reading material that teaches children to guess
Will it help students become better readers?
Parents and teachers will only know in a number of years whether it helps students. That’s how long researchers think it takes for standardized tests and their assessments to demonstrate the impact of a curriculum on student achievement.
Like students across the United States, students in Philadelphia struggle to meet state-level expectations for literacy. The district has made gains in addressing some of the learning loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but many of its students still have a long way to go on the path to proficient reading and writing.
Are there any disadvantages?
In articles published by Chalkbeat Philadelphia and The Philadelphia Inquirer, several Philadelphia teachers expressed confidence in the intended Expeditionary Learning curriculum and believe it follows the science of reading. However, they admit that they struggle with the steep learning curve and intensive preparation required to put the curriculum into practice in their classrooms.
I heard similar experiences firsthand from Philadelphia teachers attending Drexel University’s Science of Reading Day.
With any new curriculum, teachers must learn how lessons are organized. They also need to master new texts and other learning materials – such as videos, games and handouts – that form the core of education. And they must discover which of the suggested activities meet the needs of the actual students in their classroom.
The only way to do this is to use as many activities as possible and, over time, figure out which ones are best for their students. This can cause pacing issues if teachers do not move through lessons as quickly as the intended curriculum would suggest.
Also, the world knowledge component of the new literacy curriculum – rightly in my opinion – includes many practical activities. But teachers need time to collect, sort and distribute the necessary materials, and this can be a source of stress especially in the first year. Teachers often have to buy new materials or bring items from home. Over time, many teachers will likely have plastic containers containing all the spatulas, pipettes, tweezers and other tools needed for each module, which will reduce their workload.
The new curriculum also presents challenges for some students, who must develop the attention and stamina to stay engaged during the one- to two-hour learning blocks.
How have teachers been trained in the new curriculum?
Teachers were offered optional, paid professional development in expedition-based learning in the summer of 2024.
However, when implementing a new curriculum, teachers need ongoing support from colleagues and from experienced users of the curriculum. Experts suggest collaborative learning at school, led by teacher experts and focused on daily classroom teaching, as well as individual coaching and feedback from teachers.
Using a more traditional model of professional development, the district offers training to large groups on in-service days throughout the academic year. The district also says coaching is available from the Expeditionary Learning company.
What else is there to consider?
New learning builds on older learning. Students build from the known to the new. Education writer Natalie Wexler calls this background knowledge “the other half of the Velcro.”
Research shows that when students have some background knowledge about a subject, the new knowledge they learn in class is much more likely to stick.
Traditionally, much background knowledge was taught in social studies and science classes, and Philadelphia public schools taught these subjects daily, even in the elementary grades.
But after the No Child Left Behind law was passed in 2002, schools had to meet strict reading and math testing standards. Districts like Philadelphia tried to address this by replacing time spent on these subjects with more time on reading and math instruction.
This had the unintended consequence of limiting world knowledge built up from weeks of lessons on topics such as dinosaurs or photosynthesis.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
