Curriculum Insight Project

🧵Students don’t struggle with writing because they need to practice writing more essays. Many struggle because they don’t yet know enough about the topic to write substantively about it and were never explicitly taught the sentence-level building blocks of strong writing. 1/4

Really happy with this "pitch" pilot lesson today. First, you have fun saying "this is a [high/low] pitch sound" in funny pitched voices. Students then play with kalimbas and we compare the pitches of different notes. They watch a video with a fun quiz about pitch.

Under contemporary university-level research standards, it is not acceptable to quote a literacy leader on the nature of effective ELA curricula without disclosing that the individual has authored curricula for a major publisher, because this constitutes a clear conflict of interest in which professional judgment may be influenced, or appear to be influenced, by a direct commercial and intellectual stake in the topic; current norms across academic publishing, institutional review frameworks, and professional organizations require explicit disclosure of such affiliations precisely to preserve transparency, allow readers to critically evaluate potential bias, and maintain the integrity of scholarly discourse, and when such directly relevant affiliations are omitted—particularly in cases where the individual’s work is materially connected to the subject under discussion—the omission is not treated as a minor oversight but as a substantive methodological and ethical failure that can undermine credibility and, in more serious cases, meet the threshold for research misconduct. Someone is desperate. If I encountered this in Chapter 2 of a dissertation proposal, I would reject it outright; the absence of clear attribution and disclosure raises immediate concerns about the integrity of the scholarship, and at a moment defined by a literacy crisis, the field cannot afford any form of research adulteration. KIDS ARE AT STAKE.

Under contemporary university-level research standards, it is not acceptable to quote a literacy leader on the nature of effective ELA curricula without disclosing that the individual has authored curricula for a major publisher, because this constitutes a clear conflict of interest in which professional judgment may be influenced, or appear to be influenced, by a direct commercial and intellectual stake in the topic; current norms across academic publishing, institutional review frameworks, and professional organizations require explicit disclosure of such affiliations precisely to preserve transparency, allow readers to critically evaluate potential bias, and maintain the integrity of scholarly discourse, and when such directly relevant affiliations are omitted—particularly in cases where the individual’s work is materially connected to the subject under discussion—the omission is not treated as a minor oversight but as a substantive methodological and ethical failure that can undermine credibility and, in more serious cases, meet the threshold for research misconduct. Someone is desperate. If I encountered this in Chapter 2 of a dissertation proposal, I would reject it outright; the absence of clear attribution and disclosure raises immediate concerns about the integrity of the scholarship, and at a moment defined by a literacy crisis, the field cannot afford any form of research adulteration. KIDS ARE AT STAKE.

You can’t teach children how to read without phonics instruction. You can’t improve their ability to comprehend what they read without vocabulary instruction. You can’t build stamina for reading without using whole books as part of your ELA instruction. You just can’t.