Imagine you’re a fifth-grader named Ana. In your English Language Arts class, you’re reading the children’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth. But testing shows you read below grade level. So you also get an “intervention” consisting of a computer program that gives you a text written below grade-level—on the topic of endangered species.
And you get tutoring, where you practice identifying “sight words” from a list the tutor found online—words that probably have nothing to do with either The Phantom Tollbooth or endangered species. Lastly, because English isn’t your native language, you get another intervention for multilingual learners where you practice the skill of determining cause and effect, using an article on the water cycle.
Now imagine you’re at a different school and you’re in fourth grade—but your name is still Ana, and your reading ability is still below grade level. Your ELA class is doing a unit on human anatomy, and today the text is a story about how blood circulates through the body.
Before class, in a tutoring session, you read an easier text on a related topic—red blood cells—building knowledge and vocabulary you’ll need to understand the classroom text. During class, you participate in a small group led by a co-teacher who reviews words that start with circ, like circulation—including circle and circumference—so you can grasp the idea that it’s a word root having to do with things that are round or go around. That helps you remember the meaning of circulation, as well as to figure out the meaning of other unfamiliar words using the same root that you encounter in the future.
These two hypotheticals come from two recent reports on the topic of “instructional coherence,” one from TNTP and the other from CCSSO (an acronym for Council of Chief State School Officers). There’s a good deal of overlap between the two reports—including the fact that, for some reason, the authors of both reports chose the name “Ana” for their hypothetical student. Each Ana needs help to engage in grade-level work, but they have very different experiences.
TNTP Ana—the first one described—gets a jumble of “supports” covering random topics. The assumption is that what she needs is just more reading, or more practice with comprehension skills like “determining cause and effect.” CCSSO Ana, on the other hand, gets a series of coordinated activities to help her understand the specific text she’s expected to read in class. “We call this experience,” the CCSSO report notes, “instructional coherence.”
Adding to Cognitive Load
Unfortunately, most kids are likely to get TNTP Ana’s incoherent experience. TNTP cites data from the RAND Corporation showing that teachers now use an average of five different supplemental programs every week to support differentiation and small group instruction. Rarely do those programs connect with each other or with the core curriculum.
“A typical school day for a low-performing student may include exposure to multiple curricula, conflicting instructional routines, and disconnected goals,” the TNTP report says. The CCSSO report notes that this mishmash is often well-intentioned. The assumption is that if a student isn’t learning during class, it’s because they need a different approach. But as both reports note, the daily barrage of different curricula, routines, and vocabulary only ends up adding to the cognitive load imposed on students who are already the most vulnerable.
Perhaps that’s why, as TNTP observes, a study of four districts in Tennessee found that the students who got the most “support”—those identified as needing “Tier 3” intervention—made less progress than similarly low-performing peers who got no support.
And it’s not just a few students who get such presumed support. In those Tennessee districts, nearly half of students qualified for Tier 2 and 3 intervention. (Regular classroom instruction is considered “Tier 1.”)
Coherence Across Subjects
Clearly, instructional coherence is needed across the curriculum. The CCSSO report uses, as one of its case studies, a school that takes different approaches to coherence depending on the subject area. For foundational reading skills like phonics, the school diagnoses the specific gaps an individual student has—rather than relying simply on a vague test score—and addresses them explicitly. For math, support focuses on the concepts and skills students need for upcoming lessons.
And for reading comprehension, rather than focusing on isolated “skills” using different topics—the approach poor TNTP Ana got—students get injections of the specific knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand the texts and concepts in the core curriculum. That might include reading a simpler text or watching a video on the same topic, in preparation for reading a grade-level text, and more time and support for understanding the grade-level texts themselves.
In contrast, the TNTP report—despite offering a hypothetical focused on incoherent reading comprehension support—limits its discussion of coherence to foundational reading skills. That’s because the school district the report uses as a case study, Knox County, Tennessee, decided to begin its work on coherence in that area, according to Devon Gadow, TNTP’s vice president of national consulting. (The CCSSO report also chooses, as one of its two case studies, a school in Knox County—and the examples of instructional coherence from that school in the CCSSO report are also limited to foundational skills.)
Neither report identifies the specific curricula used in the schools they describe, just referring to them as “high-quality instructional materials”—a frequently misleading label. I was curious about which ELA curriculum Knox County was using, so I searched for information online and discovered it was Benchmark Advance.1
Is Benchmark Advance “High-Quality”?
That curriculum is widely used, but I was surprised to see it described as “high-quality.” I had just read two posts by Substacker Olivia Mullins that eviscerated its reading comprehension component, demonstrating that the texts and topics it included were too incoherent and superficial to build the kind of knowledge that enables comprehension (see here and here).
Mullins described Benchmark as lacking in “cohesion,” which is pretty much the same thing as lacking coherence. It struck me as ironic, to say the least, that reports focusing on the need for instructional coherence would choose to hold up as models schools that are using a curriculum that is itself incoherent in its attempt to build knowledge.
It’s not clear that Mullins’ critique is directly applicable to Knox County, because the version of the curriculum she wrote about may be older than the one used by the district. But based on conversations with others who are familiar with different versions of Benchmark Advance, and my own review of parts of the most recent version, its approach to comprehension hasn’t changed substantially. I’ll be addressing that issue in my next post.
Both the TNTP and CCSSO reports include recommendations for how states and districts can encourage instructional coherence, all aimed at aligning the extra support provided to struggling students with the core curriculum. Most of those recommendations make sense—but only if the core curriculum itself is actually “high quality” in all respects.2 For students in Knox County and many other places, coherent instruction limited to foundational reading skills won’t be enough to ensure they reach their full potential.
I already knew what curriculum was being used by the other school profiled in the CCSSO report because, as it happens, it’s the same school where I followed a class through a school year when researching a book ten years ago. That school, Center City Brightwood in Washington DC, is no longer using the same curriculum I observed, but I’ve stayed in touch with the school and know that the current curriculum is also effective in building knowledge.
One of CCSSO’s recommendations is that EdReports, an organization that reviews core curricula for alignment to the Common Core reading and math standards, should begin reviewing supplemental curricula as well. Given that EdReports gave Benchmark Advance its highest rating, despite its serious flaws, I’m not sure that’s a development anyone should be encouraging.
Thank you so much for your insights and support to the teaching profession. I participated in the TRL webinar you just did this past Thursday on writing. It was great! I do believe writing is a way of learning.
Coherence is definitely not in place in many schools because there is no importance placed in working collaboratively by the administration. I am not blaming admin but educators are limited to what we can do as a whole team. The MTSS process is not going to work unless everyone, who is providing the different supports, is talking to each other. There is a hierarchy of roles that educators cannot cross, so you are limited to doing your best with your class. Coaches are not helpful because they are fighting against teachers who are set in their ways and give up. There is so much complexity in schools that change needs to be everyone’s responsibility. Teaching needs to be a place that is always open to learning something new and trying it out. An open mind to having discussions about how we are maximizing the resources we have and the challenges we encounter together not independent of each other.
One of the most important points here is how instructional incoherence increases cognitive load for the very students we are trying to support. When students move from one topic, vocabulary set, or instructional routine to another throughout the day, working memory becomes consumed by navigating those changes rather than making sense of the content itself. What often looks like “more support” can unintentionally create a fragmented learning experience. I see this frequently with students receiving pull-out support, where the additional instruction is disconnected from what they are learning in the classroom.
The second example of Ana illustrates something powerful: when support is aligned with the core lesson, it does more than simplify the work—it strengthens the knowledge structures students need to understand grade-level material. At that point, it feels less like adding interventions and more like designing learning.
This seems like an important area for schools to focus on more intentionally. Coherence requires thinking not only about classroom instruction, but about how supports are aligned with the curriculum, how teachers are supported within the classroom, and how the overall learning experience is designed. It also requires clearer ways of measuring growth in the knowledge and skills students are expected to build, rather than relying only on broad standards.