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.
Authentic teacher collaboration is more important than administratively directed instructional improvement. Teachers are the ones who teach children, not the administrator. You seem to be moving towards Learning Communities where everyone is a learner.
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.
There's also a lot of incoherence _within_ curricula, too. Too few seem to be predicated on a broad conceptual understanding of the to-be-learned content or skills. "Oh, yes!" says the program developer, "Our program is very much evidence-based. We do phonological awareness...you know, rhyming and all that stuff... and we do letter sounds, all 26 of them!" Or, "Oh, yes... We do all facts work. In multiplication, we start with the 1 times table and then we do the 2s, then the 3s...all the way up to the 9s."
Incoherence is an inherent product of education's emphasis on creativity in teaching, I fear. [Sigh.] Everyone (teacher, school, etc.) has to Roll Your Own. [Deep sigh.]
I agree with your critique of the curriculum. Anyone writing a curriculum far removed from students and classrooms is only imagining it. I disagree or misunderstand your last paragraph. Highly trained teachers who can systematically integrate and apply a variety of theories and methods to teach a concept are what is needed in classrooms. Comparing and inventing different methods for teaching kids to read and write is indicative of systematic thinking. See Michael L. Commons Model of Hierarchical Complexity.
SIGH. After 80 years of continuous reading instruction malfeasance, during which untrained moms sitting with their kids using off-the-shelf phonics curricula outperform the entire education establishment, isn't it time we all realized that schools don't intend to teach children to read? "My Child Will Read": http://mychildwillread.org
Coherence, consistency, clarity—these are all a pipe dream. And in trying to achieve them, we make school a miserable place to learn and teach. Leads to a narrowing of the curriculum, a foolish focus only on “testable” skills, and teacher and student burnout.
What they really want is conformity—to turn teaching into a discrete series of steps that can be done by a robot.
I’m preparing to transition from a full time classroom teacher to a part time reading interventionist. I’m looking for all the SOL and SOR based research and methods I can find to help me prepare for this transition. I will be working with 4th and 5th graders who are either non readers or at least two grade levels behind. What recommendations do you have?
I have found that the recommendations that Natalie provides are sound: use the same materials that the students are using in class to address their needs. These students tend to have trouble decoding multisyllabic words, so I address new vocabulary and decoding issues at the same time. The 'hear it, say it, write it, read it, use it' routine from Gentry and Ouellette's book Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching has been very helpful. Then I use the PALS methods for partner reading and paragraph shrinking to address fluency and comprehension. I explain all of this in my nonprofit instructional guide, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense.
For those students with serious word recognition issues, check out the free program Word Connections (https://www.jessicatoste.com/wordconnections), which is for third grade and up. Excellent instruction in morphology.
I truly appreciated your article—especially your focus on cognitive coherence in teaching. It’s rare to see this addressed so clearly, and your piece stood out as one of the most meaningful I’ve read in quite some time.
For the past 15 years, we have been engaged in research, authorship, and instruction through Go-Gi English, a cognitive, logic-based system for teaching English. Our work addresses many of the systemic issues you describe—and extends beyond them in ways we believe may be of interest to you.
Interestingly, your article highlighted challenges that even we had not anticipated—particularly those emerging from academic instructional approaches.
If you’re open to it, I would be honored to share our work with you and hear your perspective. You can find a brief overview at:
I wonder how Benchmark Advance plans to address or refund the serious knowledge gaps students face as a result of their faulty statement of alignment to SoR? Districts invested many millions of taxpayer dollars for ineffective at best, (negligent?)
Those kids deserved more and so did the families who paid for it. I’m not a social conservative and I believe in the right of educators to have a say in local curricula but this was not presented with integrity.
The TNTP report provided the results of the first year of a randomized controlled trial, showing that students in the coherent intervention group demonstrated an average of "1.3 additional months of learning over the school year." The lowest-performers, they said, averaged an additional 1.8 months. That intervention, of course, was limited to foundational skills.
I don't think the CCSSO report included an experimental component.
I'm part of setting up an MTSS program on the other side of the world. The intention was to have Tiers 2 and 3 aligned with Tier 1, and we're kind of doing that, but we've filtered for attendance and behaviour instead of literacy and numeracy. So I'm running groups doing some numeracy stuff which only kinda aligns with Tier 1 (they're more than a little bit behind, and the foundational stuff I'm doing is a pre-requisite for their tier 1 work, just not in the same category), and I'm doing goal setting, emotional regulation and perseverance which is also what we're doing in tier 1.
I'd love to hear what folks think of this. I'm really not sure if we're on the right track at all - should we be intervening on literacy and numeracy only, filter for that, running programs targeting that - or is it fine to filter for attendance and behaviour, then do some sorta-aligned numeracy work and social emotional work? I'd love to hear any thoughts!
I don't know that I have enough information or expertise to provide any helpful advice, but my hunch is that many attendance and behavior problems have a lot to do with students feeling like they're failures. So if the kids in Tiers 2 and 3 at your school are behind in literacy and numeracy, as well as having problems with attendance and behavior, I would definitely focus on giving them support in the literacy and numeracy skills they need to be successful in class. You might find that enabling them to be successful in class carries over to better attendance and behavior.
Yes, I've heard this complaint from other teachers. I have two thoughts.
One: If I ruled the world, I would reduce the amount of time elementary schools spend on literacy (an average of two hours, according to the data, but sometimes much more) and increase the time devoted to science and social studies. But it's very hard to get schools to alter their schedules in that way, primarily because of the mistaken perception that reading tests measure abstract reading comprehension skills rather than knowledge and vocabulary.
Two: Maybe elementary science standards are coherent, and it makes sense for instruction to be aligned to them -- I don't really know. But in most states, elementary social studies standards are seriously lacking--sometimes random (e.g., students have to learn about three individuals who have nothing in common in terms of historical context), sometimes superficial, sometimes encyclopedic.
Instruction aligned to those standards is likely to have the same flaws. There's little or no historical content below fourth or fifth grade, even though kids can get very interested in such content--and it sets them up for academic success later on. The social studies content in at least some knowledge-building curricula (especially CKLA) is far more rigorous and coherent than the content that's in the standards.
Time is definitely an important factor. In this study an additional 30 minutes was allocated to social studies instruction.
From Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (2020):
In fact, social studies is the only subject with a clear, positive, and statistically significant effect on reading improvement. On average, students who receive an additional 30 minutes of social studies instruction per day (roughly equivalent to moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of social studies instructional time) in grades 1–5 outperform students with less social studies time by 15 percent of a standard deviation on the fifth-grade reading assessment, even after controlling for multiple measures of kindergarten reading ability and a host of student, school, and teacher factors.
Here’s what confuses me: In a six-hour teaching day there’s four hours left over even if ELA has a two-hour block. In my piece (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/in-a-dark-dark-wood-the-first-casualty?r=5spuf&utm_medium=ios) I refer to how my co-teacher and I divided up the day. I also quote Susan Neuman in my piece. She recommends looking at the content standards for fourth grade and up and aligning literacy to those standards. “And so that’s how we define the content: What is the content you are actually teaching? And our answer is, content standards.”
Yes, you would think schools would find time for social studies and science in that leftover four hours, but I've spoken to many groups of educators, and they all pretty much nod their heads knowingly when I say that I doubt most elementary students are getting even the 30 minutes a day on each of those subjects that schools have reported to the federal government. Especially in schools where test scores are low, educators feel pressure to spend more time on the tested subjects (i.e., reading and math).
But even if schools did spend more time on social studies and science, there's the problem of standards -- which, as I said earlier, are often not great. And even if the standards ARE good, standards are not curriculum. Teachers and schools either have to create their own curriculum based on the standards or find a good one that they can purchase. And because social studies standards vary so much from state to state, there's no real market for social studies curricula -- and consequently, very few good such curricula available.
I'll have to take a closer look, but what kinds of social studies curricula were taught didn't seem to factor into the study I cited, and this points to the general importance of just teaching content, which, as Susan Neuman points out, exists for every state. In my piece I cite how Louisiana has added literature, speeches, and essays to its SS curriculum. That doesn't seem overly complex. That's what my sons' fifth grade teacher did: taught the civil war unit in his U.S. history text along with Rifles for Watie. Money spent on literature and text sets rather than new knowledge-building curricula may be more efficient since the knowledge is already in the content areas.
And the recent analysis from Dan Reynolds' team finding a lack of robust comprehension instruction even with high quality materials points to the need for PD on high-impact writing-related procedures like 'get the gist' and 'paragraph shrinking' so teachers aren't fragmenting their instruction with superficial strategies.
You write: "Especially in schools where test scores are low, educators feel pressure to spend more time on the tested subjects (i.e., reading and math)." This points to the larger issue of lack of quality PD to show teachers HOW we integrate literacy components into the content areas. It may not be easy to get back on track, but I think we need a lot more than a knowledge patch from unaligned language arts curricula to right this ship for the long-term.
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.
Authentic teacher collaboration is more important than administratively directed instructional improvement. Teachers are the ones who teach children, not the administrator. You seem to be moving towards Learning Communities where everyone is a learner.
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.
I totally agree, intervention should align with the curriculum and support the students in what they are already learning, not add another burden
Informative and excellent post, NW. Thank you.
There's also a lot of incoherence _within_ curricula, too. Too few seem to be predicated on a broad conceptual understanding of the to-be-learned content or skills. "Oh, yes!" says the program developer, "Our program is very much evidence-based. We do phonological awareness...you know, rhyming and all that stuff... and we do letter sounds, all 26 of them!" Or, "Oh, yes... We do all facts work. In multiplication, we start with the 1 times table and then we do the 2s, then the 3s...all the way up to the 9s."
Incoherence is an inherent product of education's emphasis on creativity in teaching, I fear. [Sigh.] Everyone (teacher, school, etc.) has to Roll Your Own. [Deep sigh.]
I agree with your critique of the curriculum. Anyone writing a curriculum far removed from students and classrooms is only imagining it. I disagree or misunderstand your last paragraph. Highly trained teachers who can systematically integrate and apply a variety of theories and methods to teach a concept are what is needed in classrooms. Comparing and inventing different methods for teaching kids to read and write is indicative of systematic thinking. See Michael L. Commons Model of Hierarchical Complexity.
SIGH. After 80 years of continuous reading instruction malfeasance, during which untrained moms sitting with their kids using off-the-shelf phonics curricula outperform the entire education establishment, isn't it time we all realized that schools don't intend to teach children to read? "My Child Will Read": http://mychildwillread.org
Coherence, consistency, clarity—these are all a pipe dream. And in trying to achieve them, we make school a miserable place to learn and teach. Leads to a narrowing of the curriculum, a foolish focus only on “testable” skills, and teacher and student burnout.
What they really want is conformity—to turn teaching into a discrete series of steps that can be done by a robot.
I’m preparing to transition from a full time classroom teacher to a part time reading interventionist. I’m looking for all the SOL and SOR based research and methods I can find to help me prepare for this transition. I will be working with 4th and 5th graders who are either non readers or at least two grade levels behind. What recommendations do you have?
I have found that the recommendations that Natalie provides are sound: use the same materials that the students are using in class to address their needs. These students tend to have trouble decoding multisyllabic words, so I address new vocabulary and decoding issues at the same time. The 'hear it, say it, write it, read it, use it' routine from Gentry and Ouellette's book Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching has been very helpful. Then I use the PALS methods for partner reading and paragraph shrinking to address fluency and comprehension. I explain all of this in my nonprofit instructional guide, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense.
Thank you so much for your insight and information!
For those students with serious word recognition issues, check out the free program Word Connections (https://www.jessicatoste.com/wordconnections), which is for third grade and up. Excellent instruction in morphology.
Great piece
Dear Natalie Wexler,
I truly appreciated your article—especially your focus on cognitive coherence in teaching. It’s rare to see this addressed so clearly, and your piece stood out as one of the most meaningful I’ve read in quite some time.
For the past 15 years, we have been engaged in research, authorship, and instruction through Go-Gi English, a cognitive, logic-based system for teaching English. Our work addresses many of the systemic issues you describe—and extends beyond them in ways we believe may be of interest to you.
Interestingly, your article highlighted challenges that even we had not anticipated—particularly those emerging from academic instructional approaches.
If you’re open to it, I would be honored to share our work with you and hear your perspective. You can find a brief overview at:
X: https://x.com/GoGiEngl
Thank you again for your insightful contribution to this critical conversation.
Warm regards,
Robert
Go-Gi English
rf@gogienglish.com
So do all teachers
I wonder how Benchmark Advance plans to address or refund the serious knowledge gaps students face as a result of their faulty statement of alignment to SoR? Districts invested many millions of taxpayer dollars for ineffective at best, (negligent?)
Those kids deserved more and so did the families who paid for it. I’m not a social conservative and I believe in the right of educators to have a say in local curricula but this was not presented with integrity.
Thank you Natalie. That seems a modest return on investment, but at least it is progress.
I realise in theory one intervention makes more apparent sense, but what impact did either have on student practice?
The TNTP report provided the results of the first year of a randomized controlled trial, showing that students in the coherent intervention group demonstrated an average of "1.3 additional months of learning over the school year." The lowest-performers, they said, averaged an additional 1.8 months. That intervention, of course, was limited to foundational skills.
I don't think the CCSSO report included an experimental component.
Agreed! This is so important—I am testing this approach in my dissertation study right now!
I'm part of setting up an MTSS program on the other side of the world. The intention was to have Tiers 2 and 3 aligned with Tier 1, and we're kind of doing that, but we've filtered for attendance and behaviour instead of literacy and numeracy. So I'm running groups doing some numeracy stuff which only kinda aligns with Tier 1 (they're more than a little bit behind, and the foundational stuff I'm doing is a pre-requisite for their tier 1 work, just not in the same category), and I'm doing goal setting, emotional regulation and perseverance which is also what we're doing in tier 1.
I'd love to hear what folks think of this. I'm really not sure if we're on the right track at all - should we be intervening on literacy and numeracy only, filter for that, running programs targeting that - or is it fine to filter for attendance and behaviour, then do some sorta-aligned numeracy work and social emotional work? I'd love to hear any thoughts!
I don't know that I have enough information or expertise to provide any helpful advice, but my hunch is that many attendance and behavior problems have a lot to do with students feeling like they're failures. So if the kids in Tiers 2 and 3 at your school are behind in literacy and numeracy, as well as having problems with attendance and behavior, I would definitely focus on giving them support in the literacy and numeracy skills they need to be successful in class. You might find that enabling them to be successful in class carries over to better attendance and behavior.
Benchmark is terrible.
“districts can encourage instructional coherence, all aimed at aligning the extra support provided to struggling students with the core curriculum.”
It is precisely because I think alignment is crucial that I expressed my concerns related to teaching knowledge building in the ELA block that doesn’t align with what is being taught in the social studies and science blocks. See In the Dark, Dark Wood: The First Casualty in the Comprehension Wars is Contextualization (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/in-a-dark-dark-wood-the-first-casualty?utm_source=app-post-stats-page&r=5spuf&utm_medium=ios).
Yes, I've heard this complaint from other teachers. I have two thoughts.
One: If I ruled the world, I would reduce the amount of time elementary schools spend on literacy (an average of two hours, according to the data, but sometimes much more) and increase the time devoted to science and social studies. But it's very hard to get schools to alter their schedules in that way, primarily because of the mistaken perception that reading tests measure abstract reading comprehension skills rather than knowledge and vocabulary.
Two: Maybe elementary science standards are coherent, and it makes sense for instruction to be aligned to them -- I don't really know. But in most states, elementary social studies standards are seriously lacking--sometimes random (e.g., students have to learn about three individuals who have nothing in common in terms of historical context), sometimes superficial, sometimes encyclopedic.
Instruction aligned to those standards is likely to have the same flaws. There's little or no historical content below fourth or fifth grade, even though kids can get very interested in such content--and it sets them up for academic success later on. The social studies content in at least some knowledge-building curricula (especially CKLA) is far more rigorous and coherent than the content that's in the standards.
Time is definitely an important factor. In this study an additional 30 minutes was allocated to social studies instruction.
From Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (2020):
In fact, social studies is the only subject with a clear, positive, and statistically significant effect on reading improvement. On average, students who receive an additional 30 minutes of social studies instruction per day (roughly equivalent to moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of social studies instructional time) in grades 1–5 outperform students with less social studies time by 15 percent of a standard deviation on the fifth-grade reading assessment, even after controlling for multiple measures of kindergarten reading ability and a host of student, school, and teacher factors.
Here’s what confuses me: In a six-hour teaching day there’s four hours left over even if ELA has a two-hour block. In my piece (https://harriettjanetos.substack.com/p/in-a-dark-dark-wood-the-first-casualty?r=5spuf&utm_medium=ios) I refer to how my co-teacher and I divided up the day. I also quote Susan Neuman in my piece. She recommends looking at the content standards for fourth grade and up and aligning literacy to those standards. “And so that’s how we define the content: What is the content you are actually teaching? And our answer is, content standards.”
Yes, you would think schools would find time for social studies and science in that leftover four hours, but I've spoken to many groups of educators, and they all pretty much nod their heads knowingly when I say that I doubt most elementary students are getting even the 30 minutes a day on each of those subjects that schools have reported to the federal government. Especially in schools where test scores are low, educators feel pressure to spend more time on the tested subjects (i.e., reading and math).
But even if schools did spend more time on social studies and science, there's the problem of standards -- which, as I said earlier, are often not great. And even if the standards ARE good, standards are not curriculum. Teachers and schools either have to create their own curriculum based on the standards or find a good one that they can purchase. And because social studies standards vary so much from state to state, there's no real market for social studies curricula -- and consequently, very few good such curricula available.
I'll have to take a closer look, but what kinds of social studies curricula were taught didn't seem to factor into the study I cited, and this points to the general importance of just teaching content, which, as Susan Neuman points out, exists for every state. In my piece I cite how Louisiana has added literature, speeches, and essays to its SS curriculum. That doesn't seem overly complex. That's what my sons' fifth grade teacher did: taught the civil war unit in his U.S. history text along with Rifles for Watie. Money spent on literature and text sets rather than new knowledge-building curricula may be more efficient since the knowledge is already in the content areas.
And the recent analysis from Dan Reynolds' team finding a lack of robust comprehension instruction even with high quality materials points to the need for PD on high-impact writing-related procedures like 'get the gist' and 'paragraph shrinking' so teachers aren't fragmenting their instruction with superficial strategies.
You write: "Especially in schools where test scores are low, educators feel pressure to spend more time on the tested subjects (i.e., reading and math)." This points to the larger issue of lack of quality PD to show teachers HOW we integrate literacy components into the content areas. It may not be easy to get back on track, but I think we need a lot more than a knowledge patch from unaligned language arts curricula to right this ship for the long-term.