This line really matters: “standardized reading tests purport to measure mastery of the standards in the abstract, which is virtually impossible.”
It gets at a deeper problem—high-quality curriculum alone can’t do the work if teachers and leaders don’t understand the cognitive and linguistic foundations on which the standards, and therefore the curriculum, are built.
I’ve written before about the cult of “standards mastery” in literacy, and I’m grateful to Natalie for consistently pushing back on the idea that reading proficiency can be reduced to isolated, transferable skills.
One idea this piece surfaces for me, after nearly three decades working alongside teachers and schools, is that you don’t have to be the content expert to facilitate a rich discussion, but you do need to have engaged deeply with the content yourself.
This is where I see a systems-level problem. In many districts, teachers received new knowledge-building curricula in August and were expected to implement immediately. The professional learning that followed was often logistical and vendor-driven: materials, pacing, platforms. What was largely absent was protected time for teachers to read the texts closely, annotate them, talk with colleagues, and discover what is actually interesting, complex, or conceptually demanding about the content.
Across years of coaching and consulting, I’ve consistently seen that the most powerful learning, for both adults and students, happens when teachers try the work themselves. Whether it’s writing, discussion, or content learning, doing the task surfaces where thinking breaks down, reveals likely misconceptions, and builds humility. The same principle applies to knowledge-building curricula. It’s hard to imagine facilitating an energized, nuanced conversation about frog adaptations without having read the text, grappled with the ideas, and talked them through with other adults first.
Teachers don’t need to know everything. But they do need time and structures that allow them to be learners of the content. Most school systems are not designed to support that kind of deep professional learning, and to me, that is the glaring issue we are not paying enough attention to.
Yes! I came here to say the same thing. No boxed curriculum, no matter how great, can replace the need for sufficient time and effective structures that support teacher collaborative planning.
Great essay, full of way more nuance than we usually see about this topic!!
Ruth, yes exactly. What I appreciate about Natalie’s essay is that it opens space for a conversation many practitioners have been having quietly for a long time: curriculum itself has never been the lever. The conditions around it are.
Across years of working alongside teachers during curriculum shifts, I’ve seen how often change gets framed as a professional reset—what you were doing before was wrong; now we’re doing something entirely new. That framing undermines confidence and makes deep implementation nearly impossible. Strong systems handle change differently. They help teachers understand what carries forward, what gets refined, and where new learning is genuinely required so growth feels cumulative, not destabilizing.
The same is true for knowledge-building curricula. Teachers don’t need to be content experts, but they do need protected time and collaborative structures to be learners of the content themselves, to read closely, talk it through, surface misconceptions, and discover what’s conceptually rich.
That practice-based work has long been understood by people closest to classrooms, even if it hasn’t always shaped system-level decisions.
My hope is that this moment doesn’t frame these ideas as newly discovered, but instead elevates practitioner knowledge and pushes us to design professional learning that builds confidence, continuity, and real instructional capacity. That’s what ultimately allows good curriculum to do its job
Brilliant analysis of the implementation gap. The Venn diagram example was brutal, watching Renaissance patronage get flattened into a graphic organizer exercise. Back when I tutored middle schoolers, I saw this exact pattern where every history lesson somehow became about "finding text evidence" instead of actually discussing whether Medici patronage changed art. The benchmark testing trap is real becasue it pushes teachers toward atomized skill rehearsal when they're already stretched thin.
Terrific analysis. Thank you - and you covered so much ground.
In my experience in NYC, the rollout of the intended initiative (and I say “intended” because the most prominent curriculum here is decidedly not recommended by you) is as much about compliance as it is about the heart and soul of the work. A checklist and not quite a vision.
It’s hard to be critical, though; I don’t know what I would do, if I were in the chancellor’s seat, to effect change at such a wide scale.
I am hopeful that we have some building blocks in place and the next wave of reform here is focused on purpose and outcomes rather than minutiae of implementation and compartmentalized skills.
I think this piece would have been much more beneficial if there would have been an interview of an actual classroom teacher. When asking a curriculum representative her thoughts on why teachers aren’t going deep into the curriculum, it only magnifies how our society doesn’t respect the teacher in the classroom. Go to the frontlines! Ask the classroom teacher!
I always welcome the views of classroom teachers and would be interested to hear about your own experience, if you're interested in sharing it.
Just to be clear, though, I didn't quote a "curriculum representative," but rather an independent consultant who works with school districts implementing a variety of curricula.
Thank you for the correction. My apologies with curriculum representative. I should have said independent consultant. I would be honored to discuss my teaching experience with you! Please message me your availability. I eagerly await our discussion!
Why not put your perspective, based on your own experience, into a comment? I'm sure others in addition to myself would be interested in that.
So far, all you have done is to attack the credibility of someone else because she isn't currently a classroom teacher. (She is a former classroom teacher.) That doesn't tell me or anyone else what you substantively disagree with about this post.
Thank you for the invitation to clarify—that’s fair feedback, and I appreciate the opportunity to explain my perspective more fully.
My response comes from over 15+ years as a classroom teacher working with students across a range of abilities, including many who struggle to access grade-level curriculum. What I see on the frontlines is that teachers often want to go deeper into high-quality, content rick curriculum, but are constrained by real instructional realities: limited time, pressure to remediate foundational skill gaps, and accountability systems that prioritize pacing over mastery. When students lack automatic decoding, language comprehension, or sufficient background knowledge, teachers frequently have to pause or adapt instruction simply to make the curriculum accessible.
My concern is not with the credibility of former teachers or consultants, but with how the lived experience of current classroom teachers can be underrepresented in discussions about why curriculum implementation falls short. When explanations focus primarily on teacher behavior—rather than structural constraints, student readiness, lack of quality professional development and instructional conditions—it can unintentionally reinforce the narrative that teachers are the problem, rather than professionals navigating complex demands.
I also think the article would have been strengthened by explicitly noting that the consultant quoted is a former classroom teacher. That context matters, and including it would have added clarity and credibility for readers.
In short, I agree that strong curriculum matters. But depth of instruction requires alignment among curriculum, student readiness, and the time and support teachers need to meet students where they are. I appreciate the work you do in elevating these conversations and the opportunity to add this perspective.
Thanks for explaining your perspective, but I think there's quite a bit of alignment between what my post says and what you're saying. Neither I nor anyone I quoted is arguing that teachers are the problem as opposed to the system. In fact, I quote McQuillan as describing "system-level confusion about how to interpret and use standards." The causes are clearly complex.
Also, I just want to note that although I didn't quote any current teachers myself, the post is primarily about a study that surveyed 539 teachers and also conducted interviews with many of them, albeit a smaller group. So I do think the teacher perspective was represented in that way.
In any event, I appreciate you sharing your experience and perceptions.
1. "One problem is that identifying character traits isn’t a skill you can 'master.'" Maybe not, but having taught literature in grades two to twelve, I have found that asking students to look at what characters say, what they do, and what others say about them is a 'strategy' that applies to all fiction (as well as to real life). For example, teaching this analysis to my ninth graders in a 'focused journal' of Curly's wife in chapter five of Of Mice and Men led to excellent discussion where students were prepared to talk about her character.
2. As a former high school English teacher applying my literary analysis experiences to elementary school books (and not having to prepare math, science, and social studies lessons as well), I wonder if it's reasonable to expect 'generalists' at the elementary level, who are teaching multiple subjects, to have the time to become experts in the literary works they are teaching. Perhaps we need to figure out better ways to tailor lessons within the realm of the realistic. "Cut the fluff, and teach the stuff", as Anita Archer likes to say. Determining exactly what 'stuff' we should be teaching is the tough part.
3. In thinking about 'surface-level' vs. 'robust' understanding, I was reminded of the Faster Reading study you refer to in your AFT article. How do we know when to go fast and when to slow down and dig deep?
On point 2, I don't think teachers need to become high-level literary critics. And I think most of their hesitancy is about teaching science and social studies topics that they're not familiar with rather than fiction. But I do think teachers can learn about the texts and topics they're teaching through the curriculum and PL embedded in that curriculum. It can take time -- it's going to be easier teaching a topic or text the second or third time around -- but teachers have told me they've learned a lot about history through teaching CKLA, which is the most history-heavy of the curricula.
On point 3, a couple of thoughts. First, the "faster read" was focused on just getting kids to follow the story, not on using the story to "teach standards." So I think that emphasis on the story itself may have led to a more "robust" understanding of the novels being taught, even without a lot of teacher input, just because kids were actually able to get caught up in the story and see it whole.
That having been said, one group of teachers in the study had been trained in using comprehension strategies -- I don't recall exactly what they were, but they weren't "check the box" standards-type tasks. That group's students had richer discussions, the researchers found, but there was no difference between the two groups on the comprehension test scores.
Second, as I've written elsewhere (somewhere!), I think we need to do two slightly different things with regard to reading: (1) we need to show kids that reading can be a pleasurable activity, and reading entire novels without a lot of pauses for questioning or analysis can help with that, and (2) we need to help them tackle complex, challenging text, whether fiction or nonfiction. The latter isn't always fun in the moment, but it can lead to a sense of satisfaction -- and deeper understanding. So you might call it "robust" instruction.
But I wouldn't say #1 (or the "faster read") is the same as "surface-level" instruction, at least not the kind described in the SRI study. Rather, the teacher has to get out of the way to some extent so that kids can get immersed in the story.
Learning to get out of the way is often the hard part, as a teacher. What feels natural as a teacher is to *teach*--and natural teaching often doesn't align with natural learning. This has been a big problem in literacy instruction forever--as we see in the classroom scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird, and as McKeown and Beck showed years ago, though they seemed not to be fully aware of what they were describing. I wrote about this a lot back in the day, and this essay in particular still seems relevant: https://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2012/07/what-seems-natural-and-to-whom-and-why.html What is still not fully clear, even years later, is what "robust instruction" means. As you suggest, and as I noted in my essay, though McKeown and Beck kind of pooh-pooh it, good literacy education would probably mean focusing more on the text, and would probably mean getting students to try to make meaning from the text; what's still unclear is how best to do that second part. Asking about meaning (as in the Neil Armstrong example) is obviously useful, but I can easily imagine teachers following their natural instinct to "instruct" and again getting in the way...
I think kids need to have the opportunity to get through a novel without too many interruptions, but I don't think teachers ALWAYS need to get out of the way. I'm not a teacher, but I've spent quite a bit of time in classrooms, and it seems to me one of the trickiest aspects of teaching is knowing how much "teaching" to do, and when, vs. how much of the cognitive burden to place on students. I think teacher prep and PD needs to focus on that more. A good curriculum can help, but it can't anticipate every situation that will arise in a classroom.
And my reading of McKeown and Beck -- including not just the study you discuss in your post but also their book on "questioning the author" -- differs from yours. I don't think they're against "focusing on the text." Their approach is to have students consider what the author was trying to say in the text by asking them pretty open-ended questions as opposed to questions that focus on particular comprehension strategies.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I of course agree with you that it's hard to know how much teaching to do; I would merely suggest that most of the time we err in the direction of not getting out of the way enough, and of putting too little of the cognitive burden on students. And yes, McKeown and Beck are of course not *against* focusing on the text, and I do appreciate their emphasis on open-ended questions rather than trying to "teach" particular "skills" and "strategies".--and that particular study was helpful in showing how what feels natural to teachers is often not what's most helpful to students, since the teachers in that study seemed to like the open-ended questions approach less and to feel that the "strategies" approach was "less natural".
I think we do need more elementary teachers who feel comfortable with history and science topics -- and one way to do that would be to ensure that anyone who wants to be an elementary teacher has some grounding in those topics as they are likely to be taught at an elementary level.
But to be clear, no one is asking elementary teachers to read, write, or analyze "historical and scientific journal articles." The knowledge-building curricula used by the districts in the study don't include scholarly articles. The texts are written at an elementary school level. Teachers who lack expertise in the topics can teach the texts if they get the appropriate support. And, as the report suggests, they often find they enjoy the experience.
This line really matters: “standardized reading tests purport to measure mastery of the standards in the abstract, which is virtually impossible.”
It gets at a deeper problem—high-quality curriculum alone can’t do the work if teachers and leaders don’t understand the cognitive and linguistic foundations on which the standards, and therefore the curriculum, are built.
I’ve written before about the cult of “standards mastery” in literacy, and I’m grateful to Natalie for consistently pushing back on the idea that reading proficiency can be reduced to isolated, transferable skills.
https://www.middleschoolliteracyproject.org/p/the-skill-illusion?r=693wi
One idea this piece surfaces for me, after nearly three decades working alongside teachers and schools, is that you don’t have to be the content expert to facilitate a rich discussion, but you do need to have engaged deeply with the content yourself.
This is where I see a systems-level problem. In many districts, teachers received new knowledge-building curricula in August and were expected to implement immediately. The professional learning that followed was often logistical and vendor-driven: materials, pacing, platforms. What was largely absent was protected time for teachers to read the texts closely, annotate them, talk with colleagues, and discover what is actually interesting, complex, or conceptually demanding about the content.
Across years of coaching and consulting, I’ve consistently seen that the most powerful learning, for both adults and students, happens when teachers try the work themselves. Whether it’s writing, discussion, or content learning, doing the task surfaces where thinking breaks down, reveals likely misconceptions, and builds humility. The same principle applies to knowledge-building curricula. It’s hard to imagine facilitating an energized, nuanced conversation about frog adaptations without having read the text, grappled with the ideas, and talked them through with other adults first.
Teachers don’t need to know everything. But they do need time and structures that allow them to be learners of the content. Most school systems are not designed to support that kind of deep professional learning, and to me, that is the glaring issue we are not paying enough attention to.
Yes! I came here to say the same thing. No boxed curriculum, no matter how great, can replace the need for sufficient time and effective structures that support teacher collaborative planning.
Great essay, full of way more nuance than we usually see about this topic!!
Ruth, yes exactly. What I appreciate about Natalie’s essay is that it opens space for a conversation many practitioners have been having quietly for a long time: curriculum itself has never been the lever. The conditions around it are.
Across years of working alongside teachers during curriculum shifts, I’ve seen how often change gets framed as a professional reset—what you were doing before was wrong; now we’re doing something entirely new. That framing undermines confidence and makes deep implementation nearly impossible. Strong systems handle change differently. They help teachers understand what carries forward, what gets refined, and where new learning is genuinely required so growth feels cumulative, not destabilizing.
The same is true for knowledge-building curricula. Teachers don’t need to be content experts, but they do need protected time and collaborative structures to be learners of the content themselves, to read closely, talk it through, surface misconceptions, and discover what’s conceptually rich.
That practice-based work has long been understood by people closest to classrooms, even if it hasn’t always shaped system-level decisions.
My hope is that this moment doesn’t frame these ideas as newly discovered, but instead elevates practitioner knowledge and pushes us to design professional learning that builds confidence, continuity, and real instructional capacity. That’s what ultimately allows good curriculum to do its job
Brilliant analysis of the implementation gap. The Venn diagram example was brutal, watching Renaissance patronage get flattened into a graphic organizer exercise. Back when I tutored middle schoolers, I saw this exact pattern where every history lesson somehow became about "finding text evidence" instead of actually discussing whether Medici patronage changed art. The benchmark testing trap is real becasue it pushes teachers toward atomized skill rehearsal when they're already stretched thin.
Terrific analysis. Thank you - and you covered so much ground.
In my experience in NYC, the rollout of the intended initiative (and I say “intended” because the most prominent curriculum here is decidedly not recommended by you) is as much about compliance as it is about the heart and soul of the work. A checklist and not quite a vision.
It’s hard to be critical, though; I don’t know what I would do, if I were in the chancellor’s seat, to effect change at such a wide scale.
I am hopeful that we have some building blocks in place and the next wave of reform here is focused on purpose and outcomes rather than minutiae of implementation and compartmentalized skills.
I think this piece would have been much more beneficial if there would have been an interview of an actual classroom teacher. When asking a curriculum representative her thoughts on why teachers aren’t going deep into the curriculum, it only magnifies how our society doesn’t respect the teacher in the classroom. Go to the frontlines! Ask the classroom teacher!
I always welcome the views of classroom teachers and would be interested to hear about your own experience, if you're interested in sharing it.
Just to be clear, though, I didn't quote a "curriculum representative," but rather an independent consultant who works with school districts implementing a variety of curricula.
Thank you for the correction. My apologies with curriculum representative. I should have said independent consultant. I would be honored to discuss my teaching experience with you! Please message me your availability. I eagerly await our discussion!
Why not put your perspective, based on your own experience, into a comment? I'm sure others in addition to myself would be interested in that.
So far, all you have done is to attack the credibility of someone else because she isn't currently a classroom teacher. (She is a former classroom teacher.) That doesn't tell me or anyone else what you substantively disagree with about this post.
Thank you for the invitation to clarify—that’s fair feedback, and I appreciate the opportunity to explain my perspective more fully.
My response comes from over 15+ years as a classroom teacher working with students across a range of abilities, including many who struggle to access grade-level curriculum. What I see on the frontlines is that teachers often want to go deeper into high-quality, content rick curriculum, but are constrained by real instructional realities: limited time, pressure to remediate foundational skill gaps, and accountability systems that prioritize pacing over mastery. When students lack automatic decoding, language comprehension, or sufficient background knowledge, teachers frequently have to pause or adapt instruction simply to make the curriculum accessible.
My concern is not with the credibility of former teachers or consultants, but with how the lived experience of current classroom teachers can be underrepresented in discussions about why curriculum implementation falls short. When explanations focus primarily on teacher behavior—rather than structural constraints, student readiness, lack of quality professional development and instructional conditions—it can unintentionally reinforce the narrative that teachers are the problem, rather than professionals navigating complex demands.
I also think the article would have been strengthened by explicitly noting that the consultant quoted is a former classroom teacher. That context matters, and including it would have added clarity and credibility for readers.
In short, I agree that strong curriculum matters. But depth of instruction requires alignment among curriculum, student readiness, and the time and support teachers need to meet students where they are. I appreciate the work you do in elevating these conversations and the opportunity to add this perspective.
Thanks for explaining your perspective, but I think there's quite a bit of alignment between what my post says and what you're saying. Neither I nor anyone I quoted is arguing that teachers are the problem as opposed to the system. In fact, I quote McQuillan as describing "system-level confusion about how to interpret and use standards." The causes are clearly complex.
Also, I just want to note that although I didn't quote any current teachers myself, the post is primarily about a study that surveyed 539 teachers and also conducted interviews with many of them, albeit a smaller group. So I do think the teacher perspective was represented in that way.
In any event, I appreciate you sharing your experience and perceptions.
Thank you for writing this, Natalie! Deeply grateful to you as always for your talent, care and brilliance.
Thanks so much, Kristen--and very grateful to you for sharing your experience and insights.
Three thoughts:
1. "One problem is that identifying character traits isn’t a skill you can 'master.'" Maybe not, but having taught literature in grades two to twelve, I have found that asking students to look at what characters say, what they do, and what others say about them is a 'strategy' that applies to all fiction (as well as to real life). For example, teaching this analysis to my ninth graders in a 'focused journal' of Curly's wife in chapter five of Of Mice and Men led to excellent discussion where students were prepared to talk about her character.
2. As a former high school English teacher applying my literary analysis experiences to elementary school books (and not having to prepare math, science, and social studies lessons as well), I wonder if it's reasonable to expect 'generalists' at the elementary level, who are teaching multiple subjects, to have the time to become experts in the literary works they are teaching. Perhaps we need to figure out better ways to tailor lessons within the realm of the realistic. "Cut the fluff, and teach the stuff", as Anita Archer likes to say. Determining exactly what 'stuff' we should be teaching is the tough part.
3. In thinking about 'surface-level' vs. 'robust' understanding, I was reminded of the Faster Reading study you refer to in your AFT article. How do we know when to go fast and when to slow down and dig deep?
Thanks for giving me so much to think about!
On point 2, I don't think teachers need to become high-level literary critics. And I think most of their hesitancy is about teaching science and social studies topics that they're not familiar with rather than fiction. But I do think teachers can learn about the texts and topics they're teaching through the curriculum and PL embedded in that curriculum. It can take time -- it's going to be easier teaching a topic or text the second or third time around -- but teachers have told me they've learned a lot about history through teaching CKLA, which is the most history-heavy of the curricula.
On point 3, a couple of thoughts. First, the "faster read" was focused on just getting kids to follow the story, not on using the story to "teach standards." So I think that emphasis on the story itself may have led to a more "robust" understanding of the novels being taught, even without a lot of teacher input, just because kids were actually able to get caught up in the story and see it whole.
That having been said, one group of teachers in the study had been trained in using comprehension strategies -- I don't recall exactly what they were, but they weren't "check the box" standards-type tasks. That group's students had richer discussions, the researchers found, but there was no difference between the two groups on the comprehension test scores.
Second, as I've written elsewhere (somewhere!), I think we need to do two slightly different things with regard to reading: (1) we need to show kids that reading can be a pleasurable activity, and reading entire novels without a lot of pauses for questioning or analysis can help with that, and (2) we need to help them tackle complex, challenging text, whether fiction or nonfiction. The latter isn't always fun in the moment, but it can lead to a sense of satisfaction -- and deeper understanding. So you might call it "robust" instruction.
But I wouldn't say #1 (or the "faster read") is the same as "surface-level" instruction, at least not the kind described in the SRI study. Rather, the teacher has to get out of the way to some extent so that kids can get immersed in the story.
Learning to get out of the way is often the hard part, as a teacher. What feels natural as a teacher is to *teach*--and natural teaching often doesn't align with natural learning. This has been a big problem in literacy instruction forever--as we see in the classroom scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird, and as McKeown and Beck showed years ago, though they seemed not to be fully aware of what they were describing. I wrote about this a lot back in the day, and this essay in particular still seems relevant: https://literacyinleafstrewn.blogspot.com/2012/07/what-seems-natural-and-to-whom-and-why.html What is still not fully clear, even years later, is what "robust instruction" means. As you suggest, and as I noted in my essay, though McKeown and Beck kind of pooh-pooh it, good literacy education would probably mean focusing more on the text, and would probably mean getting students to try to make meaning from the text; what's still unclear is how best to do that second part. Asking about meaning (as in the Neil Armstrong example) is obviously useful, but I can easily imagine teachers following their natural instinct to "instruct" and again getting in the way...
I think kids need to have the opportunity to get through a novel without too many interruptions, but I don't think teachers ALWAYS need to get out of the way. I'm not a teacher, but I've spent quite a bit of time in classrooms, and it seems to me one of the trickiest aspects of teaching is knowing how much "teaching" to do, and when, vs. how much of the cognitive burden to place on students. I think teacher prep and PD needs to focus on that more. A good curriculum can help, but it can't anticipate every situation that will arise in a classroom.
And my reading of McKeown and Beck -- including not just the study you discuss in your post but also their book on "questioning the author" -- differs from yours. I don't think they're against "focusing on the text." Their approach is to have students consider what the author was trying to say in the text by asking them pretty open-ended questions as opposed to questions that focus on particular comprehension strategies.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I of course agree with you that it's hard to know how much teaching to do; I would merely suggest that most of the time we err in the direction of not getting out of the way enough, and of putting too little of the cognitive burden on students. And yes, McKeown and Beck are of course not *against* focusing on the text, and I do appreciate their emphasis on open-ended questions rather than trying to "teach" particular "skills" and "strategies".--and that particular study was helpful in showing how what feels natural to teachers is often not what's most helpful to students, since the teachers in that study seemed to like the open-ended questions approach less and to feel that the "strategies" approach was "less natural".
I think we do need more elementary teachers who feel comfortable with history and science topics -- and one way to do that would be to ensure that anyone who wants to be an elementary teacher has some grounding in those topics as they are likely to be taught at an elementary level.
But to be clear, no one is asking elementary teachers to read, write, or analyze "historical and scientific journal articles." The knowledge-building curricula used by the districts in the study don't include scholarly articles. The texts are written at an elementary school level. Teachers who lack expertise in the topics can teach the texts if they get the appropriate support. And, as the report suggests, they often find they enjoy the experience.