Last month’s release of biennial reading scores on the “Nation’s Report Card” — and the likely overlooked, but monumentally important, — could not have provided a better bookend to our recently concluded tour of “knowledge-rich schools.”

We embarked on the in January with an essential question: What — beyond use of a high-quality, knowledge-building curriculum — defines a knowledge-rich school?” We hope readers of the series have a better picture in their minds, and that you will be patient as we bring our travelers back together to compare notes. We think there are some common, and significant, themes.

In the meantime, we can’t help noting — on the heels of that very thoughtful discussion among some of the foremost authorities on reading instruction — how aligned their recommendations were with what we saw happening in these schools. We offer the following crosswalk:

“Too many of our children are not reading enough to become good readers,” Carol Jago, vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, said in kicking off the panel discussion. “As a society, we need to foster a culture that values reading.”

Building a love of reading was on full display everywhere we went on the School Tour. It was particularly noteworthy at Greensboro, North Carolina’s , where, as my colleague David Liben says, “they do volume-of-reading on steroids.”

An important clarion call emerging from the panel was the need to do away with the practice of assigning students to books at their “level.”

“At best, this has no positive effects, and at worst, it’s been found to do real damage – to hold kids back,” said Tim Shanahan, a longtime reading expert and professor emeritus at University of Illinois at Chicago.

(See our blogs about in Dayton, Ohio, and in Phoenix, Arizona, for great examples of exposing all students — every kid in the class! — to engaging, complex texts.)

Calling out the importance of such exposure for struggling readers in particular, Marilyn Adams, a visiting scholar at Brown University’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, claimed that “the widespread practice of giving students easier texts when they’re weaker readers serves to deny them the very language and information they need to catch up and move on.”

Our visit to showed us how joyously students can be supported in building this knowledge with the help of the right curriculum.

“Once students are fluent decoders, the key determinant of comprehension is what a student already knows about a topic,” said Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “[Our challenge is] to assure that every child is exposed to a curriculum that is knowledge-rich and appropriately sequenced.”

There is no better model of intentional sequencing of knowledge than the well-known Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum, whose model implementation we witnessed at in Riverside, California.

Public Prep CEO Ian Rowe underscored the importance of the “intellectual preparation” of teachers.

“We can’t expect kids to do close reading of complex texts unless our teachers are doing so,” he said, providing us with the perfect opportunity to sing the praises, yet again, of the great work being done in Louisiana. Together with the vast majority of educators throughout the state, teachers at near Lake Charles have “become learners, too.”

We look forward to sharing more about our insights in the months ahead!

Barbara Davidson is president of StandardsWork and runs the Knowledge Matters Campaign. A former classroom teacher of students with learning disabilities, she has worked for the past 30 years at the intersection of education policy and practice and has led a number of curriculum development efforts.

Detroit has lost more than 1 million residents . Once-beautiful homes sit boarded up in a 672,000-person city that housed 1.8 million people nearly seven decades ago.

But this city still has fight left in it, as we discovered on our sixth Knowledge Matters School Tour stop. At two charter schools — Detroit Prep and Detroit Achievement Academy — a small group of committed educators are working to breathe hope into this once-great city by building schools that work for all students.

Both schools we visited have chosen to use (EL 2.0), a curriculum that intentionally integrates social-emotional learning, academics, and real-world applications and experience. Indeed, one of the most exciting features of EL 2.0 is that its holistic vision of achievement appeals to parents, teachers, and students of all backgrounds.

Academically, the curriculum is made up of four modules a year, each focused on a topic in science (like birds, fossils, or weather) or social studies (like leaders of social change or the American Revolution). We saw first-graders reading complex texts about the adaptive value of different kinds of bird beaks and feathers, and heard students recounting with joy the heron they saw over the weekend. Their teacher tells us that the students have even learned to greet each other with bird calls.

Woven in with this rich content is the focus on social-emotional learning, a key differentiator of the EL 2.0 curriculum. Schools select their own core values, which are baked into academic conversations, goal-setting, and student self-monitoring. Detroit Prep’s core values, for example, are responsibility, perseverance, curiosity and creativity, integrity, cooperation, and compassion. During our time with them, it wasn’t at all uncommon to hear students encourage each other to be more responsible or even to ask their teachers if they could provide their feedback more compassionately. The teachers emphasized that the focus on social-emotional learning was particularly valuable for students who had come from less advantaged backgrounds and were learning to feel safe and valued at school.

This blending of social-emotional and academic learning comes together in EL 2.0 schools when students present their work to parents at student-led parent conferences to discuss their progress, as well as at quarterly “celebrations of learning” for the entire school community. We saw the beautiful aftermath of one such celebration at Detroit Achievement Academy, where the entire school was decorated to resemble a tropical rainforest.

The educators at Detroit Prep and Detroit Achievement Academy emphasize that, unlike other curricula, EL 2.0 is not “plug and play,” but instead contains the “seeds to help your garden grow.” Much like a garden, the curriculum can be “messy” and takes time and patience before you see the fruits of your labors, teacher say.

“It doesn’t feel neat,” Detroit Achievement Academy Principal Adrian Monge said. “There’s not going to be a successful exit ticket at the end of the day…. Sometimes you have to wait till the third unit of the module.”

Educators also emphasized that success with this curriculum requires much more planning time and work to study and internalize curriculum design.

Messy as planting this garden may be, an interview with fifth graders Jordan, Justin, and Victoria proved what’s possible. The class was completing a unit on athletes who were leaders of social change, and Victoria had just ably facilitated her peers in a Socratic seminar about whether Jackie Robinson’s success was more attributable to his personal character or to outside factors like the support he received from family and friends.

Jordan, who is now blossoming, said he struggled to learn at his previous school because his teachers were unkind.

“It took me time,” he said. “But now I care about my education and learning.”

Victoria said learning about African-American sprinter Wilma Rudolph — and how she had overcome polio and shed leg braces to win three gold medals in Olympic track — sparked an interest in history.

For Victoria, the lessons from Rudolph also translated outside the classroom.

“There was a moment when one of our new students was struggling and had a conflict with another student,” teacher Kirstin Stoeckle said. “Victoria went up to her, put her arm around her shoulder, and said, ‘If Wilma Rudolph could overcome polio, you can do this.’”

Stories like this give us hope that from the wreckage of closed factories and abandoned houses, the seeds of opportunity in Detroit are sprouting.

Silas Kulkarni is executive director of Teaching Lab, leading powerful professional learning experiences in school districts around the country by applying lessons learned as a record-busting middle school teacher in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Galileo Galilei’s birthday is not usually a cause for elementary school celebrations — but that could change if publisher has anything to say about it.

At Saville Elementary School in Riverside, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, third-graders are learning quite a lot about the Italian astronomer and father of modern science as they kick off a module on Outer Space in ’s new ELA curriculum by reading Peter Sís’s Caldecott Medal–winning book Starry Messenger.

Our tour guide, Mad River School District Instructional Coach Mandy Polen, had no way of knowing that our visit was going to fall on such a special day. We were treated to a wonderfully rich Socratic seminar on the virtues of the space race, a culminating activity for the module that began six weeks ago with Galileo and, during the intervening weeks, had students read Brian Floca’s Moonshot and Robert Burleigh’s One Giant Leap (both award winners) while exploring a NASA video, mixed-media fine art, sculpture, JFK speeches, and more.

David Liben accompanied me on this visit to Dayton. At the conclusion of the seminar, Liben told the students about how Sputnik launched a massive debate within policy circles about the lack of rigor in the American education system, with some camps feeling students should be pushed to tackle more demanding topics earlier in their school career and others arguing it wasn’t developmentally appropriate.

“That’s just offensive,” one little girl immediately offered. “I love proving people wrong,” chimed in another. Galileo would have been proud.

Katie Luedke has been at Saville her entire teaching career — 15 years. She’s mostly taught first and second grades. It was when she moved to the third grade, looping with some of the kids she had two years earlier in the first grade, that her passion for curriculum reform reached its peak. That was when she really saw the effects of not having a consistent curriculum.

“They couldn’t look at a passage and understand it,” Luedke said, describing a lack of “connection to what they’re reading,” insufficient vocabulary, and little knowledge of the world.

The teachers at Saville are a singularly impressive lot. Luedke herself has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Dayton, ranked one of the top teacher preparation programs in the nation , and . If anyone could write good curriculum, these folks could do it.

Luedke became part of a group of teachers who concluded they had to abandon their strategy of “fixing” things here and there (in response to test scores) and embrace a unified curriculum. They had developed an antipathy for “the basal approach” and decided they wanted to do something really different. What led them to Wit & Wisdom were the books.

It’s hard not to love the books that make up the Wit & Wisdom curriculum. Each of four modules in the school year is composed of a curated collection of literary and informational texts Great Minds calls “beautiful inside and out,” as well as speeches, interviews, music, visual art, film, and more. The texts were intentionally selected to serve as both “mirrors and windows” — that is, they provide opportunities for students to see themselves reflected in the texts and also open up for students a knowledge of the world and the world of ideas.

As we moved around the school — first into a fourth-grade class reading Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet as part of a module on “Extreme Settings,” then to a second-grade class reading The Story of Ruby Bridges as part of a module on “Civil Rights Heroes,” and finally a first-grade class reading What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? (another Caldecott winner) — it was hard not to feel like we were in some elite private school. Yet Saville is anything but. It’s a district school in a Rust Belt city plagued by the all-too familiar problems of generational poverty: families torn apart by drug addiction, homelessness, and irregular employment.

The teachers at Saville get pretty emotional when they talk about what Wit & Wisdom is providing their children.

“They will have this for the rest of their lives,” Luedke tells us.

is president of and runs the . A former classroom teacher of students with learning disabilities, she has worked for the past 30 years at the intersection of education policy and practice and has led a number of curriculum development efforts.

When we walked into our first classroom — eighth-grade Literature and Composition — at Maryvale Preparatory Academy in Phoenix, Arizona, we knew we were in for a treat. A young man approached us, shook our hands, and said, “We’re having a Socratic seminar about Lord of the Flies; please have a seat.”

Jack Franicevich is a veteran of the seminar format. He let his students lead the discussion, participating almost as a peer (while lobbing in rich vocabulary words like “overbearing,” “preoccupation,” and “oblivious.”) But he also didn’t let things get off course, with reminders like, “How does that help us answer this question?”

It’s not just Franicevich. Everywhere we went at Maryvale Prep, we witnessed a lovely melding of consistently strong instruction, thoughtfully sequenced curriculum, empowering content, and great care paid to the school’s nine core virtues: responsibility, perseverance, integrity, honesty, courage, citizenship, humility, friendship, and wisdom.

Maryvale Prep is part of , a network of public charter schools. Established in 2004, they operate 23 schools in Arizona and Texas. Maryvale Prep is in its fifth year of operation and represents a big change for the organization, since it serves a predominantly low-income, Latino student population. To fill classes their first year, Principal Mac Esau knocked on doors throughout the (interestingly, the first master-planned community in Arizona, back in the ’50s), assuring parents they weren’t there to sell cable, and telling them about his vision for a school that would prepare their children for college and a virtuous life.

Esau acknowledges that the Great Hearts philosophy of “truth, goodness, and beauty” probably didn’t impress as much as did the passion of his team.

Maryvale Prep — and indeed all Great Hearts schools — use the as the content backbone of their curriculum, though it is not a full-on implementation of Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA). The Great Books Reading List plays an influential role as well, with students reading 50 classics by the time they finish eighth grade (and getting their own copies to keep!) — everything from Charlotte’s Web and Pinocchio to A Christmas Carol and The Merchant of Venice.

Throughout our visit, the level of student engagement with content was powerful — and the quality of the work high. But this is not the most notable feature of Maryvale Prep. As we visited with teachers and parents, they continually returned to the impact of the school’s focus on students’ moral formation.

“We are teaching students to be thoughtful and insightful by bringing them into contact with some of the best thinkers and artists of the ages,” Great Hearts Chief Academic Officer Robert Jackson said.

Maryvale Prep was our first charter school visit on the tour, and the flexibility it has to hire teachers inclined toward the school’s philosophy and to support a full-time teacher assistant in all K-5 classrooms is certainly an advantage. Not every faculty is going to want to immerse itself in content to the degree these teachers are. But such factors — and a whole lot of heart — certainly make for one very special school.

Barbara Davidson is president of StandardsWork and runs the Knowledge Matters Campaign. A former classroom teacher of students with learning disabilities, she has worked for the past 30 years at the intersection of education policy and practice and has led a number of curriculum development efforts.

Tori Filler is a member of the Literacy and English Language Arts team at . Prior to this work, she taught elementary school in Brooklyn, New York.

Monticello-Brown Summit Elementary School is one of 71 elementary schools in Guilford County Public Schools, the third-largest school district in North Carolina. It recently adopted American Reading Company’s , an English Language Arts curriculum designed to help build children’s knowledge of the world. This is its story.

One might think that a brand-new curriculum (with a lot going on inside of it), in its first year of adoption, and with a newly minted principal, is a formula for disaster. But what’s happening at Monticello-Brown is anything but.

The ARC curriculum is garnering attention from school districts around the country because it looks and feels a lot like the “” with which so many are familiar. This was certainly a factor in Guilford County’s decision to adopt the program.

But ARC Core is, in fact, quite different. While kids work with “leveled books” based on skills they have and have not yet mastered (identified through ARC’s Independent Reading Level Assessment, or IRLA), there’s a sense of very intentional movement through levels rather than languishing in one as all too often happens in traditional leveled programs. There is much celebration when students move to a new level, and surprisingly little competition about at which level students are.

Each level has a set of “power goals” — and every student we talked to could tell us what his/her “power goal” was (such as identifying the antagonist and protagonist in narrative text). Students “conference” one-on-one, or in nimble, flexible groups, with their teacher and are assessed for comprehension, vocabulary, and foundational skills before they move on. If they don’t progress, they know precisely why.

Another difference here is that all of the books are published trade literature, as opposed to leveled readers, which are written specifically to be used in leveled programs. Since the publisher is one of America’s largest distributors of children’s books, districts can customize the units, selecting topics they know will appeal to their students or that match state social studies and science standards. Not only is the core text customizable, but so are all the leveled “bins” that correspond to it, giving students a wide variety of texts from which to choose when working on their power goals.

But there’s more. ARC is organized around topic-based units, each of which includes a “research lab” that features a grade-level core text — rich in vocabulary and content — that all students read and around which whole class discussion takes place. Students choose a research topic related to the content of the core text and read additional books at varying levels of complexity to complete a cumulative research assignment. From everything we heard from students, the end-of-unit project is a real highlight of ARC Core.

Finally, in addition to IRLA and the Research Labs, ARC includes 30 minutes of independent reading time during which students can choose texts at any level.

The result of all this is that kids are reading — a lot! In fact, it is the volume of reading — and engagement with books — that really is the story of Monticello-Brown Summit Elementary.

What do the kids think about it all?

Fourth- and fifth-grade students: Brock, Bailey, Julio, Camrun, Jaylen, Hunter, Savannah, Riccardo, and Osbaldo:

• ARC gives us the opportunity to read more books.

• At my old school, I didn’t have enough time to read my books.

• Last year I got books that were too hard and I couldn’t read them.

• ARC focuses on one thing, one topic at a time — where you can really get an idea of what it means, what happens, instead of half of this and half of that.

• I like it when we read [a book] together because you can get others’ opinions. I like being in book arguments.

• I never get bored. English and social studies are my favorite subjects.

• ARC is more informational. Last year we just searched for things and wrote it down.

ARC Core has a lot of moving parts. What do the teachers say about it implementing it? From Ashley Martin, Latina Dixon, Alex Faulkner, Melissa Wilson, and Shannon Vaka (curriculum facilitator):

• The rigor in this curriculum is huge. In the beginning, it’s hard. I kept asking myself, “How am I ever going to get them to think this deeply about the text?” (Ms. Martin, fourth grade)

• I would put it somewhere between 1–3 [on a 5-point difficulty scale, with 5 being the hardest].

• I used a program before where all students read grade-level texts, but what’s different here is that they’re [the students] able to make it come alive with books on the same topic. (Ms. Dixon)

• What’s different here is that when we finish with our independent text, they talk with their classmates, and it’s broadening their horizons, they’re sharing with each other, they’re discussing it, and adding to their reading lists. (Ms. Wilson, fifth grade)

• I really appreciate that it took the best of other programs and brought it all together.

• I thought I was going to miss small groups — but this way you get to know the individual readers so much better… you’re working on a very tiny, short-term, specific goal. When they’re ready, you move them.

• The greatest difference I see is with our struggling readers.

Perhaps part of the reason Monticello-Brown’s teachers aren’t more overwhelmed by implementing the new ARC curriculum is because Principal Christopher Scott, a first-year principal in the 2016–17 academic year, when ARC Core was being rolled out, and now chief cheerleader in the district — has invested significantly in professional development. He saw the curriculum being used in summer school, signed Monticello-Brown up as an early adopter, and hasn’t looked back. Scott has also put at least 25 percent of his Title I dollars into supporting professional development, making it possible for the school to benefit from the on-site assistance of an ARC coach for 14 days this school year.

Third-grade teacher Alex Faulkner was just three weeks into using the curriculum (following maternity leave) when we visited and sat in on her coaching session. Faulkner confessed that she was still struggling to figure out in what order to do things — should she work with the skills first or dive into the content? The ARC coach suggested she could, in fact, intentionally connect them.

The book Faulkner’s students were reading was an informational text about bugs. The coach used as an example of a question she might have asked, “Which detail would be most helpful to a bug researcher?” “Oh, I get it; I could blend them together.”

This “aha moment” strikes us as what it’s all about. Privileging content, while not abandoning language arts skills development, is a sea change for many teachers. We saw it on full display at Monticello-Brown. The important point is this: While the curriculum is maturing, teachers are learning, and full implementation across the school and district is taking shape, children are reading and writing more than they ever have, and about more interesting and important topics than previously in their school careers. It will make a mountain of difference in these children’s lives.

David Liben is a senior content specialist on the Literacy and English Language Arts team at Student Achievement Partners. He founded two innovative model schools in New York City where he served as principal and lead curriculum designer.

Barbara Davidson is president of StandardsWork and runs the Knowledge Matters Campaign. A former classroom teacher of students with learning disabilities, she has worked for the past 30 years at the intersection of education policy and practice and has led a number of curriculum development efforts.

Kinder is a tightly knit 2,400-person community in western Louisiana. The biggest monument in the area is the Coushatta Casino Resort, where many of the local residents work.

Of the nearly 1,000 students enrolled in the town’s two public schools, about 60 percent are classified as low-income. The median household income in Allen Parish, the county in which Kinder resides, is $41,801, according to the 2012–16 American Community Survey. That figure is even lower in Kinder itself.

Yet in this unexpected place, something remarkable is happening educationally. Using a teacher-written, knowledge-rich curriculum called the , students at Kinder Elementary School are becoming passionate experts and independent thinkers.

For much of the time that we visited, schools were closed due to an ice storm. But sitting in the lobby of the casino restaurant, instructional coach Jade Welch, parent Chasidy LaFargue, and her son Mason told us why they love their school.

“It’s a very home-like environment,” Welch said.

LaFargue enjoyed visiting Kinder Elementary so much that she started working as a substitute teacher.

“It’s like a big group you want to be part of,” she said. “The friendships you get from these women — they are learning, you are learning.”

To be sure, Kinder is in the early stages of its growth and development, and there’s still much more work to do. But this theme of learning together in a community flows from administrators to teachers, to students, to parents — and connects directly to the school’s success in using a new and challenging curriculum.

“If we didn’t have a culture of collaboration in place before Guidebooks, we would have drowned,” Assistant Principal Jennifer Doucet said.

But the best description of the school comes from 9-year old Mason.

“It’s pretty much like a regular school. It’s fun and you learn a lot,” he said.

Mason’s favorite unit was the American Revolution, and he readily rattled off information about the Stamp, Sugar, and Quartering Acts; the Founding Fathers; and why he would have been a Patriot and not a Loyalist. But he is equally knowledgeable about frog adaptations. In his teacher Miss Hannah’s class, students prepared for a unit on The Whipping Boy by reading informational texts about the Middle Ages — from dietary habits to the treatment of soldiers to the design of castles. The students love it.  

This curriculum and instruction didn’t happen by accident. A , Louisiana supported local teachers in writing and revising the Guidebooks as a free online curriculum that any district in the state has the option to use. Nearly 80 percent of districts now use them. Guidebooks’ use of complex texts to build knowledge of topics supports the enthusiastic discussion we observed.

First-grade teacher Carley Chaumont echoed this observation, sharing that she appreciated the complexity of the [Guidebooks’] texts because she “could engage deep questions and have rich discussions with her kids.”

This engagement isn’t limited to only Miss Carley’s more affluent students.

“The texts in Guidebooks are so engaging to students, I don’t see a difference in our students based on background,” she told us.

Indeed, the curriculum was intentionally designed to build knowledge to support access for all students in order to close the achievement gap.

To use Guidebooks or another knowledge-rich curriculum, professional development specific to that curriculum is key, said Stephanie Perry, curriculum and instructional support supervisor for Allen Parish School Board.

District leadership has supported building teachers’ knowledge and ability to use the curriculum by participating in a statewide “Content Leaders” training. Getting the teachers thinking has gotten the students thinking, school leaders say. To support the use of this more rigorous curriculum in schools, teachers collaborate for one hour per day; even administrators have their own collaborative planning group.

“This is a learning journey for me,” Chaumont told us. “Be a learner yourself. Have an open mind.”

Disclosure: Content Leader training has, in part, been developed by Teaching Lab, a nonprofit for which the author is executive director.

 is executive director of , leading powerful professional learning experiences in school districts around the country by applying lessons learned as a record-busting middle school teacher in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

I’ve signed in at many front offices in my 30-plus years of visiting schools, but never one where the school secretary had to (politely) ask me to hold on a second while a child finished reading her a story. Nothing was more important at that moment, to that member of the dedicated team in Riverside, California, than to give this little girl her undivided attention as she displayed her newfound knowledge.

While not by design, it was perhaps appropriate that the first stop on our Knowledge Matters School Tour was at a relatively mature Core Knowledge school. The program is the most established, most tested of the knowledge-building English language arts curricula in use today. Taught in thousands of district and charter schools around the country, CKLA — as it’s more commonly called — is both a curriculum program and a cause.

Bryant’s adoption of the Core Knowledge philosophy — and this radically new way of schooling — began back in 2010, when Riverside Unified School District became a . Lari Nelson was asked to leave her high-performing school down the road and start a Core Knowledge school. She researched the basics of the program, visited some schools in neighboring Arizona — and came back fired up by what she saw.

Prior to implementing Core Knowledge, Bryant Elementary ranked 27th out of 29 elementary schools in the district academically; today it is seventh.

Bryant is located in a downtown, working-class neighborhood; 78 percent of its students live in poverty. Largely Latino, some 23 percent are English learners. And from our observations, 100 percent are engaged, joyful learners.

A tour through Bryant’s classrooms is a celebration of knowledge. From the terra-cotta warriors on the shelves to the maps of the world, stories about ocean zones, and African masks, these students and staff are proud of what they do and learn every day — and chose to show it. I was able to gain knowledge just by looking around the room.

Of course, there was much learning happening inside the classrooms, with students exploring questions like:

• For first-graders: Why was farming important to the ancient Mayan civilization?

• For second-graders: Why were waterways important in the War of 1812?

• For fourth-graders: What do examples from history and student experience tell us about the role of failure in the inventing process?

• For fifth-graders: What are the techniques and features of Renaissance art and architecture?

Aside from the rich content these students are exposed to, the seamless way in which ELA skills are integrated into the lessons, and the tight pedagogical practice of the teaching, perhaps the most noticeable — and exciting — thing about spending two days at Bryant School of Arts & Innovation was the generally confident demeanor of the students. It wasn’t unusual for students to confess, “This confuses me,” or “I have a question about that.” This is growth mindset on full display.

Maddie, a sixth-grader, spoke for most of the students when she said, “We learn complicated things, but somehow we still get it because our teachers are amazing.”

Teachers at Bryant log many out-of-school hours learning the content, which they say they have to do in order to keep up with their students. But they don’t seem to mind.

“Core Knowledge brought the joy back to teaching for me,” fifth-grade teacher Cortney Austin said.

is president of and runs the . A former classroom teacher of students with learning disabilities, she has worked for the past 30 years at the intersection of education policy and practice and has led a number of curriculum development efforts.

When was the moment you fell in love with learning? If you ever fell in love with learning?

For most of us, it probably wasn’t when we were conjugating verbs, learning about inferences, or sequencing events. More likely it happened when our papier-mâché volcano erupted, we won a class debate, or we learned why something we were interested in happened. Art, music, foreign cultures, or learning how the world works were probably the things that captivated you the most.

Schools that deliberately focus on imparting knowledge of the world by restoring wonder and excitement in the classroom are often called “.” Knowledge-rich schools deepen students’ understanding of a wide range of topics, pairing the skills students need to be successful in school with the content knowledge that will prepare them for a lifetime of engaged learning. As a movement, knowledge-rich schooling has the potential to promote excellence, inspire passion, and enhance educational equity — particularly for children from homes with limited access to books and fewer opportunities than their more affluent peers to travel or visit museums.

Over the next few weeks, I invite you to join me and my colleagues at the as we tour schools across the country to see the many ways knowledge-building curriculum is enhancing classroom instruction — by asking students to read, write, and speak to high standards, but to do so from a wide range of topics that enrich students’ understanding of the world around them — ranging from water conservation to the Revolutionary War to Renaissance architecture. We want to tell the story of what becoming knowledge-rich means to students, parents, and teachers, and highlight schools that are on a journey to create the kind of learning experience that can truly change lives.

Our focus is on elementary schools and the reading/English language arts instruction occurring within them. Given the paucity of time devoted to social studies, science, and the arts in elementary schools across the country, if children don’t encounter these topics in their reading, and they don’t engage with them at home, they likely won’t be learned. And whether the price students pay is being “left behind” or incurring gaping holes in their background knowledge and preparedness for their futures, we believe to our core that our children, our communities, and our nation deserve better.

The significant role that background knowledge and command of academic vocabulary plays in reading comprehension is not a new discovery, but its attraction as a deliberate instructional model has recently enjoyed a resurgence of interest. Driven by compelling cognitive science, a renewed focus on curriculum in the wake of the Common Core State Standards, and a culture of innovation encouraged by the Every Student Succeeds Act, curiosity has been piqued about what “knowledge-rich schooling” really means — and how the heck you do it.

Does it just come down to picking the right curriculum and making sure teachers have the necessary supports in place, or is there something more?

The eight schools we’re visiting over the next few months use different high-quality comprehensive ELA curricula. In selecting these curricula, we relied heavily on , the nonprofit organization that rates ELA and math curriculum for its alignment with the CCSS. For an ELA curriculum to get high marks from EdReports, it must successfully pass through “,” which is all about building knowledge.

Over the next several months, my team and I will chronicle here, on The 74, our visits to these schools:

• , Riverside, CA

• , Kinder, LA

• , Greensboro, NC

• , Phoenix, AZ

• , Riverside (Dayton), OH

• , New Haven, CT

• & , Detroit, MI

Beyond the many rational, research-based, educationally sound reasons for placing content knowledge at the center of the educational enterprise in elementary schools, there is something qualitatively different about teaching and learning in schools that do so. We believe there’s a hunger out there to learn more about how schools take this on — if, indeed, it’s possible that knowledge-rich schooling can breathe new life into tired old education practices. So join us this spring as we explore this in schools across the country.

is president of and runs the . A former classroom teacher of students with learning disabilities, she has worked for the past 30 years at the intersection of education policy and practice and has led a number of curriculum development efforts.

is a member of the Literacy and English Language Arts team at . She is a former elementary school teacher and literacy coach.

is executive director of , leading powerful professional learning experiences in school districts around the country by applying lessons learned as a record-busting middle school teacher in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

is a senior content specialist on the Literacy and English Language Arts team at . He founded two innovative model schools in New York City where he served as principal and lead curriculum designer.