Uncover the secrets to unlocking your students' full potential with Megan Robinson, Director of Content, Implementation, and Adoptions at Curriculum Associates, as she guides us through the revolutionary practice of educational acceleration. Get ready to transform your approach from remediation to the more dynamic strategy of acceleration, a method that equips students with the foundational skills they need before tackling grade-level challenges. Megan's discussion, rich with insights from pivotal studies like The Opportunity Myth by TNTP, is a treasure trove for educators seeking actionable strategies to elevate engagement and outcomes in the classroom.
Join us as we delve into the astounding success story of a school that catapulted its math proficiency rates from 17% to 50% in just two years through whole-class acceleration. This episode isn't just about the statistics; it's a celebration of the universal benefits that come from refreshing foundational skills for all learners, ensuring no student lags when moving forward. With Megan's invaluable expertise, we conclude with a powerful reminder of the impact educators have when they remain connected and proactive in an ever-evolving educational terrain.
Read The Opportunity Myth by TNTP: https://tntp.org/publication/the-opportunity-myth/
Visit the Blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog
Follow us on Twitter: @CurriculumAssoc
Follow us on Instagram: @MyiReady
Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Uncover the secrets to unlocking your students' full potential with Megan Robinson, Director of Content, Implementation, and Adoptions at Curriculum Associates, as she guides us through the revolutionary practice of educational acceleration. Get ready to transform your approach from remediation to the more dynamic strategy of acceleration, a method that equips students with the foundational skills they need before tackling grade-level challenges. Megan's discussion, rich with insights from pivotal studies like The Opportunity Myth by TNTP, is a treasure trove for educators seeking actionable strategies to elevate engagement and outcomes in the classroom.
Join us as we delve into the astounding success story of a school that catapulted its math proficiency rates from 17% to 50% in just two years through whole-class acceleration. This episode isn't just about the statistics; it's a celebration of the universal benefits that come from refreshing foundational skills for all learners, ensuring no student lags when moving forward. With Megan's invaluable expertise, we conclude with a powerful reminder of the impact educators have when they remain connected and proactive in an ever-evolving educational terrain.
Read The Opportunity Myth by TNTP: https://tntp.org/publication/the-opportunity-myth/
Visit the Blog: CurriculumAssociates.com/blog
Follow us on Twitter: @CurriculumAssoc
Follow us on Instagram: @MyiReady
Have feedback, questions, or want to be a guest? Email ExtraordinaryEducators@cainc.com to connect with us!
Curriculum Associates presents the Extraordinary Educators podcast with hosts Danielle Sullivan and Sarah Loveris. Here tips, best practices and successes to improve your teaching and leadership and drive student growth and learning. We're here for you.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone, welcome to the Extraordinary Educator podcast. This is Danielle.
Speaker 1:This is Sarah. This week, we are joined by our incredible colleague, megan Robinson, who is the director of content, implementation and adoptions at Curriculum Associates.
Speaker 2:I love talking with Megan. She was on the podcast before. Maybe we can actually link her other episode in the show notes as well, but she really is bringing the most important aspect of education acceleration to the forefront. In this episode, megan is leaning into the research on acceleration and sharing some best practices for educators and leaders to think about how to shape and implement acceleration as a teaching practice.
Speaker 1:We can't wait for you to hear our conversation with Megan here. It is. Welcome, Megan. It is so great to have you back on the podcast.
Speaker 3:Yes, it's been a while. It's so great to see how much you all have grown and expanded in the few years since I was last a guest.
Speaker 2:Well, we are so excited to have you back, and last time you talked about amazing research you were doing, so tell us. What are you doing now? What are you thinking about? What are you researching? What's going on in your world? Yes, so.
Speaker 3:I'm always reading and consuming research, as well as books by outstanding educators and thought leaders, and one thing that I just haven't been able to step away from for the last few years, since 2019, since I came across the first piece of research around this, which is the Opportunity Myth by TNTP, and since reading that research and realizing what approaches were really being used to address unfinished teaching and learning and what needed to be done to address unfinished teaching and learning with great impact. I have just been so not only empowered by that, but the way that I see it, helping educators understanding why what they've been doing because they're trying so hard to support students address unfinished teaching and learning. And let me just take a second there to talk about what do I keep saying unfinished teaching and learning? Well, if I don't teach Unit 6, that's not unfinished learning, that's just unfinished teaching. They just simply didn't cover it, whereas if I taught it, it was high quality instruction, it was very engaging, the students were doing the majority of the talking and it still didn't sink in. Then we can qualify that as unfinished learning. So that's why I say unfinished teaching and learning.
Speaker 3:But folks are doing their darnness to address unfinished teaching and learning, and have been for decades. But when you look at the data, you see there's hardly much of a statistical impact that's being made or being felt by the approaches that have been in place. So clearly we need to do something different. Right? But everyone goes what? What do we do? And so, really diving into that research and finding more research, more guidance from NCTM, ncsm, student achievement partners, the federal government speaking about the importance of acceleration rather than remediation, and, most recently, an educator who I've been working with for a number of years, they took this acceleration model to their school, to this one school site, and they said let's try this out, let's see if all this research and all this like let's really, let's kind of like use ourselves as a lab school After two years of building in an acceleration block before math, an acceleration meaning what is the one most critical prerequisite skill that students need to have some understanding of, not full proficiency of, not complete mastery of, but some understanding of in order to really get the most out of this lesson, to be able to fully participate in this grade level instruction.
Speaker 3:Because this is a fifth grade class, these students have a legal right to fifth grade content, so I should be spending the majority of my time delivering fifth grade content, but I do need to take little breaks here and there to make sure that students have one day or 20 minute experience with that one most critical prerequisite skill. So they have that launch pack. Well, they did this for two years where they built that acceleration block at the beginning of math, 20 minutes every day and in two years they saw the proficiency increase from 17% students proficient to 50% of their students proficient. So if I thought that I might step over, choose a next idea to run with and you know, and glide through the education realm with, those thoughts are over.
Speaker 3:I'm sticking with acceleration because I'm seeing more and more educators really jump on that class one to it, if you will. And then they're seeing the impact. They're seeing an increase in student confidence, they're seeing an increase in student participation, they're seeing an increase just in students overall identity as students and then, of course, they're seeing the data follow suit. So pretty powerful, and I'm going to continue riding this acceleration wave.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for sharing that and congrats to that school and their success. And that's the data speaks for itself. I think oftentimes when teachers hear about doing this whole class, their mind immediately goes to like, well, my students are different places, or what if you know there's certain foundational concepts or things that most kids know but others don't know? So how do you kind of you know for teachers that don't have the 20 minute block built in but who are listening right now, how do they kind of go about framing their thinking around whole class acceleration when not every student needs that missing puzzle piece Right?
Speaker 3:Well, here's one thing to consider Even if some students might have that prerequisite skill already maybe you have a pre test that shows that, some sort of diagnostic that gives you that information they still need that information, dusted off and ready to go. So everyone needs that information. Some just need it dusted off, some need an actual like dip, you know, in the pool in order to be fully prepared for what's coming. So I think there's an opportunity there to sort of shift the thinking of saying these students don't need it. Now, everyone needs this information ready to go. Some students need a little more work with it in order to be ready to go than others, but everyone needs this skill ready for this week, right? So I think that's one way to start shifting the thinking, rather than excluding students or saying these students don't need it.
Speaker 3:Hey, it's been six months since they last worked with that prerequisite skill, or three months, and I don't know about you, but I'm a full grown adult and I can't remember what I wore a week ago. So if we're asking nine year olds to remember what they did six months ago, we're expecting them to just be able to recall that. You know, you're going to see a wide variety of success rates with that. So instead just find it a bit more humane to just say everyone, let's just, let's just revisit this.
Speaker 1:I think too, just like that's such an important mind shift and also just help students start off with whatever you know content that is a little more confident, because if you're saying, hey, we're about to add decimals and we're going to, but in order to do that we have to be masters at you know whole, whole, whole number addition and from learning that for them so they can be excited about it, and then and if it feels quote easy for some kids, they might be like pumped about it because I want to do this new thing, that's really important. So thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, that is very important and it's overall just realizing that they are. They are children, they are students, right, whether they're 17 or they're seven, right At the end of the day, they are students and we all have unfinished learning. All of us, even you, even me, we all have unfinished learning. So what kindness, what humanity to show students to, to give everyone the opportunity to regress, what it is they need to build their confidence and to have even more success than they've had in the past.
Speaker 2:And I love everything that you're talking about, so you were starting to say this let's, let's talk about some actual strategies. You started to talk about whole class. So, as teachers or leaders are listening to this, what are some things you're starting places, or even books or research that that educators can have access to, or frameworks that can begin this process?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so what two? Two things that they could, that they could read. I would recommend the opportunity myths by TNTP and I would also recommend accelerate don't remediate by TNTP as two tools to you know, to build your, to build your background and understand sort of what's happening. What was the process and how was it different from the most traditional approach to confidence, teaching and learning, which is intervention? But the one thing that educators can do it starts with an S and it is scaffold. Scaffold, the grade level, instruction, or scaffold, the prerequisite skill. So what does that mean? Well, what scaffolding isn't? It doesn't mean talking slower. It doesn't mean making things easier.
Speaker 2:It doesn't mean talking louder.
Speaker 3:It doesn't mean repeating the same thing over and over again, it means having an understanding of how these skills connect to the prerequisite content and then, during your whole class instruction, being able to plug in the opportunities where students are, where you're going to remind students of some prerequisite information that they need for that moment. So, rather than I described earlier a district or site that took 20 minutes to do that and then they dove into the grade level instruction Whereas what you're doing whole class is taking that 20 minutes and weaving that 20 minutes of information throughout your grade level content lesson so that along the way, students have these nuggets of information that move them more and more forward within that grade level content. So it could be a separate block, like I mentioned earlier. Or when you're doing whole class, you have to scaffold it and you weave it into the grade level content. There are quite a few steps to figuring out how to do that. There are a number of tools that can help folks with it.
Speaker 3:The best that I have seen is found in the I Ready Pre-Requisites report. I really haven't seen anything else even close to it, not even an attempt to do something nearly as detailed or informational for educators to understand. When you're teaching, let's say, multiplication in third grade. How do you weave in what prerequisite skills are necessary to weave in and how do you weave that in? And there's that specific guidance for educators within that prerequisite report, no matter what curriculum they're using it's you're all teaching multiplication in third grade. So this is how you weave in the scaffolds when you're teaching that third grade content. So I would say, yes, scaffold, learn how to scaffold, understand what scaffolding is, understand what scaffolding is not. And then you apply that to your whole class instruction and that's what the majority of that research shows. Tntp and the other piece that I mentioned Accelerate, don't Remediate is about scaffolding instruction and doing that during whole class instruction.
Speaker 1:Awesome and we'll be sure to link those in the show notes for our listeners. So, megan, that is all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for all of your expertise and tips and insights. It is always so great to hear. Get inspired by following us on social media and please tag us in your posts on Twitter, at curriculumassoch, and on Instagram, at myirety. If you have feedback about the podcast, a topic of interest or want to be a guest, email ExtraordinaryEducatorsatcainccom. Subscribe where you listen to podcasts and if you'd like to help more educators like you join the conversation, please leave a review.
Speaker 2:And remember, be you be true, be extraordinary. The Extraordinary Educators podcast is produced by Curriculum Associates. Editing by Whiteboard Geeks, social media by Atstie Hannan, guest booking by Sarri LaBearis, production by Hailey Browning. This podcast is copyright, material and intellectual property of Curriculum Associates.