“Without context, a piece of information is just a dot. It floats in your brain with a lot of other dots and doesn’t mean a damn thing. Knowledge is information-in-context… connecting the dots”.
-Michael Ventura
Once again, Louisiana has been in the news for their creation of ELA Guidebooks, which gives students a scaffold to build knowledge, centering around a theme, tackling big ideas while using authentic texts written by real people for the real world. Ruth Wattenberg, education policy analyst and former president of the DC State Board of Education, praises the LA Guidebooks as leading the way in developing a quality knowledge building curriculum in her article in the State Education Standard. Wattenberg explains that “knowledge builds on knowledge, so lessons and units must be sequenced so they build on each other… Whatever the subject matter, good curriculum is systematically and coherently sequenced and comprehensive.” The implication is that the ELA Guidebooks do just that.
The New York Times reported on the Pelican State, remarking on the Knowledge Matters Campaign’s visit to a Louisiana classroom, “where 70 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a diverse group of fifth-graders sat, rapt, as their teacher… introduced a key insight: that the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation all occurred during the same period of human history.
[She] reviewed vocabulary words that students would need: heretic, rational, skepticism, heliocentric. Then, over the course of an hour, 10- and 11-year-olds broke into groups to discuss why Leonardo da Vinci was interested in human anatomy. They wrote about how the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo differed from those of the ancient Greeks.”
The teacher gave her students information in context to build structures of knowledge. The ELA Guidebooks’ high-quality curriculum has made a difference, and “Louisiana has been celebrated by the Knowledge Matters Campaign, an effort led by Barbara Davidson… Knowledge Matters tries to draw attention to schools that demonstrate strong reading results, often through teaching a notably rigorous, history-heavy curriculum to elementary school students.”
Louisiana’s ELA Guidebooks are routinely rated as a “high quality curriculum” in EdReports’ rankings because year after year the state’s reading scores show gains. According to a national study performed by Harvard and Stanford, Louisiana is leading the nation for academic recovery, and the Education Recovery Scorecard ranks Louisiana as first in the nation for reading. In EdWeek, Rick Hess recently reported that “Louisiana’s long-standing commitment to knowledge-rich curricula, matched with its investment in high-quality teacher development, offers lessons from which we all can learn.”
In 2016, when the curriculum, built by teachers and for students, needed implementation, the LA DOE asked for CCC’s help. The CCC team worked closely with the Director of Academic Content to organize the copyright permission and delivery solution. The successful implementation of this solution allowed the teachers to focus their time and effort on the classroom and their students rather than expend time and effort cobbling together the required materials. EdWeek reports that a decade after the ELA Guidebooks were first created, “the state has stayed true to its focus on implementing high-quality curriculum across superintendents and election cycles — and it shows.”
CCC, a decade later, is proud to be a part of the infrastructure of Louisiana’s ELA Guidebooks.
CCC supports the use of high-quality reading content through a combined licensing and content solution called RightFind Curriculum. This solution enables K-12 educators and those who serve that academic market to identify and incorporate excerpts of high-quality published content in curriculum and lessons while managing copyright compliance. RightFind Curriculum includes pre-permissioned titles from over 90 publishers, representing over 1M works, for all age groups and all subject areas (fiction & non-fiction books, primary sources, poetry & short stories, essays & memoirs, newspapers & magazines, web content, and millions of images & videos).
If you are interested in working with CCC to create your own curriculum or supplement a curriculum already in place, please reach out to me directly: skalman@copyright.com.