The "insane" disconnect between school schedules, reading research, and curriculum design
Please help us bridge this divide with our Elementary School Day Survey.
A few weeks ago, we kicked off a conversation about dosage, including a school day survey for elementary teachers. Please take or share this short survey if you haven’t already.
We want to highlight one of the comments on that post, from researcher Stephanie Snidarich:
“I'm glad that the issue of dosage is finally seeing the light of day. Katherin Maki (University of Florida) and I (Stephanie Snidarich, University of Florida Lastinger Center for Learning) published a meta-analysis of reading fluency interventions with a novel synthesis of dosage research. Spoiler alert: there is very little dosage research in this area. Check it out here.”
It’s great to see researchers focus on dosage. More of this, please! Yet we’re troubled by the idea of “very little” research in this realm. We think we’re on to something with our concerns.
If you look closely, many people are talking about dosage, even if they aren’t using that term. Journalist Stephen Sawchuck struck a chord in a recent tweet thread on curriculum lists saying, “Some curricula, if you followed to fidelity, would take more than 3 hours a day, which is insane.” We would add: it’s only insane if you know the length of the typical ELA block. Spoiler from our survey: to date, every respondent reports an ELA block much shorter than three hours.
In addition, Emily Hanford’s latest reporting features a curriculum (Success For All) that relies on a redesign of the school day. How can we have practical conversations about that program if we are in the dark about the current school day in most districts?
You can help advance the conversation by taking our survey (if you are an elementary teacher), and/or forwarding this to elementary teacher friends. The survey should take five minutes or less.
We can already promise that the survey results will be a conversation-starter. Thanks for helping us get to a sizable sample.
I have done some reporting on a very effective whole-class math intervention called SpringMath, and that also in most cases requires a reschedule of the school day for elementary students. This is a great conversation to be having.