For teachers, materials matter

The phrase “high-quality instructional materials” sounds boring, even to me, and I’m a teacher. But the blandness of the language belies its importance – these materials are critical for teacher effectiveness and student learning.

Curricula are the organized plans and materials that teachers use to help students learn – a kind of roadmap intended to lead to the standards for each grade. As part of the LEARNS Act, school districts now have to use curricula grounded in the science of reading, a research-backed approach to teaching literacy. Most older programs and low-quality offerings don’t meet this bar, so many districts have adopted new curricula.

These new curricula are aligned with the state’s literacy standards as well as the training that teachers statewide receive to help improve students’ reading skills. Given how the LEARNS Act focuses on student growth, high-quality instructional materials that support students’ progress fit perfectly.

For teachers, the new materials are definitely an adjustment, even for ones like me who’ve taught for more than 15 years. The new lessons focus more on content and, as you might expect, given the literacy focus, students need to do a lot of reading. I teach fourth grade, so this makes sense. This is the first year that students are expected to read more complicated texts and think more critically about what they read.

As a teacher and as a mom, I know that an expectation of strict adherence to content-heavy lessons is not a recipe for high student engagement. That’s why I mix it up a bit, in ways both small and big.

For a unit on poetry, for example, I encouraged students to imagine that they were poets, and they read their work with different voices and faux accents. For a science unit about anatomy, the students donned white lab coats and pretended to be doctors. When we studied the Middle Ages, we built a LEGO Castle and later used it as a reference when we worked on informative writing about castle components. It was a great visual to accompany the text we were reading.

No one – neither teachers nor students – tends to respond well when something is forced on them, and the state has implemented this part of the LEARNS Act in a way that gives districts choice. The Arkansas Department of Education provided a list of high-quality curricula, and districts could select from it. To its credit, my school district empowered teachers to help inform our choice. I had the privilege to serve on that group and help make our decision about a new math curriculum.

Curricula costs money, of course, but research shows that new materials are a more cost-effective strategy that saves teachers time and leads to greater job retention. A Gallup-Walton Family Foundation study released this fall found that one in four U.S. teachers lack the basic materials or staffing support they need to do their jobs effectively. Notably, the report found that “teachers who say they have adequate resources are significantly more likely to report satisfaction with their workplace (77%) than those who do not (44%).” This is vitally important at a time of widespread teacher shortages, and with more than half of current teachers saying they would not advise a young person starting out today to become a teacher.

Sure, there are resources online. The materials on Teachers Pay Teachers have been downloaded by teachers more than 1 billion times. And yes, AI can help. That same Gallup survey found 60% of K-12 teachers are already using AI, and teaching preparation and lesson planning are the most common uses. But these are piecemeal approaches, not part of a coherent strategy that builds on students’ prior knowledge and leads to the next skill that students will build.

In other words, high-quality instructional materials might not be the most scintillating topic, but they’re absolutely critical for teachers and students getting the support they need to reach their highest potential.

Editor’s note: Kimberly Herdes, recently selected to participate in the Arkansas Excellence in Teaching Fellowship Program, is a fourth-grade teacher at Willowbrook Elementary School in the Bentonville School District. The opinions expressed are those of the author.