Why high-quality instructional materials are only the beginning of effective literacy instruction

Written by: Dr. emily taubken

Our last blog introduced Jordan, who combined deep literacy content knowledge with ongoing instructional coaching to help her students leave kindergarten reading on grade level by making the instructional decisions that no curriculum, no matter how well designed, can make on its own.

Every great teacher deserves strong instructional materials. While her curriculum defines where she is heading, Jordan is the expert in the driver’s seat, ensuring every student can get there. Jordan’s success doesn’t come simply from following the structures provided in her curriculum. It comes from knowing when—and how—to work within and beyond them.

Even with a strong curriculum, Jordan relies on her literacy expertise and the coherent instructional systems in her school to translate a well-designed curriculum into responsive, high-quality classroom instruction, driving strong literacy outcomes for her students.

High-Quality Curriculum Still Requires Great Teaching

What happens when an excellent curriculum meets the realities of actual students in real classrooms in our city?

High-quality instructional materials matter. They provide coherence, research-aligned instructional routines, and a strong foundation for classroom instruction. Schools should absolutely invest in HQIM.  It’s our first line of defense for strong Tier 1 instruction.

But no curriculum can fully anticipate the diversity of learners in today’s classrooms. Every lesson requires teachers to answer questions the curriculum cannot answer. Are students ready to move on? Has automaticity developed enough to support connected text? Which students need another opportunity to practice? Is today’s Tier 2 lesson reinforcing or competing with core instruction? These teacher-led decisions determine whether curriculum materials become effective instruction with demonstrated impact. This is where teacher expertise really matters. Curriculum tells teachers what to teach. Teachers determine how students will learn it.

Let’s take a look into veteran teacher Maura Mitchell’s first-grade classroom. During one coaching conversation, Maura shared that many of her students were consistently not automatic enough with decodable readers.

Rather than replacing the lesson or abandoning the curriculum, she made one focused adjustment. Before students opened the decodable reader, they practiced words, then phrases, then sentences built around the target pattern. With her literacy coach’s support, she adjusted her daily instructional routine by adding spiral review and building fluency before asking students to apply the skill in the decodable reader.

Curricular Choices Across a System: Coherence Across the School is as Important as Curriculum Quality

Do the fullness of students’ literacy experiences work together or compete against each other?

Teacher expertise is essential, but it is only one part of a student’s literacy experience. Curriculum doesn’t exist in isolation. Students receive literacy instruction across multiple settings, including Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, SPED, ESL, in-school and after-school tutoring, among others.

These systems should reinforce one another, but often they don’t. One of the most common challenges is not poor curriculum selection (though this certainly can happen). It’s that there are competing curricula within the limited time and structures of a school day.

Classroom teachers are teaching one sequence. Interventionists are teaching another. Tutors are using something different altogether.

Everyone is working incredibly hard. Everyone has good intentions and brings expertise to the table. But students experience literacy as disconnected pieces instead of one coherent instructional experience.

Ultimately, literacy improvement is often a question of how schools use instructional time. Every unnecessary transition, every misaligned intervention block, every missed opportunity to reinforce a skill is time students cannot get back. The strongest schools are intentional about making every minute and every student learning experience count towards one aligned goal for their specific community of learners.

Conclusion

The state of Tennessee and local education agencies in Memphis have made tremendous progress in improving access to high-quality instructional materials. That matters, and we should celebrate it.

But curriculum adoption was never intended to be the end of the work.

Every day, teachers across Memphis make hundreds of instructional decisions that no curriculum can make for them. Those decisions—grounded in literacy expertise, informed by student data, and supported by coherent school systems—are what ultimately transform strong materials into strong outcomes and real lived experiences of students in classrooms.

Curriculum matters. Teacher expertise matters. Ongoing systems of support matter. To accelerate progress in literacy, we have to recognize that these three are inseparable.

What Can You Do This Year to Accelerate Progress in Literacy? 

• If you are a classroom teacher, find ways to develop your literacy content knowledge so you can leverage data-based instructional decisions within your high-quality instructional materials (HQIM).

• If you are a district leader, adopt high-quality instructional materials and create coherent literacy systems across Tiers 1, 2, and 3. Implementation of HQIM is as important as the selection itself.

• If you are a school leader, protect instructional time and build structures that help teachers use student data to make responsive adjustments within the provided HQIM. Leverage curriculum-based professional learning and aligned literacy coaching systems.

• If you are a policymaker: Acknowledging that curriculum quality alone is insufficient to accelerate student outcomes, investments should support both strong instructional materials and the conditions that enable teachers to use them effectively.

• If you are in the literacy field: We’ve made a lot of progress asking “Which curriculum?” That was the right first step, and excellent resources continue to emerge to fill gaps in the field. Now, we need to spend more time on implementation research asking, “How do we help teachers maximize the impact of the high-quality curriculum they have?”