Tennessee hasn’t just trained teachers, we’ve given them the right tools: curriculum.
Teacher training has become increasingly-popular as a means to bring the Science of Reading into classrooms, for good reason. Tennessee didn’t forget this; our Reading360 initiative trained 30,000 Tennessee teachers over the last two summers, and our teachers have raved about the experience.
However, training isn’t enough. If you simply tell teachers what needs to change without giving them the tools to do it, you become that coach that yells, “Run” or “Tackle” on the sidelines, without providing the plays and the playbook required for success.
By 2019, the “Best for All” initiative ensured that all districts now use high-quality ELA curriculum. This has been a game-changer. Curriculum enables the changes we’ve asked teachers to make to be tangible and feasible. It is the proverbial playbook.
This is the cornerstone of our improvement, and the backbone for everything else that follows.