Learning List Blog

Building a culture of standards alignment ensures every student has consistent opportunities to succeed. Research from RAND and McKinsey shows that adopting aligned materials is not enough—lasting improvement comes from making standards the foundation of all instructional decisions. Discover four practical steps leaders can take to set the table for a successful school year.

In 5 Tips for Planning an Effective K-12 Curriculum Review and Adoption Process, we discussed the decisions you need to make when planning an instructional materials adoption process. For an adoption to be successful, the selection committee must have sufficient guidance and time to review materials effectively. With so many materials on the market, narrowing the list of materials for the selection committee to review is a critical next step in any adoption process. This blog

Over the years, Learning List has assisted hundreds of districts in planning and running K-12 curriculum adoptions. As a result, we have observed many "what to do's" and "what not to do's." One of the critical "to-do's" is to plan the process. A well-planned, thorough process is far more likely to lead to a successful outcome. Some important decision points to consider as you plan an K-12 curriculum adoption process include: (1) Articulate the need to adopt a new K-12 cu

The end of the school year and the impending ESSER cliff are two forces compelling districts to review their K-12 curriculum materials to determine which instructional resources to keep and which to discard. If you are involved in making those decisions in your district, the first question you are likely asking is, "Which materials are teachers using?" Several companies, including Canvas, Day 180, and Lightspeed Systems, can help you track the usage of digital materials. A s

If you care about instructional materials, you need to know about legislation that is sailing through the Texas legislature: House Bill 1605 (Buckley) and its identical companion Senate Bill 2565 (Creighton). The legislation would implement significant changes in how instructional materials are selected and used in Texas classrooms. Why should you care? California, Texas, New York, and Florida have long been bellwether states in the K-12 publishing market. Additionally, Te

Purchasing instructional materials is the single largest annual purchase a school district typically makes. To put it in context: school districts spend more on instructional materials annually than you paid for your house. A purchase that large certainly merits careful due diligence. Before we purchase a house, we engage a realtor and spend weeks even months visiting multiple houses on the market. We compare the features of each house against our mental list of "must haves"

If you have perceived an increase in state control over the adoption of instructional materials, you are not alone. This blog explains the reason for the shift away from districts' control over the selection and use of instructional materials. In a recent EdWeek article, education leaders who shaped the standards movement argue “that states should be doing more ‘quality control’ when it comes to instructional materials—signaling which are high-quality and incentivizing and

Over the last three years, yours, like most districts, likely scrambled to meet students’ needs in lots of new ways. The district may have purchased new materials to support at-home learning. Teachers may have subscribed to online resources individually.  And, since students returned to school, intervention, and tutoring resources have likely been purchased. When you analyze the current list of materials in your district, do you have an abundance of instructional materials?

When purchasing supplemental materials, how much weight should you give to the alignment percentage? In this blog, we explore the differences between comprehensive and supplemental materials when it comes to assessing alignment. Educators in every district are working hard this year to close students' Covid-19-related learning gaps. Consequently, many campuses and districts are selecting supplemental materials. This blog discusses important differences between supplemental a

Like Consumer Reports®, Learning List is a private company, independent from publishers and free from political influence. States and other review entities rate and rank materials with the goal of identifying "the best" materials for districts to use. We do not. We calculate an alignment percentage, but we do not rank or rate the materials we review. We provide our subscribing districts with access to easy-to-read, evidence-based reviews of thousands of widely-used PreK-12 in

In the first two blogs in this series, we offered guidance for planning an instructional materials adoption and customizing a rubric to reflect your district's priorities. Generally, districts would use that information when selecting core materials. Supplemental materials are most commonly selected at the campus level, and campus leaders typically rely on word of mouth (Wang et. al., 2019) when it comes to selecting new instructional materials.

This is the second blog in the series about effective strategies for reviewing and selecting instructional materials. Our first blog discussed planning a successful adoption, which included distributing and aggregating the results of a needs assessment. Now it is time to develop a rubric for the adoption. Developing a rubric from scratch can be daunting. More often, educators look for existing rubrics to customize. This blog provides guidance for creating or customizing a rub

If your district or campus will be adopting new materials this year, someone in your campus or district is probably starting to plan the adoption process. Over the last decade, Learning List has assisted hundreds of districts, both formally and informally, with instructional materials adoptions. Based on research regarding selecting and implementing high-quality instructional materials and our own observations of local adoption processes, we offer a four-part blog series on e

The Learning List is a free, public directory of more than 10,000 K-12 instructional materials (and counting!) for the courses districts offer. We aggregated titles from state and district adoption lists, our database of reviewed materials, and publishers' catalogs. The titles are organized by subject, course, and grade band. Within each grade band, the materials we have reviewed are listed first; the remaining materials are listed in alphabetical order.

What is the principal's role in selecting and implementing materials? The RAND Corporation's study titled, School Leader's Role in Selecting and Supporting Teachers' Use of Instructional Materials, answers that question. The study explored how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted school leaders' perception of materials' quality, as well as their role in selecting and implementing instructional materials. The study was based on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 39

Whether you are reviewing the alignment of a material before you purchase it or are planning instruction with a material you already own, the publisher's correlation can be an invaluable resource. The correlation identifies which standards the material has attempted to address and directs teachers to specific content in the material that addresses those standards.

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