Increasing the Cohesiveness of Curriculum and Instruction

Most English classrooms have a well-established set of "ground rules" (Durst, 1999) that give a sense of order and coherence to what takes place. These ground rules determine who talks and when, what kinds of arguments and evidence will be offered and accepted, what will count as doing well and doing poorly, participating or disrupting, being on task or being off task. The ground rules provide a set of stable expectations that provide students and teachers alike with a sense of comfort and security, of coherence in the day-to-day life of classrooms (Applebee, Burroughs & Stevens, 2000). The very stability of these ground rules, however, masks a surprising variability in what students actually learn to do in classrooms studying supposedly similar topics (Hillocks, 1999), as well as surprising discontinuities in the activities that take place within the classroom. In most English classrooms, the curriculum is a loose collection of separate activities (reading, writing, viewing, discussion) with little relationship to one another, and little continuity over time.

Yet findings from a wide variety of studies converge to suggest that such fragmentation works against effective literacy learning. In a series of studies of curricular coherence and continuity in elementary and secondary school classrooms, Applebee and his colleagues (1996; Applebee et al., 2000; Applebee, Burroughs, & Cruz, in press; Burroughs, 1999; Stevens, 1999) used the concept of "curricular conversation" to describe broad issues or topics that carried across units or semesters or even the full school year. (See Prawat, 1993, 1995, for a related argument in support of curriculum based on the exploration of a network of "big ideas.") Although most of the curricular conversations they studied were fragmented, they also found examples at all levels of curricular conversations that were cumulative and coherent across an entire school year. Such conversations led to increased student engagement with academic learning and to a deeper conceptual understanding of the topics under discussion – whether those topics focused on the notions of "genre" and "author" in second grade or of "clash of cultures" in a chronologically organized high school course in American literature. Conversely, in classrooms where the curricular structures worked against such cumulative curricular conversations, engagement fell and students and teachers alike struggled for a sense of progress and success. Such curricula were particularly prevalent in lower-track classrooms, where the lack of attention to extended curricular conversations ensured that the students in these classes became ever less able to participate in the kinds of learning experiences that their peers in other tracks were encountering (Stevens, 1999). Page (1991) and Nystrand and Gamoran (1997) have similarly documented the deadening effect of the lack of cohesiveness among lessons and activities in lower-track classrooms.

Other CELA researchers have also documented the importance of connectedness among activities at other levels of curriculum and instruction. Pressley and Allington, for example, conducted extensive case studies of curriculum and instruction in matched pairs of exemplary and more typical first-grade classrooms serving high proportions of students of poverty, in schools in five states (Pressley et al., 1998; Allington et al., in press). Among the features that distinguished the exemplary from the more typical classrooms in the same schools were connections at several levels: topical and thematic linking; intertextual references; linking between academic and personal experience; and direct instruction linked to larger meaning-making activities. Importantly, these classrooms were particularly successful in improving the performance of the lowest quartile students on a variety of standardized measures.

Langer (1999), studying middle and high school programs whose students were surpassing the performance of demographically similar peers on high stakes assessments, found that the more successful schools and teachers also emphasized connected learnings, making overt connections among knowledge, skills, and ideas across lessons, classes, and grades, and across in-school and out-of-school applications. In contrast, she found that in more typically performing schools, such connections were more often left implicit. An especially interesting set of findings concerned approaches to skills instruction. Langer and her research team found three types of approaches: separated (e.g., mini lessons focused on a particular skill, knowledge, or strategy), simulated (e.g., short activity in which the skill is applied, primarily for practice in the skill), and integrated (use of the skill within the embedded context of a large and purposeful activity (not primarily for skills practice). The difference between the higher performing and more typically performing schools was that teachers in the higher performing schools balanced all three approaches to skills instruction and emphasized the connections among them, whereas the other teachers chose one or another approach without emphasizing the connections between different contexts for learning. These findings echo Delpit’s (1995) argument that entry into the cultures of power require explicit teaching of the skills necessary for participation in that culture – skills that mainstream students may already have acquired without explicit teaching. Freedman et al. (1999) in their study of literacy instruction in multicultural urban classrooms similarly noted the importance of overt attention to skills instruction within a larger instructional program. Baumann and Ivey (1997) also found that enabling skills could be integrated effectively in a literature-based second grade reading program.

Nystrand, Gamoran, and Carbonaro (1998), in a study of more than 100 ninth-grade English and social studies classrooms, found that growth in writing achievement across the school year was positively related to the degree of coherence among classroom reading, writing, and discussion activities. The more closely these often separate activities were integrated with one another, the larger the growth in measured writing ability over the year. In another finding that is related to Langer’s discussion of skills instruction, they also found that growth in writing ability was associated with writing assignments that gave attention to the strategies and processes necessary to do well on the assignments. Guthrie and colleagues (Guthrie, Schafer, Wang, & Afflerbach, 1995), in a series of path analyses based on NAEP data on the reading achievement of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds, also emphasized the importance of connectedness between strategy instruction and larger meaning-making activities. Their analyses suggested that teachers who constructed a strong integrating framework incorporating cognitive strategy learning and discussion around what was being read led to increases in the amount and breadth of student reading.

There are two important caveats that surface in the research on connectedness. One concerns the importance of making connections explicit to students: Otherwise they may experience a "connected" activity as a fragmented one, failing to understand its purpose or its relationships to other experiences (Marshall, 1984; Langer, 1999). Second, the connections must be "authentic" in the sense of contributing to the continuity of discussion or performance. Connections that are artificially imposed can frustrate conversation, as has been the case, for example, in some of the cross-disciplinary classrooms in CELA studies (Applebee et al., in press).

With these caveats, these studies suggest that increasing the cohesiveness of both curriculum and instruction is an important component of instructional development that focuses on improving student achievement.

A comprehensive reference list is available.