Peter Occil

Suggestions for Instructional Materials

These are suggestions to improve core and supplemental instructional materials, for all school subjects, used in U.S. schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade. ¹

1. Instructional materials should be open educational resources (OER) that anyone can access and use free, at least for noncommercial purposes (for example, CC-BY-NC-SA or Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). There should be a GitHub or GitLab repository containing the source code of the materials. ²

2. Instructional materials should:

   • Devote most time to instruction that is interactive (teacher and students take turns), where the teacher explains and models concepts and procedures in small steps before getting students to apply those concepts and procedures. ³
   • Give review questions in class, with low or no stakes, at least once a week using the theory of spaced and interleaved retrieval practice (for example, a quiz of randomly arranged questions from last lesson, last week, last unit, and course-so-far).
   • Get every student participating in the lessons as frequently as possible, such as by answering in unison either orally or with mini-whiteboards.
   • Encourage teachers to get every student attending to the lessons, such as by arranging desks in rows facing the teacher, reducing noise and classroom decoration, and banning mobile phone use.
   • Require as little preparation time as possible.
3. Instructional materials should be knowledge-rich. In Language Arts, they should also follow the criteria given in the Knowledge Matters Campaign’s review tool.

4. There is guidance for:

   • Content that could form part of a knowledge-rich curriculum up to eighth grade.
   • Improving cultural responsiveness in Literacy instructional materials.
   • Offering numerous options to do beyond-grade-level content and exercises for willing and ready students, as long as these options are always presented to all students ⁴.
   • Instructional practices and course content for Mathematics; also see Merlo 2024.
   • Structuring lessons in History and other aspects of Social Studies using the Four-Question Method.
   • Structuring lessons in U.S. Civics using the questions in the civics portion of the naturalization test given by the U.S. government, or using such questions for retrieval practice.
   • Increasing rigor and quality of Latino American content and black American content in U.S. History instructional materials.
   • Devoting at least 45 minutes daily to Social Studies instruction up to fifth grade.
   • Devoting at least as much daily time as other content subjects to Science instruction up to fifth grade.

5. Instructional materials in Language Arts:

   • Should teach synonyms for new words to be learned and for other words and phrases prone to overuse.
   • In sixth grade and up, should include copious lessons on grammatical analysis and knowledge of English syntax, as well as concrete guidance to help students avoid, in their writing, overused or imprecise words and phrases, both within and across writings ⁵; redundant or unnecessary language not serving an expressive purpose; and ambiguous language.
   • Should feature, as works that the whole class reads in their entirety, prose novels with high literary and lexical complexity for the grade level (such as the complexity seen in the Harry Potter series) and knowledge-building informational prose books with the same complexity.

Suggestion number 5, in particular, is intended to address observations that our language may be getting poorer by the year, in terms of everyday vocabulary and linguistic variety (see, for example, Emilio Bernal’s “Good usage prevents abusage”). ⁵

License

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Endnotes

1. Additional suggestions to improve education, which instructional materials could choose to address, are as follows:
   (1) Encouraging caregivers to keep mobile phones and social media away from their children, especially if the caregivers themselves use social media for 1 hour or more daily.
   (2) A playlist of made-for-kids videos relating to topics in the Core Knowledge Foundation’s Core Knowledge Sequence (especially videos that invite viewers to answer questions on the topics they present), for each grade from kindergarten to eighth grade, intended for children to optionally watch at home outside instruction.
   (3) Teacher training in every school subject should cover the following topics as much as possible: (A) Cognitive load theory, working memory (and how severely limited it is), long-term memory, and effective study practices (for example, retrieval practice, cover/copy/compare, spaced repetition, interleaving); (B) the importance of devoting most time to interactive, turn-taking instruction where the teacher explains and models concepts and procedures in small steps before getting students to apply those concepts and procedures (examples: Barak Rosenshine’s principles or Engelmann’s Direct Instruction) and of not giving hands-on/”inquiry”/discovery activities until students have mastered the necessary background knowledge and skills; (C) the importance of eliminating distractions to learning such as classroom noise, classroom overdecoration, and mobile phones during school days; (D) the importance of having a knowledge-rich curriculum (see suggestion 3 in the body of this page) and of teaching and using academic vocabulary (for example, Coxhead’s Academic Word List); (E) modeling good student behavior and setting consequences for misbehavior; (F) practical ways to implement topics A to E, earlier in this list, in teachers’ day-to-day work, along with instructional coaching; (G) research references on topics A to F.
   (4) For Literacy, a free and open-source English grammar reference book designed for middle school and secondary students.
   (5) The recognition that Social Studies encompasses history, geography (natural and human), culture, civics, and economics and instruction in Social Studies should be knowledge-rich and lay an accent on the country and locality where the instruction takes place. ↩

2. This suggestion may make it easier for the general public to view, edit, give feedback on, and suggest changes to the instructional materials for various reasons, including: To reduce cognitive load on students and teachers (without reducing rigor); to improve historical accuracy and cultural responsiveness; to correct errors; to best take advantage of research on how people learn (such as retrieval practice and interleaving of topics); to keep the materials up to date with scientific, technological, and historical scholarship; and to reduce preparation time for teachers. ↩

3. Greg Ashman’s definition of explicit instruction; Groshell’s Just Tell Them (see summary by Helen Reynolds). Similar instructional advice is also found in Barak Rosenshine’s principles of instruction (Amer. Educator, spring 2012), Teach FAST (Tavernetti), and Direct Instruction: A Practitioner’s Handbook (Kurt Engelmann). Direct Instruction lessons typically involve frequent rounds of teachers’ asking questions and students’ answering them in unison, with many rounds being repeated “until firm”. ↩

4. One example, similar to the approach found in Illustrative Mathematics, is the presence in student workbooks of “Are you ready for more?” followed by a challenging exercise. Another example is a relatively short unit on basic calculus concepts such as limits and continuous functions at the end of Algebra 2, such as the last unit of Fishtank Learning’s Algebra 2 course. ↩

5. A list of some of the overused and discouraged words is given elsewhere. The works of Emilio Bernal Labrada, Theodore Bernstein, Mario Pei, Bill Bryson, and Richard Lederer, among others, provide guidance on good English usage. ↩ ↩²

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