What happens between students’ access to grade-level content and their learning from it?
I keep coming back to a question as I visit classrooms, talk with school leaders and teachers, and think about the work we are asking schools to do.
This question has grown out of my work supporting the implementation of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) in very different school settings. The contexts are not the same, and neither are the challenges. Yet I am noticing some similar tensions. I see teachers working hard to implement the adopted materials as intended. The resources are there. Lessons follow the sequence. Questions are asked, activities are completed, and instruction moves forward. From the perspective of whether the lesson was delivered as planned, the implementation can look strong.
But sometimes, the student results tell a different story.
I am not raising this question to challenge the value of high-quality instructional materials. I believe all students deserve access to strong, grade-level instruction, regardless of the classroom or school they attend, and HQIM helps us get there. Rather, I am wondering whether we are paying enough attention to what happens between the materials we provide, the instruction students experience, and the learning that results. Because those things are connected, but they are not necessarily the same.
We have made progress. Now, how do we go deeper?
The commitment to high-quality instructional materials is an important step forward. It gives teachers a foundation for providing students with access to rigorous, grade-level content. It also helps establish a shared understanding of what students should know and be able to do. That matters.
But having access to the content does not automatically mean students understand it. A student can read a challenging text without making meaning of it. A student can complete a math problem without understanding the reasoning behind the solution. The content matters. The materials matter. And so does what happens when a teacher puts those materials in front of students.
I see this as an opportunity to deepen the work, not pull back from it. As EdReports has emphasized, strong instructional materials need to be supported by a clear instructional vision, professional learning, and thoughtful implementation.[1]. We have invested in getting strong materials into classrooms. Now we need to keep asking what it takes for those materials to produce the learning we intended for all students.
Do we understand the lesson, or just the lesson sequence?
One question I keep revisiting is how deeply teachers understand the design of the lessons they are teaching. And when did they have time to learn. Knowing what comes next is not the same as knowing why it comes next. Why does the lesson begin with a problem instead of an explanation? Why are students asked to compare two representations? What is the discussion supposed to help them understand? Where is the real thinking in the task? These are the kinds of questions I want us to make time for in collaborative planning.
Are we preparing teachers to move through a lesson, or are we helping them understand its purpose well enough to make sound instructional decisions along the way?
That distinction becomes especially important when students do not respond as expected. A teacher who understands the intended learning can make a more informed decision about whether to ask another question, model a concept, provide additional practice, or give students more time to work through the thinking. The goal is not to move away from the materials. It is to understand them well enough to use them with purpose.
As an instructional leader, I think this is an important part of our responsibility. We cannot simply ask teachers to implement materials well. We have to help them develop the knowledge and judgment required to do it well.
Connecting the instructional messages we give teachers
My professional learning through reading, webinars, and conferences has pushed my thinking even further. Imagine being a teacher who has been told…
Anita Archer’s work on explicit instruction emphasizes clear explanations and modeling, guided practice, frequent opportunities for students to respond, corrective feedback, and monitoring of independent practice.[2]
The gradual release of responsibility framework gives us another way to think about instruction: how teachers model and guide learning while gradually transferring more responsibility to students.[3][4]
Zaretta Hammond’s Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power challenges us to think about how students develop the capacity to become independent learners and how our instructional decisions either build or limit that capacity.[5]
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) encourages educators to anticipate learner variability and design instruction that provides meaningful access to learning from the beginning. It asks us to consider how students engage with content, make sense of it, and demonstrate their understanding.[8]
Now consider these ideas alongside the demands of our instructional materials.
I find myself thinking less about which approach we should choose and more about how we help teachers connect them. When does a student need explicit modeling? When might too much modeling take away the thinking the task was designed to develop? When is struggle productive, and when has a student simply become stuck? When does a scaffold provide access, and when does it allow a student to finish an assignment without really understanding the content? These are not simple questions, and I do not think they have one-size-fits-all answers. But they are questions worth exploring together.
Perhaps this is what we are missing between the materials and the learning: the judgment teaching requires. Hattie’s focus on impact brings us back to the question that should anchor these conversations—not simply whether teachers used the materials or followed an instructional approach, but what students learned and how we know. If we want teachers to make thoughtful decisions about when to model, when to scaffold, and when to step back, instructional leaders have a responsibility to create the conditions for that thinking. Have we made enough room for teachers to examine student learning, wrestle with these questions, and strengthen their judgment—or have we been clearer about what we expect them to use than how we support them in deciding what students need?
Are we measuring a lesson’s completion or a student’s learning?
This is where I find myself thinking about the difference between a culture of compliance and a culture of learning. Hammond’s work challenges us to consider whether our classrooms are developing students’ capacity to think and learn independently or primarily teaching them to follow directions and meet expectations.[5][6]
A classroom can be orderly. Students can complete the assigned work. The teacher can follow the lesson as written. And we can still have important questions about what students actually understand. I wonder whether, in our efforts to maintain pacing and consistency, we sometimes give more attention to whether the lesson is moving forward than to whether learning is happening.
I want to be careful here. Teachers are working within expectations, pacing guides, assessment demands, and the realities of their classrooms. The answer is not to place another burden on teachers or suggest that they simply need to do more. The question is what we, as instructional leaders, are asking teachers to prioritize and how we are supporting them in doing it.
When students demonstrate confusion, do teachers feel prepared to respond? Do our coaching conversations help them identify what the student understands and what remains unclear? Are we giving teachers permission and support to respond to student thinking while maintaining the rigor and purpose of the lesson? We need to be clear that pacing matters, and learning matters more. The goal is not to abandon the plan every time a student struggles. It is to help teachers recognize when a responsive instructional decision is necessary to accomplish the very purpose of the plan.
Fidelity matters. But what does it really mean?
And then there is the F-word…FIEDLITY…Along my journey I learned that a better approach to that concept is integrity.
The Carnegie Foundation has explored the distinction between rigid fidelity and implementation integrity [7]. They make the distinction between fidelity and integrity of implementation gives me another way to think about this work. We, as educators, need to preserve what matters most in the materials while recognizing that thoughtful teaching requires decisions based on what students need to learn. As instructional leaders and coaches, are we helping teachers understand the purpose behind the lessons well enough to make those decisions, or are we placing more emphasis on following the plan? I wonder if part of what we are missing between the materials and the learning is a deeper understanding of the teaching that brings the materials to life.
I am not dismissing fidelity to high-quality instructional materials. Consistency matters, particularly when we are working to ensure that all students have access to grade-level content within and across grade bands. Teachers should not have to create an entirely different curriculum for every classroom. Student should not have to grapple with a different way to learn every year.
But I do think we need to be thoughtful about how we define successful implementation. If fidelity becomes primarily about completing every activity and asking every question, or moving through every lesson at the designated pace, we risk confusing adherence to the plan with accomplishment of its purpose. What happens when a teacher completes the lesson exactly as written, but students have not developed the intended understanding? What happens when a teacher makes a thoughtful adjustment that preserves the rigor of the task and helps students get there? Should we evaluate those two experiences in the same way?
We need teachers to understand the essential learning within a lesson, not simply the steps required to deliver it. We need them to recognize which parts of the lesson are critical to the intended learning and how to respond when students need something different to reach that learning.
This requires knowledge of the materials, knowledge of the content, knowledge of students, and professional judgment. It also requires us, as leaders and coaches, to help teachers develop that judgment rather than leave them to figure it out on their own.
A reason to approach this work with humility and reflection
There is a historical concern behind some of the questions I am asking.
In education, we have a tendency to become deeply invested in an instructional direction. We develop the language, establish the expectations, train our teachers, and build systems around the approach. Sometimes, as that investment grows, it becomes harder to step back and ask whether our assumptions are holding up.
I think about earlier commitments to the Balanced Literacy model, and whether we remained sufficiently open to evidence that challenged the new model in light of what Science of Reading had already revealed about reading instruction. I am not equating HQIM with those approaches, nor am I suggesting that our current investment is a mistake. I am raising the comparison because I believe it gives us a reason to remain humble and reflective.
Can we be committed to an instructional approach and still ask difficult questions about how it is working? Can we look honestly at student outcomes without treating every concern as resistance to the work? Can we be willing to adjust our thinking when the evidence tells us there is more to understand? These questions matter in literacy, in mathematics, science—across content areas.
An instructional approach can be grounded in strong research and still require thoughtful implementation, ongoing examination, and professional learning. Supporting the direction we have chosen should not mean that we stop asking questions about the results.
In fact, I would argue that our commitment to the work should make us more willing to ask them. Let student learning guide our next questions Where student outcomes do not reflect the promise of the materials, I want us to become more curious, not more certain.
If overall results improve but some students are not making the progress we expect, what should we examine? What does student work tell us? What do students say when asked to explain their thinking? How do teachers respond when students demonstrate partial understanding? What can students do independently after the lesson is over? These questions can help us move beyond broad conclusions about whether a teacher is implementing the materials correctly.
Assessment data can help us identify where to look. Classroom observations, student conversations, and student work can help us understand what is happening and what we need to learn next. This is where I see an important opportunity for instructional coaching and leadership.
Our role is not simply to check whether the lesson was delivered. It is to help teachers examine the relationship between their instructional decisions and student learning. It is to ask questions that deepen understanding, provide feedback that strengthens practice, and create opportunities for teachers to learn alongside one another.
We can do that without diminishing the work teachers are already doing. In fact, I believe that kind of professional dialogue respects the complexity of teaching and the expertise it requires.
The work in front of us
We have made an important commitment to ensuring that students have access to grade-level content and high-quality instructional materials. Now we have an opportunity to deepen our understanding of what it takes to turn that access into learning. I do not have answers to every question I am carrying into classrooms. But I believe these are questions worth asking, and I believe the answers will come from looking closely at instruction, listening to teachers, studying student work, and being willing to examine our own assumptions.
We do not have to choose between supporting HQIM and asking difficult questions about implementation. We do not have to choose between consistency and responsiveness. And we should not have to choose between honoring the work teachers are doing and acknowledging where that work can grow. Those things can coexist. As instructional leaders and coaches, we have a responsibility to help make that possible.
What happens between students’ access to grade-level content and their learning from it?
I hope we keep asking. I hope we keep looking closely. And I hope we remain willing to learn from what we find.
Sources for Further Reading
[1] EdReports. “Instructional Materials Evaluation Tool and Quality Criteria.” EdReports. https://www.edreports.org/
[2] Archer, Anita L., and Charles A. Hughes. Explicit Instruction: Effective and Efficient Teaching. New York: Guilford Press, 2011.
[3] Pearson, P. David, and Margaret C. Gallagher. “The Instruction of Reading Comprehension.” Contemporary Educational Psychology 8, no. 3 (1983): 317–344.
[4] Fisher, Douglas, and Nancy Frey. Better Learning Through Structured Teaching: A Framework for the Gradual Release of Responsibility. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2014.
[5] Hammond, Zaretta. Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2015.
[6] Hammond, Zaretta. “Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power.” Educational Leadership, 2019.
[7] Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. “Improvement Science and the Principles of Improvement.” Carnegie Foundation. https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/our-ideas/
[8] CAST. Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. Wakefield, MA: CAST, 2024. https://udlguidelines.cast.org/