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CARE about the Story! A Framework for Supplementing your Curriculum

Updated: Jan 13

Introduction

As educators, we swim in a vast ocean of educational resources designed to supplement the core curricula we are required to teach each year, but it can be difficult to select what would best maximize learning. Even the most well-developed, research-grounded resources can fail to produce quality learning if they don’t integrate well with the scope and sequence of what we’re already teaching!


So, how do we choose?


Think of the course you’re teaching as a story: Course learning objectives are the themes, units are major plot points, and lessons are scenes. You’re the author, and the curricular resources you use become the text of your story.  Now, most teachers do not get to choose the core curriculum, but many have the ability to use supplementary resources to bolster understanding and promote mastery of content.


If you want your story to make sense to your readers (the students), you have to CARE about how your supplements enhance your story!


We propose the CARE framework as a tool to help you plan supplementary lessons, and it consists of the following four elements:

  • Connect

  • Attract

  • Reinforce

  • Elaborate


Let’s unpack each component of the CARE framework:


Connect

Keeping with our storytelling metaphor, every scene (lesson) in the story (your course) should be significant, moving the plot from the introduction to its conclusion while contributing to the themes (your course objectives). Your supplementary resources and associated activities (hereafter supplementary lessons) should function as callbacks and foreshadowing, helping the reader make connections between the past, present, and/or future. In other words:


Supplementary lessons should guide students to connect previous learning to future learning through present learning.

In practice, our supplements should do the following:

  • Call back to key concepts and/or vocabulary students previously learned within the context of what they’re currently learning. Students integrate past lessons or units with current lessons and units, ideally retrieving previous information as they process new information (see the Reinforce section below).

  • Foreshadow upcoming key concepts and/or vocabulary within the context of what students are currently learning. We prime students for future learning through current learning.


Assuming that your core curriculum establishes foundational concepts at the beginning of the course, connecting your curriculum with supplementary learning can help students organically retrieve and build upon those foundational concepts, strengthening their internalization of those concepts throughout the course.


Here are some examples:

  • In math, selecting resources that establish multiplication as adding groups of a number. This (presumably) calls back to their previously learned concept of addition while establishing the concept of manipulating groups of a number. This will be foundational knowledge for an upcoming unit on division.

  • In ELA, you might use a brief informational text about static and dynamic characters between two stories in a unit on dystopian fiction, calling back to characters in the first story and identifying them as static and dynamic while setting up a more in-depth analysis of character development techniques in an upcoming story.


Attract

Who stays engaged in a boring story? Two components of learning are attention (Dehaene, 2020; Jha, 2021) and active engagement (Dehaene, 2020). If we want students to learn, we must attract our students’ attention and draw them in to engage with the content. How can we do this?


Let’s think of our lessons as consisting of a set of three components: the content, our delivery, and activities. The content itself may or may not inherently intrigue our students; students (and all people for that matter) are naturally interested in different things! However, attracting our students to content is much more about HOW we deliver the content and have them interact with it.


With that in mind, here are some things you could do that may increase student engagement:

  • Sell it! Use anticipatory questioning and activities to instill a sense of curiosity in your students.

  • Develop your communication skills! The way you introduce your content and deliver explicit instruction will either contribute to or detract from students’ attention. We’re inspired by the work of Vinh Giang, a clinician on effective communication. Check him out here!

  • Structure your lesson with tasks that require them to think! (Willingham, 2009).

  • Develop or select gamified supplementary learning experiences (Nacional, 2024).

  • Incorporate cooperative learning strategies. Amanda and I found Kagan cooperative learning to be useful in our classrooms, which together included elementary, middle, and high school students!


Reinforce

As the author, you want to be sure that the main ideas in your story have enough support to be apparent to the reader! Supplementary lessons should reinforce concepts, skills, and vocabulary students have learned throughout the year. Retrieval practice is important for long-term retention of information (Agarwal & Bain, 2019; Brown et al., 2014), and we can utilize supplementary lessons to facilitate an organic form of retrieval practice.


We teachers generally select rather than create texts, and it is rare to find texts that incorporate all of the concepts, skills, and vocabulary from your anchor texts. Careful planning can address this: You could select multiple short texts to reinforce subsets of core content. However, if you’re limited to just one supplementary text in a given unit, it is best to select one that reinforces big ideas, themes, and/or foundational concepts from the current unit. Then, reinforce other concepts, skills, and vocabulary through learning activities.


Elaborate

Great writers unfold their stories within a thoroughly developed setting. How vast was our sense of Martin’s Westeros, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and Rowling’s Hogwarts? We readers became immersed in the setting and were aware of how the plot existed within that context.


In the same way, supplementary lessons should elaborate on core curriculum content, helping students understand the broader contexts in which that content exists and thus deepening their sense of the real-world relevance of the knowledge. There are several avenues for elaboration, including: introducing new, divergent, nuanced, or expanded perspectives on unit concepts / themes; exploring a unit theme in a different context; and having students apply concepts to solve a real-world problem or to conduct case analysis.


Extending the CARE Framework

The CARE framework is a tool to help increase curricular coherence, facilitate deep and meaningful learning, and assist learners with storing knowledge in long-term memory. Though we focused on its application to supplementary lessons within the context of a single-subject course, the framework could be used in conjunction with backward design to create any extended learning experience! Here are two examples:

  • If you’re an all-subjects teacher, you can broaden your implementation of the CARE framework to include other subjects. This can be a great way to solve the seemingly ubiquitous issue of ensuring science and social studies instruction in the elementary classroom while also blurring the lines between subjects to provide students with a more holistic learning experience.

  • If you’re in charge of professional learning for your staff, you could use the CARE framework to help you increase the conceptual coherence of your professional learning schedule.


The next time you’re planning, try it out!  Let us know how it’s working for you, and if you’d like some guidance, please feel free to reach out to me!

 

Want to take the CARE framework even further? Join us in our upcoming webinar to learn about how to use the CARE framework and AI to generate custom texts designed to meet the specific needs of your students!

 

References:

Agarwal, P. K., & Bain, P. M. (2019). Powerful teaching: Unleash the science of learning. Jossey-Bass.


Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. The Belknap Press.


Dehaene, S. (2020). How we learn: Why brains learn better than any machine… for now. Viking.


Jha, A. P. (2022). Peak mind. HarperOne.


Nacional, R. (2024). Gamifying education: Enhancing student engagement and motivation. Puissant, 5, 716-729.


Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. Jossey-Bass.


 
 
 

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