Your Curriculum Companion: The Essential Guide to Teaching the EL Education K-5 Language Arts Curriculum

This essential guide to the EL Education K-5 Language Arts Curriculum is one part roadmap to the curriculum, one part orientation to its instructional practices, and one part coach-to answer your questions, relieve your stress, and put you and your students on the path to success.

Your Curriculum Companion explores the foundations of the curriculum, including the principles and research it was built on and the instructional practices that make it unique. The book is designed to help you "look under the hood" at practices embedded throughout the curriculum so that you can sharpen your instruction, support students to be leaders of their own learning, and make well-informed changes necessary to best meet your students' needs.

Key features of Your Curriculum Companion include:

Libby Woodfin is the director of publications for EL Education. Libby started her career as a fifth‐ and sixth‐grade teacher at the original lab school for the Responsive Classroom in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and went on to become a counselor at a large comprehensive high school. Libby started with EL Education in 2007 while completing graduate work at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Education Policy and Management. Throughout her career, Libby has written articles, blogs, chapters, and books about important issues in education. Her previous books include Management in the Active Classroom; Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools through Student-Engaged Assessment; Learning That Lasts: Challenging, Engaging, and Empowering Students with Deeper Instruction; Transformational Literacy: Making the Common Core Shift with Work That Matters; and Familiar Ground: Traditions That Build School Community.

Suzanne Nathan Plaut, former director of curriculum design for EL Education, is now the managing director of program for EL Education. She previously served as the vice president of education at the Public Education & Business Coalition in Denver, Colorado, overseeing professional development, evaluation, and publications. Suzanne holds a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she served on the editorial board for the Harvard Educational Review. Her previous books include Transformational Literacy: Making the Common Core Shift with Work That Matters and The Right to Literacy in Secondary Schools. She has also been published in EdWeek. Plaut worked as a literacy coach and director of literacy in several Boston public schools and taught high school English in Colorado and New Zealand. She lives in Lafayette, Colorado with her husband and two daughters who were fortunate to attend an EL Education elementary school.