The History Matters Campaign is a project of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Imagine you are back in the 11th grade—but today, in 2026. You’ve probably had a smartphone since middle school, and you might not be in the habit of picking up a book. You’re comfortable with technology and cautiously optimistic about AI, even though many of the adults in your life seem worried about it. In fact, there’s almost a 50 percent chance that you’ve not only used AI in your schoolwork, but for fun and entertainment too.
Then you walk into English class, and your teacher begins to read aloud the opening pages of Klara and the Sun. You meet Klara, a robot and “Artificial Friend” who watches the world from a shop window, waiting for a human customer to bring her home. Then a pause, and the class reads “The Real AI Nightmare,” an op-ed that asks the main question of this new English unit: Is AI the danger, or are we? You write your first stance of the year, making sure to use the kind of descriptive language and evidence your teacher discussed in class.
So begins Unit 1 of the Novel High School ELA (9–12) curriculum published by Novel Education Partners. I recently walked in both the teacher’s and students’ shoes as part of a detailed review of the curriculum using the new Knowledge Matters High School Review Tool. The tool was designed to give educators, school leaders, and curriculum developers a clearer and more rigorous lens for designing and evaluating high school curriculum.
Our review examined text selection and complexity, instructional design, academic discourse practices, writing instruction, and support for diverse learners, producing a detailed picture of how the curriculum functions in practice rather than just on paper. The goal was to assess not only whether the curriculum checks the right boxes, but how its components work together to build genuine literacy and content knowledge over time. So what did we learn?
Building Knowledge, Text by Text
As students dive into Klara and the Sun, they explore a world quietly split between families who pursue mysterious genetic “lifting” procedures for their children and those who can’t afford them. They write and discuss their way through the novel daily—unpacking whether robots designed to be human companions can befriend one another, and how irony animates scenes of toxic smoke and environmental degradation narrated by solar-powered characters. Along the way, they spend a day on President John F. Kennedy’s “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech from 1962, which rallied U.S. support to win the Space Race. The goal: sharpen your eye for rhetoric before you’re back inside the story.
Step by step, students are introduced to new texts and sources full of information, which they eventually weave into an argument of their own. Each new source appears in sync with the novel’s arc. When the story focuses on Rick, a non-optimized human neighbor, students read a scholarly essay about income-based disparities in access to technology in the United States. A citation-packed article examining AI companionship appears just as human cloning surfaces in the novel. When an optimized child’s illness becomes grave, students read an analysis of the ethics of human enhancement.
It all comes to a head in a fishbowl Socratic Seminar—two rounds of discussion, with two essential questions that students debate, all while citing evidence from these many texts. Students grapple with meaty questions, which they answer not off the top of their head, but with knowledge and vocabulary they’ve built through their experiences in the unit: What does love mean when technology keeps changing it? What does innovation cost the people left behind? After the Socratic Seminar, students are then asked to argue, in writing, what value—if any—technology adds to relationships, social class, or personal rights. That argument becomes the unit’s culminating Performance Task: an essay built from the sources they have amassed along the way to support each student’s unique counterclaim and conclusion. Then one final test—a two-part assessment, with multiple choice questions and a free response essay—to demonstrate how the knowledge actually stuck.
Field Test Findings
Our review surfaced a curriculum with considerable strengths. Kids want, and deserve, to get the experience of reading great books as they prepare for college and/or careers and life out in the world. Novel ELA’s text selections stood out as a major asset: across every grade level, texts are high-quality, culturally rich, and intellectually demanding. They span literary fiction, investigative nonfiction, poetry, foundational documents, and essays. Units are organized around compelling topics, from the Jim Crow era and AI ethics to Puerto Rican colonial history and the 1920s Osage Reign of Terror. In a world where we are always competing for young people’s attention, these great books both grab their attention and give them the chance to build deep content knowledge while engaging with rigorous texts. Further, thoughtful text pairings push students to grapple with whose voices get heard, such as Camus’ The Stranger and Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation.
The tool also focused our attention on the curriculum’s instructional design. Units are organized into “Arcs of Inquiry” in which recurring exercises engage students in literary analysis, knowledge-building, discourse, and writing in a clear progression. This gives both teachers and students a predictable roadmap, effectively reducing their cognitive load during complex, multi-week units. Each unit also includes key literacy accelerators, as defined by our tool: building vocabulary knowledge through a volume of reading, deepening world knowledge, guiding students to marshall evidence in writing and discussion, and building strong reading habits through close reading of complex texts.
If there’s one thing we know about high schoolers, it’s that they have opinions and aren’t afraid to share them, and Novel ELA channels that energy and motivation productively through meaningful academic discussion. Daily discourse practices are anchored in text-based inquiry questions and Socratic Seminars appear as culminating events in every unit, backed by strong preparation tools, variations for diverse learners, and clear teacher guidance. Writing instruction is similarly robust: students write daily across varied forms. Performance tasks are authentic extensions of each unit’s intellectual work, such as reclaiming a silenced narrative or producing a researched essay paired with a multimedia presentation.
Finally, the review found that Novel ELA offers strong support for all learners, with dedicated supports embedded in every lesson, targeted tools for Multilingual learners, and teacher-facing materials that explain the reasoning behind program design.
We also identified areas where the curriculum could be even stronger: a stronger spiral for vocabulary words, broadening the range of academic protocols for student discussions, and building a more intentional gradual-release structure as students become familiar with routines. These could push retention, collaborative argument-building, and open-ended inquiry further. These insights are exactly what our tool is designed to produce. Identifying opportunities for growth is just as important as celebrating strengths, because both give publishers and educators the full picture they need to make informed decisions about curriculum.
Lessons for the Future
This review gave us the opportunity to test and fine-tune our new tool, which yielded another set of insights. For example, we found that criteria looking at a curriculum’s coherence are especially powerful. These include how well texts, tasks, and assessments connect back to central inquiry and whether instructional design reflects genuine backward design thinking. We tweaked our tool to guide reviewers to look at how well a curriculum pulls a coherent thread from its essential questions all the way through to its culminating tasks, because that kind of tight coherence is what teachers actually feel, or miss, when they’re implementing a program day to day.
The tool also cues reviewers to look at how knowledge-building and disciplinary thinking show up across units. That revealed something worth naming: knowledge building works differently at the high school level. A typical high-school course load includes classes in science, math, history, and English. A strong high school English curriculum needs to treat English itself as a discipline, rather than a delivery vehicle for topical content.
These insights are just the beginning of what a carefully considered curriculum review can provide. As more publishers and educators look for ways to evaluate high-school curricular quality with precision, our tool offers a rigorous, transparent framework. I’m proud of what we’ve learned so far, and excited to apply it to more curricula in the months and years ahead.
Vaishali Joshi is Chief Consulting Officer at Knowledge Matters.