EdNC. Essential education news. Important stories. Your voice.

Search ednc.org

Brief | Creating a master schedule that maximizes the literacy block

Share this story

Our republishing policy

EdNC is a nonprofit, online, daily, independent newspaper. All of EdNC’s content is open source and free to republish. Please use the following guidelines when republishing our content.
  • Our content must be republished in full. If your organization uses a paywall, the content must be provided in full for free.
  • Credit our team by including both the author name and EdNC.org in the byline. Example: Alex Granados, EdNC.org.
  • If republishing the story online, please provide a link to EdNC.org or a link to the original article in either the byline or credit line.
  • The original headline of the article must be used. Allowable edits to the content of the piece include changes to meet your publication’s style guide and references to dates (i.e. this week changed to last week). Other edits must be approved by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
  • Photos and other multimedia elements (audio, video, etc.) may not be republished without prior permission. Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you are interested in sharing a multimedia element.
  • If you republish a story, please let us know by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you have any questions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Canonical tag

Please include the following canonical tag in the <head> of the republished story.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ednc.org/brief-creating-a-master-schedule-that-maximizes-the-literacy-block/">

HTML content

This includes the title, byline, content, and tracking pixel required for republishing this story.

Copy & paste HTML
This story is tagged:
Photo via Pexels

Editor’s Note: The fifth brief of an eight-part series from the North Carolina Early Childhood Foundation is embedded below on classroom experiences while aligning reading instruction with the “science of reading.”


School master schedules, which determine the blocking of time during the school day, are tricky and complicated systems to coordinate. Researchers and educators are increasingly learning that these master schedules substantially impact learning, because they determines the time spent on instruction and whether key components of instruction are experienced in the optimal order.

As noted in Brief 1, NC’s Excellent Public Schools Act, signed into law in April 2021, requires that all pre-K to fifth-grade teachers complete Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) training. After completion, many aspects of implementation are left to the discretion of school districts and schools. Without additional guidance on how to implement what is learned, there are many decisions that schools can make that can undermine the benefits of strengthening teachers’ knowledge of the practices that can align their instruction with the Science of Reading (SoR).

Whether beginning readers receive reading and writing instruction in connected blocks of time is one of those aspects that can be affected by a school’s master schedule, and when blocked correctly, can enhance the effectiveness of strong instructional practices.

The full brief is embedded below.