A One-Size Curriculum
Doesn’t Fit All
Find the right fit for your classrooms.
Lumina provides curriculum services designed to meet your unique needs.
Curriculum WRITING
Whether it's building from curriculum you already have or creating complete units from scratch, we design cohesive curriculum tailored to your vision and goals.
Curriculum REVIEW
We offer thoughtful, research-based reviews with a trained eye for coherence, rigor, and practical instructional design. We share actionable feedback to elevate instructional quality.
Curriculum TRAINING
We provide professional learning that equips your team with the knowledge, skills, and resources to develop powerful, rigorous, cohesive curriculum..
Our Development North Star
We believe the most effective curriculum is crafted intentionally and systematically. Our approach is shaped by cognitive science and pedagogical research, along with years of experience working with schools, districts, and national publishers.
We Believe
Every component of the curriculum we design, from Essential Questions to tasks and assessments, is built from these core principles.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Just as Sir Isaac Newton attributed his success to the “giants” of thinking who came before him, the curriculum work we do would not be possible without the following giants of thought leadership in the education space.
Education and Curriculum Design
Daniel Willingham
Mike Schmoker
Doug Lemov
Grant Williams & Jay McTighe
Zaretta Hammond
Natalie Wexler
Harvard Project Zero
Literacy
Kelly Gallagher
Jeff Wilhelm
Doug Fisher & Nancy Frey
Tim Shanahan
Marilyn Adams
Freddie Hiebert
Anne Cunningham
Vermont Writing Collaborative
Social Studies
Barbara Davidson
Bruce Lesh
James Loewen
Art Worrell & Paul Bambrick-Santoyo
Lauren Brown
Tremendous gratitude for so many others, including former and current colleagues and active practitioners!
Highlights From Past Projects
KIPP NYC
Worked with district team to write a vertically-aligned K-8 core ELA curriculum grounded in full-length texts, including:
Vertically aligned K-8 standards-based Scope and Sequence
Unit plans
Lesson plans
Assessments
Instructional Handbook
Professional development
Result
State reading proficiency nearly doubled, from 26% to 51% across network schools.
NY School District
Created middle school ELA unit plans aligned to a published curriculum with autonomy for teachers to create their own lessons.
Developed standards-aligned throughlines
Curated text sets
Wrote content & language objectives
Developed exit tickets and culminating tasks
Created Instructional Practices Handbook
Result
Adoption across all classrooms
Publishers
Wrote and edited curriculum for national publishers, including Scholastic, HMH, Benchmark, NSSI, and LearningMate on the following projects:
Foundational literacy Teacher Guides
Teacher and student resources for technology-based reading intervention
Science-of-reading based training
Virtual learning curriculum for ASL
Writing instruction for K-5 core ELA
Create multilingual learner lesson supports for novel-based ELA units & lessons
Curriculum Writing
No more nights spent piecing together lessons.
It can be frustrating to find a curriculum designed to meet your students’ needs. Some teachers struggle with off-the-shelf curriculum that lacks rigor, usability, and engagement. Others spend their nights heroically trying to cobble together a patchwork of content that will lead to a coherent progression of instruction.
We’re here to help.
Curriculum that empowers teachers to do their best work, not more work.
Lumina creates curriculum that blends your local context with research-based instruction. Together, we define your goals, requirements, and values. We create customized units that are knowledge-rich, rooted in compelling stories, and cohesive. We deliver complete units digitally, with all content and resources at your fingertips.
Curriculum Writing Options
We offer a range of curriculum development services in literacy and social studies:
Vertically aligned scope and sequence
Text set development
Instructional strategy development
Unit plan development
Lesson plans, with all necessary resources
Scaffolds for students with varying needs
Subject Areas
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K-2 Foundational Literacy
K-12 Core ELA
9-12 AP / IB
Novel Studies
Reading Intervention
Literacy Electives
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K-8 Social Studies
Humanities
Civics
Social Studies Electives
LISTEN
Lumina follows a transparent process, working alongside you to turn your vision into effective curriculum.
Development Approach
PLAN
TEST DRIVE
CREATE
DELIVER
CURRICULUM REVIEW
Every curriculum tells a story. What’s yours?
A strong curriculum is the foundation for effective instruction. Yet many classrooms struggle with variable lesson quality and a curriculum that never quite comes together. The gaps in rigor, coherence, or instruction are felt, but you aren’t sure where to start or how to fix them.
We’re here to help.
Actionable insights that transform a collection of ideas into a clear narrative.
Lumina reviews curriculum to identify strengths and gaps in coherence, rigor, and alignment to research-based instructional practices. We map connections between lessons as we clarify how knowledge and thinking build across the year. We identify ways your team can sharpen lessons, strengthen alignment, and elevate student outcomes. You’ll walk away with a clear roadmap for revising curriculum to foster joyful, lasting learning.
Curriculum Review
Lumina provides curriculum reviews that help you envision the next version of your instruction. When helpful, we provide sample rewrites that help your team visualize the revisions and move forward with clarity.
We provide the following focus areas or can customize our focus based on your needs.
Coherent Throughlines
Clear, Research-Backed Instruction
Scope and Sequence
Scaffolds to Unlock Access
Knowledge-Building Text Sets
Student Agency
Text-Dependent Tasks
Responsive Assessment
CURRICULUM TRAINING
Sometimes the best curriculum isn’t the one you buy;
it’s the one you build.
Curriculum design isn’t a maze, but it can certainly feel that way. Teams juggle standards, materials, assessments, and specific district expectations, often without a roadmap for putting the pieces together. Many educators haven’t received sufficient preparation for curriculum writing. They bring deep expertise about students, communities, and classroom realities, yet they feel underprepared to translate standards into cohesive learning experiences and need support developing vertically aligned curriculum.
We’re here to help.
Training your team to write curriculum with confidence and clarity.
Through guided planning sessions and feedback cycles, Lumina trainings provide your team a clear, sustainable process for writing high-quality curriculum. Together, we unpack standards, build knowledge-rich text sets, design cohesive units, and write research-based lessons. We equip your team with the tools, templates, and techniques used by professional curriculum designers. Your team emerges with a unified vision and the capacity to build curriculum that is truly their own.
Where will your journey begin?
Our professional learning cadence empowers your team to become confident designers. Partner with us on one or more of the following training phases designed to build your team’s capacity. Each phase is full of practical support and tangible takeaways.
Phase 1
Set a vision and goals from the intersection of local expertise and research-based design.
Phase 2
Create coherent, standards-aligned curriculum maps.
Phase 3
Align on high-quality prototypes using collaborative cycles of writing, feedback, and revision.
Phase 4
Write lessons that ensure equitable access to rigorous content.
Phase 5
Ensure adoption with usable templates and rhythms that fit your classrooms.