Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I am you host, Zach Groshell.
My guest today is Dr. Olivia Mullins, Founder and Executive Director of Science Delivered and lead developer of the Learning Squared science and literacy program. Olivia trained as a scientist before turning to elementary science education. She’s become one of the sharpest voices working at the intersection of knowledge-building curriculum, the science of reading, and explicit instruction for the youngest learners, and her blogs and tweets have shaped a lot of the current conversation about what “knowledge-building” actually means in literacy and the content areas.
🚨 Registration is open! 🚨
Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.
We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.
🗽 NYC | July 27–31, 2026
👉 Learn more + register here: 🎟️ Explicit Teaching Institute registration
I also hope you have time to check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.
In this episode, we discuss:
- What we tend to misunderstand about content instruction in the early elementary years
- How building knowledge through coherent texts and talk differs from treating content as a list of disconnected facts
- What it looks like in practice when science and literacy are fully integrated in a primary classroom
- Why language — especially vocabulary and sentence structures — is so central to learning science concepts in the early grades
- How standards like NGSS fit in, and whether they support or complicate this kind of integration
Links:
- Science Delivered — science-delivered.org
- Olivia’s Substack
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