Curriculum

For the first time, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Genius and Joy framework is available as an all-in-one kit containing detailed lesson plans, authentic literature, explicit instruction, and student writing journals.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Five Pursuits framework of Identity, Skills, Intellect, Criticality, and Joy is a research-based instructional approach that enhances student engagement and achievement by focusing on literacy, identity development, and historical awareness. The Genius and Joy curriculum for Grades K-5. prioritizes academic rigor by developing literacy skills, building content knowledge and centering students’ learning experience on joy. The curriculum is deep in content and thought while also practical and easy to read.

Illustrations from the book "Ruth and the Green Book," featuring an Esso gas station attendant and a woman with a child holding a book titled "The Green Book."
A computer screen displaying an educational slide about "The 'Over' Ground Railroad" with a section on learning about history, travel, and the Green Book. An image of a book cover titled "Ruth and the Green Book" is visible, featuring an illustration of a family and a gas station.

1 Anchor Texts

  • Build background knowledge with six engaging fiction or nonfiction texts in each grade.

  • Develop vocabulary and comprehension skills.

  • Support text analysis, inferencing, and reflection.

A collage featuring educational materials includes a document titled "Ruth and the Green Book," with an illustration of a family at a gas station. Part of a "Genius & Joy Teacher's Guide" is visible, alongside a happy child. The content relates to a curriculum about history, travel, and the Green Book.
Student writing and activity journal with colorful cover for Genius & Joy program, grade level not specified, set against an orange background.

2 Unit Plans

  • Follow a consistent before-, during-, and after-reading approach in detailed daily instruction that is tailored to each unit’s themes and topics.

  • Engage students in the ‘Five Pursuits’ with multimodal layered text suggestions integrated into each Unit Plan.

  • Strengthen peer interactions, as well as family and community connections, with collaborative learning projects.

  • Customize your instruction with flexible teacher notes.

3 Digital Resources

  • Display content featuring author videos and engage students with a slide deck for daily instruction.

  • Provide fluency, comprehension, content-area connections, and group work with a variety of practice and progress-monitoring worksheets.

  • Complete the student materials with additional unit-specific digital resources.

4 Student Journals

  • Inspire students to read, reflect, and respond to questions related to a meaningful quotation, honing their writing and critical thinking skills through daily journaling activities.

Each grade covers six curriculum themes per unit:

Cultural Diversity, Community & Collectivism

The Living and Social Environment

Self & Identity

Advocacy & Activism

Building the Future

Creativity, Literacy & Art

What Is Genius & Joy?

Genius is the intelligence, brilliance, special qualities, creativeness, uniqueness, knowledge, individual power, natural abilities, skills, talents, and light every student and educator holds. Historically, genius has not been a word used to refer to all students, but only a select few. Within this curriculum, we honor every single student—their special talents and the brilliance that they carry—as a genius. No student comes to a classroom without genius. Instead, it is up to us to recognize, affirm, cultivate, and nurture it.

Joy is beauty, aesthetics, creativity, and love in the self and humanity. Joy is the celebration and happiness as well as a sense of belonging. It includes space within the learning experience where students can live out and discover their fullest potential. Joy is art and music and creation. It is fostering wellness, healing, peace, happiness, self-determination, collaboration, wonder, laughter, imagination, care, and advocacy. Joy is a safe and creative space to be free—free to learn, free to dream, and free to be.

Smiling child with glasses and a glowing light bulb above their head, symbolizing an idea or creativity, in a library setting.

Teacher & Student Materials

The Teacher’s Guide is designed to help develop and prepare teachers toward successfully studying and implementing the Genius and Joy Curriculum. The Unit Plans contained within are designed for the teacher to “co-write” or “co-create” the Unit with the writers of the Genius and Joy Curriculum, so you will find lines for annotation, drawing, creating, and planning your own ideas. Within the Genius and Joy Curriculum is also Genius and Joy Journal for each student. The Journals elevate the themes carried in the Unit Plans. To complement each of the six themes, we also selected six anchor texts as well as multimodal texts such as video, photos, memes, primary source documents, music, songs, artifacts, objects, and digital interactive texts.

The image displays the "Genius & Joy" educational set for Grade 3, including a box with a joyful child in sunglasses, a Teacher's Guide by Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, and a Student Writing and Activity Journal. The designs are colorful and vibrant.

Research & Testimonials

The HILL Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Education (CHRE) is covered deeply in Dr. Muhammad’s books Cultivating Genius and Unearthing Joy. The CHRE framework was developed through the teachings of Black literary societies and the scholarship of educational researchers who brilliantly paved the path. These genius minds include the culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining scholarships of Gloria Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, Luis Moll, Kris Gutiérrez, Django Paris, Richard Milner, Tyrone Howard, Muhammad Khalifa, Bettina Love, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Joyce King, Cynthia Dillard, Valerie Kinloch, and many others who center forms of Black educational history, genius, and joy in their works. The Genius and Joy Curriculum also builds upon the educational brilliance of historical scholars such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Anna Julia Cooper, James Forten, William Whipper, Maria Stewart, WEB Dubois, Carter G. Woodson, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and bell hooks. Through their work, this curriculum seeks to help educators understand how to define, reimagine, and redesign curriculum and instruction today.

A group of children and a teacher working together at a table with educational materials and a laptop in a classroom.

Interested in Bringing Genius and Joy to your
School or District?

Create a learning community where every student’s genius shines—bring Genius and Joy to your classrooms today.