Secondary Social Studies Consulting
Your teachers already know the content. Let’s teach them to teach it differently.
Dr. Kimberly Nicole Miles partners with K–12 districts and curriculum leaders to bring disciplinary literacy directly into secondary Social Studies classrooms — without adding to your teachers’ load or losing a single week on the pacing guide.
Serving K-12 school districts, curriculum directors & Social Studies department heads
The Real Tension
The mandate landed. The pacing guide didn’t move.
"Teachers feel forced to choose between content pacing and literacy instruction."
You’ve been handed a district-wide literacy initiative. Your Social Studies teachers have a curriculum map that waits for no one. And somewhere in the middle, students are being asked to read like historians without ever being taught how.
This is the gap Dr. Miles closes.
Not with generic reading strategies stapled onto your existing units. Not with a two-day PD that disappears by Monday. But with job-embedded coaching that meets your teachers where they are — inside their planning time, inside their content, inside their classrooms.
The Distinction That Matters
There’s a difference. Most PD doesn’t know it.
Adolescent Literacy
Most literacy professional development teaches adolescent literacy — foundational strategies for accessing complex text.
Disciplinary Literacy
Dr. Miles teaches disciplinary literacy — the specialized practice of reading, writing, and thinking like a historian.
That distinction changes everything. A student who can identify the main idea of a passage is not the same as a student who can source a primary document, contextualize an era, and corroborate competing accounts.
The second student is college-ready. The second student is what Social Studies was always meant to produce.
ICLS exists to get your department there.
The Approach
We go where the work actually happens.
Every ICLS engagement is built around one principle: real change happens in collaborative planning rooms, not conference centers.
Dr. Miles embeds directly into your teachers’ professional learning communities — bringing targeted historical inquiry routines into the spaces where your team already works together. No extra sessions to schedule. No separate literacy block to carve out. The content is the literacy.
When teachers feel genuinely supported — not managed, not mandated — they build the confidence to lead students deeper. That’s where student growth becomes measurable.
What We Offer
Three Tiers. One Mission.
Foundational PD Workshops
High-impact single sessions aligned to your district's current literacy goals and Social Studies curriculum standards.
Learn More →Collaborative Coaching Cohorts
Job-embedded support delivered during teacher planning periods. Live co-planning that honors curriculum pacing.
Learn More →Strategic Partnerships & Rigor Audits
District-wide instructional alignment. An instructional audit and multi-year literacy integration roadmap for your department.
Learn More →
Dr. Kimberly Nicole Miles
Founder & Lead Consultant, Ed.D.
Meet Dr. Miles
Twenty years in the room. Now she’s in yours.
Dr. Kimberly Nicole Miles built ICLS from the inside out — starting in elementary classrooms, moving through secondary and collegiate instruction, and spending two decades watching what happens when literacy is treated as an English teacher’s problem instead of everyone’s responsibility.
She holds an Ed.D. with professional endorsements in Instructional Coaching, Gifted Education, ESOL, and Math (K–5). Her peer-reviewed research on adolescent disciplinary literacy in Georgia’s Social Studies classrooms has been recognized as a benchmark regional framework for secondary integration.
She doesn’t just study this. She’s lived it.
What Educators Say
Trusted by District Leaders
ICLS transformed how our district approaches procurement. We avoided a costly compliance issue that could have cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. The training was practical, relevant, and immediately applicable.
Dr. Sandra Mitchell
Superintendent, Riverside Unified School District
The leadership coaching I received through ICLS was unlike anything I had experienced in my 20 years in education. The strategies were immediately applicable and the results were evident within months.
Marcus Thompson
Assistant Superintendent, Lincoln County Schools
Working with ICLS on our strategic plan was a game-changer. Their facilitators knew how to bring out the best thinking from our community stakeholders and turn it into a cohesive, actionable document.
Patricia Nguyen
Board President, Greenfield School District
Free Resource
Stop choosing between the curriculum map and the literacy mandate.
There’s a better path. Download the free guide Dr. Miles wrote for secondary instructional leaders who are done making that impossible trade-off.
The Contextual Shift: 5 Ways to Integrate Literacy Without Losing Content Pacing
Your Social Studies classrooms can do more than cover content.
They can teach students to think like historians. Let’s build that together.
Learn More →