Where Does High Quality Curriculum Come From?

Ollie Lovell's blog post is from Australia, but it fits with the ongoing discussion of the value of curriculum in this country. He notes that in a recent discussion about a variety of school issues, he kept coming back to the same place:

The fast and robust way to increase student achievement is to put high quality curriculum resources in the hands of their teachers (ref).

The fastest way to reduce teacher workload for early career teachers in particular is to give them high quality curriculum resources.

For PD centred around pedagogical content knowledge, we only see effective professional development when that PD is anchored to concrete examples that teachers plan on teaching. Without this, conversations become overly abstract and theoretical.

Student behaviour systematically improves when students are learning more successfully, or in the words of Rob Coe, ‘Success precedes motivation’ (ref). And this is greatly scaffolded by quality curriculum materials.

And when we address all of the above issues, we will see greater teacher retention, and an easing of our current teacher shortages.

In all of these instances, the devil is firmly encamped in the details. Does "increase student achievement" mean "raise test scores"? Because that's not my idea of increasing student achievement, and as we've been seeing for twenty-some years, a rich high-quality curriculum is not needed, or even preferable, for raising scores on the Big Standardized Test. Can a HQC reduce workload? That depends on how easy it is to implement, how well it matches the needs of the students and the skill set of the teacher, and how much prep and adaptation it requires. I would have agreed that solid lessons and instruction help with classroom management; I'm not sure that post-COVID we aren't seeing new behavior issues that are more resistant to that solution. And I'm pretty sure this oversimplifies the problems with teacher retention in the U.S. Maybe things are different in Australia.

So Lovell may be overselling a tad, but having a high quality curriculum does matter. I worked most of my career in a district that couldn't quite get its act together on curriculum. We went through many curriculum development cycles, but the district leaders could never quite commit the district resources (teacher release time, paying for extra hours, some useful leadership and direction) to get the job done. 

It was frustrating, and ultimately my department created something we could use on our own. That was also frustrating; one department member didn't feel like following the plan, so she just didn't, and there really wasn't anything we could do about it. And while building admins were willing to recognize that what we had created existed, that didn't keep them from still shooting for that old standby, Curriculum By Textbook, insisting we insert test prep drill, and occasionally unilaterally announcing that a Certain Book would no longer be taught because somebody somewhere might be upset. 

I will skip past the unavoidable eternal arguments about HQC (what is included and who decides) other than to note that they add another level of complexity to all of this.

But Lovell moves on to an interesting question-- if we want some HQC, where do we get it?

Getting expert level resources requires expert level knowledge, the kind that Lovell says is "hard to build." Not only do we need expertise in the content area, but expertise in teaching, and expertise in the audience for the instruction. The standards movement kind of skips past all three, assuming that if one sets certain standards, the content takes care of itself, the specific audience doesn't matter, and the teaching piece is where you blame educators for faulty implementation. The curriculum/materials industry has limited expertise in the first two and assumes that its actual audience is the people who make purchasing decisions in districts, not the people in the classroom who have to deal with it.

High quality curriculum does not come in a one-size-fits-all box right off the instructional materials rack. It is not prepared by some company hundreds of miles away. It is not googled. And it is not, God help us, created by large language model computer programming. The place you are most likely to find the expertise required is among the master teachers in your district.

Even the best instructional materials and curricular design stuff doesn't become an actual high quality curriculum until it receives its final shape from the master teachers who turn it into classroom instruction. This has been a point of frustration for folks who want to fix schools by imposing standards and instructional design-- once it hits the classroom, it is going to be delivered and interpreted by the classroom teacher. Master teachers are doing curricular design and redesign every day. That's the expertise we need to tap.

And as Lovell notes, even if we tap the expertise of the teachers in the district, we hit the time issue. When, exactly, are busy, swamped teachers supposed to do this? And are they supposed to do it for free? 

There can be other obstacles. Our do-it-ourselves program was thin on details because we'd hashed those out in conversation. And that gets to one of the other challenges in building a curriculum--exactly for whom are you creating it? Most of the district-directed attempts we made were not curriculum designed for teachers, but curriculum designed so that administration could have something to show the state. They weren't to help us teach, but to help administrators and bureaucrats prove that we were teaching. 

Or the most insidious curriculum purpose of all-- "I want to know that if you drop dead tonight for some reason, I can hand this curriculum to your replacement and everything will stay right on track in your classroom." It is the education version of "I want you to train your own replacement."

In a district with low trust between administration and teachers, curriculum is collateral damage. Can I trust you to do your job? Can I trust you to let me do my job? I'm going to argue that the loss of teacher autonomy over the past few decades is directly connected to curriculum problems. "I am going to hand you this curriculum in a box, and you will implement it with fidelity or else" is another way to say "I don't trust you to do your job." Fear and control never make a system better than trust and support.

Okay, this is taking longer than I expected. Let's get back to the question--where does HQC come from?

Lovell suggests an intriguing idea

How do we overcome large-scale expertise and/or time shortages to ensure that solid curriculum materials are accessible and usable by every teacher in our country?

To me, one of the most promising opportunities on the horizon is multi-school organisations, groups of schools working together, and under common governance, to share resources in a way that enables each to achieve much more than they could on their own.

I like this idea. It still has some major holes to fill, like what format and organizational scheme should they use? We were several times required to use a format that was basically a response to the Common Core Pennsylvania State standards, so that the result, had we ever finished it, would have been geared to proving to the state that we were checking off a list by "unpacking" and addressing the standards and not giving a teacher direction and support in designing instruction for the year. 

It's one of the great curriculum traps-- a document designed to prove to the state that you're doing your job is not a document that helps you actually do your job. 

I also recognize that multi-school design looks hugely different in a big district where such a program would be inside the district and in an area like mine, where such a program would have to be intra-district. 

I think back to our teacher-to-teacher design work and imagine what we could have done with more time, more support, and more teachers to provide perspective on what works in particular grade levels. We did okay, but with the additional resources, we could have created something really cool and useful for students across the county. If we could have tapped the varied and rich professional experience and research across the county, we could have accomplished so much more.