When I met Kim Schiller, she had been teaching for 30 years and was well-known as a dedicated and creative teacher. She brought containers of mealworms and handfuls of budding branches to her 2nd grade class, encouraging students to observe natural phenomena and ask questions about what they saw. She created number centers, stocked with objects that could be grouped and counted in different ways. Her classroom walls were covered with students' writing, and the daily morning meeting included numerous opportunities for students to share their ideas, offer suggestions and solutions, and explain their reasoning.
According to Kim, she had always been a "progressive" teacher, seeking out innovative and developmentally appropriate resources for teaching all subjects and creating lessons from scratch. In math, she wanted to give her students a rich experience that helped them understand numbers and geometry in the world. Kim used commercially published curriculum programs infrequently and selectively. (By "curriculum program," I mean collections of materials, including a teacher's guide and student text, designed to provide guidance for daily instruction.)
As a mathematics education researcher and former teacher, I understood Kim's aversion to textbooks. During my teaching career in the 1980s, most mainstream textbooks were formulaic—dry for both teachers and students. Math programs, in particular, offered predictably uninspired lessons focused on repetition of pencil-and-paper procedures.
But Kim's school had recently adopted a new math program developed to reflect the vision of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Curriculum Standards. These standards, and the new math program, emphasized concepts over routines and favored learning through solving problems, developing strategies, using models, and participating in discussions. I was working with Kim and her colleagues to help them learn about and use the new program, and I was eager to find out how Kim was using it because it offered a wealth of instructional resources that seemed to fit with her philosophy. I was stunned to discover that, after a year, she had only incorporated a handful of the program's activities into her instruction, selecting just a few that she felt meshed with her approach.
From her perspective, the new curriculum didn't offer anything novel or distinct from what she had been doing. I was equally surprised when she explained that the new program was not "necessarily a curriculum." To her, it was a collection of useful activities, within a loose framework. It appeared that using a curriculum program, even one fully attuned to her ideas about teaching math, did not fit with Kim's view of good teaching.
The Good-Teacher Doctrine
Kim was not alone. The doctrine that good teachers don't rely on textbooks, and instead design their own lessons, has persisted over the years. We are seeing this doctrine play out in a different way under the influence of the Common Core State Standards. In many districts, teachers have been encouraged to use the new standards as their guide for what to teach, while they determine how to teach it—mainly by developing their own lessons and cobbling together materials from the Internet. Curriculum programs are viewed as unnecessary to what teachers should be doing.
The good-teacher doctrine has great appeal. It reveres teacher expertise. It views teachers as curriculum designers in the classroom, who are best positioned to tailor instruction to the needs of their particular students. According to this doctrine, curriculum programs might be useful for inexperienced teachers, or during periods of transition in a given school, but only as an impermanent solution. The ultimate goal is to move away from relying on them. Given the dearth of materials truly aligned to the standards and the expense of those that are available, many schools and districts have pragmatically embraced this doctrine.
The Downside to the Good-Teacher Doctrine
The good-teacher doctrine has a harmful downside—one that misrepresents key distinctions between teachers and curriculum materials and works against teaching and schoolwide improvement. The doctrine promotes an image of teachers as solo performers and of curriculum resources as dispensable props. From this perspective, teachers improve by weaning themselves off of external supports. The best teachers work alone, without a net.
When taken to its logical conclusion, the good-teacher doctrine creates artificial barriers between teachers and potential partners. By placing a spotlight on single teachers, rewarding individual ingenuity and flair, it deflects conversation about the work of teaching and discourages genuine collaboration among colleagues. From a system-wide perspective, the belief that good teachers do not use curriculum materials leaves teacher development up to chance and severely hampers efforts to achieve curricular coherence across classrooms and grade levels.
It's been almost 20 years since my conversations with Kim. Since then, I've talked with many teachers and have studied how they use, adapt, and learn from curriculum materials. I have found that many teachers are reluctant to use teacher's guides or are hesitant to admit that they do. I have also analyzed more than a dozen elementary and middle school math curriculum programs, and have spent time with the developers of these materials to understand the design process. On the basis of these encounters, I contend that teachers and curriculum materials are not interchangeable; they actually do different, yet complementary, work. I suggest that we might challenge the good-teacher doctrine and reframe the teacher-curriculum relationship as a partnership.
Partnering with Curriculum Materials
The first step in reframing the teacher-curriculum relationship is to understand the distinct contributions that skilled teachers and well-designed curriculum programs offer to the work of teaching. Let's begin with curriculum materials, since few teachers have opportunities to see how these resources are developed.
It's important to note, however, that not all curriculum programs are designed with equal care or expertise. Well-designed programs are based on research findings and undergo rounds of field testing and revision. I encourage leaders to consult the Publishers' Criteria documents on the the Common Core State Standards website, which contain criteria for developing CCSS-based programs.
Curriculum developers usually work in teams that include experienced teachers and instructional designers. They begin with a "big picture" map of the major concepts to be taught and an understanding of how concepts and skills develop over time and in relation to one another. These maps are influenced by state standards and are increasingly informed by research findings on student learning.
The curriculum development process typically involves several rounds of field-testing in real classrooms followed by revisions; in many cases, developers incorporate insights from these trials into their revisions, including what they've learned about how students are likely to respond to given tasks.
The most collaborative curriculum developers go out of their way to communicate with teachers. In other words, beyond constructing carefully designed and sequenced lessons, some authors include notes in the margins written to the teacher about the rationale for their designs, important ideas about the content, or what students often find difficult. These curriculum authors assume that teachers will make adaptive decisions, and they include these notes to support teachers in making those decisions (Ball & Cohen, 1996; Davis & Krajcik, 2005).
Teachers, on the other hand, bring to this partnership indispensable knowledge of their particular students, especially students' current levels of understanding and learning needs. When planning with curriculum materials, teachers draw on their own experiences, expertise, and pedagogical skills, along with resources from their schools and districts, to make appropriate adaptations.
When enacting the curriculum, teachers must steer interactions with students toward the critical concepts, while ensuring that it is the students—not teachers themselves—doing the intellectual work. As they guide students down that pathway, teachers must be able to hear students' developing ideas and adjust the pace, circle back, and even take a detour or two, without losing track of the journey. Deborah Ball once described this type of work as keeping an "ear to the ground" and her "eyes focused on the mathematical horizon" (1993, p. 376).
All partnerships have the potential to be powerful when they bring together different types of expertise. The teacher-curriculum partnership is at its best when the distinct capabilities of each member are recognized and leveraged in support of student learning. Curriculum materials offer the teacher a high-level map of the domain and learning pathways within and around it. They also reflect the experiences of other teachers, classrooms, and students. Yet, their effectiveness depends on teachers using them and making appropriate adaptations in the process.
A number of factors impede the teacher-curriculum partnership. Teachers who believe that the best teachers do not use curriculum materials often feel guilty or inadequate when they do. Further, teachers are generally not taught how to partner effectively with curriculum materials, in particular how to discern and leverage authors' contributions. Those teachers who develop these abilities often do so through opportunities to work with colleagues or curriculum developers, but these experiences are not typical. Finally, not all curriculum authors see themselves as collaborators with teachers. Some offer a product that lacks transparency or support, or is overly restrictive or scripted. Some products lack coherence or clear learning pathways.
Strategies for Teachers
Regardless of the quality of the curriculum program, teachers can use the following strategies to partner with curriculum materials.
- Look for the big ideas. It's tempting to focus on the steps of the lesson plan. However, it's more important to first identify the central ideas or concepts that undergird the lesson. Identifying the big ideas gives you a sense of the horizon to keep in sight.From there, you can evaluate the recommended steps and make modifications appropriate for your students. Such modifications might include adjusting the rigor of the main activity or changing the context of problems to make them more relatable to students. Studies of teachers using math curriculum materials have indicated that attending to the big ideas instead of the specific procedural steps improves the quality of the lesson (Stein & Kaufmann, 2010) and increases student learning (Brown, et. al, 2009).
- Pay attention to the pathways. From one perspective, a curriculum guide provides a collection of activities and lessons to present to students. But the relationship among these activities shouldn't be missed. Lesson sequences, devised to shape an intended learning pathway, are one of the most important contributions of well-designed curriculum materials. Pathways—within and across lessons—should begin where students are and help them move to where they should be. Fractions sequences in upper elementary grades, for example, typically use students' understanding of halves to introduce fourths and even eighths, because these fractional parts can be made by subdividing larger fractional parts into smaller parts. These fractions can be used to develop an understanding of equal partitioning, the meaning of the denominator, and unit fractions before thirds and sixths are introduced.Many warm-up tasks placed at the beginning of lessons are designed to review previously learned concepts that will be used in the upcoming lesson. In most cases, the underlying rationale or even the particulars of the pathway itself are not explicitly articulated. I have observed teachers undo these sequences or replace the planned warm-up task with a different and even unrelated one. When teachers know to look for the organizational structure of the collected lessons and activities in their curriculum, they are better situated to understand the impact of the adaptations they make and avoid changes that undermine the pathway.
- Anticipate: What will ___ say? Teachers should treat instructional activities featured in curriculum materials as starting points for student learning. Learning occurs when students grapple with new ideas, extending those that are familiar. Curriculum developers know that teachers play a critical role in steering students through this meaning-making process, but they cannot plan for every contingency. When planning lessons with curriculum materials, it's often easier to focus on the ideal responses students might provide (the solutions or explanations that would signal understanding) than it is to consider possible incorrect or partially correct responses. When you anticipate the varied ways your specific students are likely to respond, you can consider what these responses reveal about students' developing understanding and think about how to react.
- Collaborate with colleagues. Teachers can collaboratively partner with their curriculum materials, working together to identify the big ideas, spot learning progressions, anticipate and plan for student responses, and make appropriate adaptations to meet the needs of their students. This type of teacher-curriculum-teacher partnership makes schoolwide curricular coherence possible. When teachers plan and reflect together, they are more likely to make decisions that benefit all students as they progress from one grade or class to the next.
Good Teaching with Curriculum Materials
I spent four years working with Kim Schiller and her colleagues. Together, we learned to partner with the new curriculum. I saw that Kim was right: Curriculum materials cannot replace teachers or quality teaching. Teachers have the power to bring a text to life, to make it engaging and relevant for the students whom they know so well. Equally true, like the musical score used by a conductor, curriculum materials provide a strong foundation from which to draw. Good teaching involves discerning that foundation and building on it with students.
