Educators face a dizzying array of programs that promise to improve schooling. This loose collection of curriculum providers, tutoring programs, school designers, and other education initiatives forms a “school improvement industry” (Rowan, 2002) that has grown substantially since the 1980s. Although these initiatives can be beneficial, too often they compete for time, money, and resources, undermining a school’s capacity to make substantial improvements.
Illustrating this challenge, in my 1998–99 survey of principals in three districts in California and Texas, 63 percent of their schools engaged with three or more improvement programs and 27 percent with six or more (Hatch, 2002). In one district, 18 percent of schools were working with nine or more programs simultaneously. Almost two decades later, another survey I conducted in New York City revealed more than 100 programs working to improve reading outcomes in public elementary schools alone (Hatch et al., 2023). A sample of programs reported receiving grants from 57 different funders and identified 75 different sources for literacy expertise, with little overlap or coordination.
Given the constantly increasing demands on and expectations for education, as well as the complexity of schooling, it’s understandable why schools take on more initiatives. This challenge is particularly daunting for those educators, parents, and students who are dissatisfied with the narrow academic focus of conventional schooling and who seek to transform education to support a wider range of abilities and student well-being overall. Unfortunately, ambitious efforts to overhaul schools on a large scale have never fulfilled their aspirations.
Why not? Improvements in education are most likely to take off when they “fit” into the work that is already underway (Hatch et al., 2021). “Fitting in” means that the new ideas are consistent with many of the needs, goals, and values of those who are expected to put them in place. However, reform initiatives that challenge conventional practice—and the status quo—often generate resistance and rejection. Likewise, new ideas are more likely to fail when they demand more expertise, resources, and time than are readily available.
Instead of trying to add more skills and competencies into the curriculum or pursuing gargantuan efforts to replace one curriculum with another, there’s a better approach—and that’s to condense the curriculum.
Less Is More
Ted Sizer (1984), founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, said it simply: “Less is more.” Doing less, however, depends on recognizing that doing too much is counterproductive. For example, research has shown that too much studying provides little added benefit for students, and it can interfere with the amount of time students spend exercising, resting, sleeping, and developing other interests and abilities (Dumuid et al., 2022; Gromada & Shewbridge, 2016). Moreover, students who sacrificed sleep to engage in more studying experienced more problems learning, with one study (Gillen-O’Neel, Huynh, & Fuligni, 2012) showing that cramming in three more hours of studying almost doubled students’ learning problems.
Indeed, if less is more, more is also less. The events of recent years show how difficult it is to imagine how the world may change when a new virus spreads, a disaster occurs, or new technologies emerge. However, by adopting a future-oriented mindset that recognizes tomorrow will always be uncertain and undetermined, educators can gain the freedom to pursue their most powerful ideas as they reflect on their progress and adapt to changing circumstances. Three powerplays, drawn from innovative practices internationally, can help.
Powerplay 1: Integration
Instead of trying to cover every essential skill and concept, educators can condense the curriculum by teaching some key concepts and skills in an integrated and deeper way. In the process, they can meet academic demands more efficiently while creating more time and space for students to develop a wider range of abilities that can be useful in the future.
I’ve found good examples of efforts to condense the curriculum in an unexpected place: Vietnam. The Olympia School, a K–12 private school in Hanoi, demonstrated the power of careful curriculum mapping. Their approach involved aligning the skills and concepts emphasized in the Vietnamese national curriculum with other well-known standards (including the U.S.’s Common Core State Standards and those of the International Baccalaureate), as well as with the school’s own competencies for responsible global citizenship.
Along with focusing on the overlap across these curricula, the school thoughtfully combined the teaching of several subjects normally taught independently. For example, they created a life skills curriculum that integrated Vietnam’s requirements for teaching ethics with some requirements for social sciences and natural sciences. Rather than offering English as a separate subject, the school adopted a bilingual approach starting in elementary school, with English taught alongside Vietnamese, mathematics, and other subjects.
This approach helps students make connections among concepts and terms taught in different classes. Moreover, subject matter teachers teaching in Vietnamese can co-teach with their colleagues teaching English, facilitating coordination and communication. Both moves enabled the school to reduce the number of subjects (and periods) that have to fit into students’ schedules and that teachers have to plan and prepare for. This also created some space during the school day for students to participate in collaborative projects designed to help them learn about issues like sustainability and develop the competencies emphasized in the school’s mission and goals.
Instead of trying to cover every essential skill and concept, educators can condense the curriculum by teaching some key concepts and skills in an integrated and deeper way.
Powerplay 2: Micro-Innovations
Micro-innovations are small changes in structures, routines, practices, and resources that can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of learning. In Singapore, teachers use a game-based app to help high school students learn key terms in introductory chemistry. In South Africa, peer tutoring enables students in under-resourced townships to prepare for and pass college entrance exams in core subjects, even in the absence of well-prepared teachers (Hatch et al., 2021). In rural parts of Vietnam, where people speak a variety of indigenous languages, some schools engage parents as translators to support the 1st grade teachers who don’t speak the local languages.
These micro-innovations not only help address instructional challenges and achieve learning goals, but can also be carried out within available time and resources. Moreover, they give teachers the tools they need to shift from teacher-directed instruction to more hands-on, collaborative, and student-centered approaches.
This attention to micro-innovations suggests another crucial shift. We need to move away from producing new curricula and practices that are supposed to work in general for all subjects and topics and move toward developing specific innovations that support the learning of specific topics, with specific groups of students, in specific situations, and at specific points in time (Bransford et al., 2006). For example, the game-based chemistry app can be useful for high school students in chemistry courses, but it won’t help at other levels or in other subjects. Likewise, the peer-tutoring approach may not be as necessary in schools that have sufficient resources and a substantial number of teachers.
Crucially, instead of trying to scale-up initiatives across often inhospitable conditions, these micro-approaches “plug in” new practices to existing resources, staffing, and strategies. For example, mobile boat libraries in Cambodia ensure that all students have access to the materials and resources they need. Recruiting and training school bus drivers to serve as tutors can help address staffing issues. Counselors could post and share QR codes that enable students to sign up for virtual appointments to discuss their concerns, as opposed to having their peers see them walk into a counselor’s office. And to support students who are just beginning to learn algebra, teachers could use assessments that help them identify which crucial “predecessor” skills students might need to work on to stay on track.
Powerplay 3: “Niches of Possibility”
Educators can also create “niches of possibility”—places inside and outside of regular school schedules where the conditions are more amenable for “plugging-in” and supporting more powerful learning. Niches of possibility that invite inquiry-based, collaborative, and hands-on learning can be found in traditional subject-based courses like history; in lab-based courses in physics, chemistry, computing, and engineering; in design and performance-based courses in the arts; and in a wide variety of extracurricular programs.
In China, the innovative schools I have visited demonstrated niches of possibility even amid the intense pressure of an exam-based system. At Beijing City Academy, high school students engage in many self-directed, interest-based, and project-based activities, including electives in subjects that provide hands-on opportunities for inquiry, research, and design. The school offers 90-minute blocks that enable students to participate in different programs and clubs during the regular school day. Students help organize field trips, and teachers from each of the core subjects arrange for various “learning festivals” throughout the year that allow students to demonstrate their learning through performances and other creative presentations. Thus, City Academy students repeatedly engage in opportunities that foster deeper learning, even as they work on meeting conventional academic standards and preparing for required exams.
Educators can also help create niches of possibility by showcasing how efforts to change the curriculum align with skills and competencies reflected in state and national standards; in college entrance requirements, including personal essays and portfolios; and in college classrooms and diverse workplaces. Increasingly, these efforts can take advantage of policy changes in high school graduation and college entrance requirements. In the United States, for example, all 50 states have now developed policies that allow for competency-based graduation standards, and almost half have endorsed “portraits” or “profiles” of a graduate that schools can use to provide a rationale for their innovations.
Estonia has taken the bold step of replacing several of the exit exams that high school students have to take to graduate with a requirement for students to produce a research project or a business plan and pass a school-designed project. The Viimsi Gymnasium, an upper secondary school in Tallinn, Estonia, has what they call a maturity exam for their school-design project. This is a public presentation in which students share a portfolio of their reflections on the development of their personal, academic, and professional interests. Rather than a “one-shot” end-of-high school performance, the portfolio that students present brings together materials and reflections from both their courses and their real-world activity requirements, such as internships, job shadowing, and volunteering. The portfolio also serves as a demonstration of how the students have developed the competencies of a self-directed learner that the school has made a central part of their learning goals, alongside the academic goals that are part of Estonia’s national education standards.
By carefully—and publicly—addressing crucial learning goals and competencies in combination with conventional academic expectations, schools like these build student confidence and prepare students for their futures. That confidence can transform a curriculum that tries to teach everything in an exhausting linear sequence into a dynamic one that addresses multiple standards and goals far more efficiently.
Pare Down to Power Up
Developing micro-innovations depends on the expertise and resourcefulness of educators who understand the specific needs of their students. It depends on education leaders who have a keen sense of what matters. And it depends on an organization that can rachet down the pressures to adopt new initiatives and help educators create niches of possibility where micro-innovations can take root.
Developing a powerful repertoire of micro-innovations contributes to an infrastructure that supports transformative learning over the long term. In the process, the focus shifts from policy-level and large-scale implementations to the classroom level and to making sure that all students, particularly those who are left out and who are systematically disadvantaged by conventional schooling, encounter more opportunities to engage in powerful learning. Those experiences create new possibilities for education that build directly on the specific conditions in which students live and learn each day.
Reflect & Discuss
Where do you see natural opportunities to integrate subjects in ways that reduce redundancy and deepen understanding?
What small, specific curricular changes could you make that are meaningful but don’t require major resources or systemic overhaul?
