To Teach or to Read from a Script

It's not really a question

Curriculum is one of the most important aspects of our students’ school lives.

Our curriculum invites students to learn. It helps students see the wonder and the joy in the world around them. It shows them they are not alone. It allows them to see times and lives they will not experience and could not have imagined. It opens up worlds.

Right now none of that is a reality in most places. Under the guise of ensuring teachers use “High Quality Instructional Materials,” schools are being forced to adopt curricula from a predetermined set of vendors. In many places, teachers are being forced to teach that curricula “to fidelity.”

Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash

The impacts of this are devastating and multi-layered. If all you need is an adult who can babysit and read from a script - well then anyone can teach can’t they? This can be seen as another step in de-professionalizing the art and science of teaching.

These curricula often claim to be culturally responsive or diverse or to be representative of the world as a whole. What that often means is that representation is surface level at best. This report put out by NYU in 2022 looks at three of the most popular reading curricula in the country, including one used in my division. It is a devastating indictment of what we put in front of our children and our teachers. I would encourage you to read the whole report, but here are two graphics from the report:

From “Lessons in (In)Equity,” page 39

From “Lessons in (In) Equity,” page 42.

Yesterday

At the risk of sounding as old as I actually am this was not at all the norm during most of my teaching career. My first year, I was handed the standards, shown the book room and pretty much told to figure it out. This is also a terrible way of doing things. Would I have benefitted from having a boxed curriculum? Yes. It would have given me a place to start. Do I remember looking at the test while my students were taking it that first year and thinking, “Wow. Probably should have taught poetry?” Yep.

Would I have benefitted more from colleagues who had a plan and were willing to work with a new teacher? Yes, but that was not yet the culture of the school. With a new admin, that soon became the culture of the school. Our principal, JH, made sure we learned how to write curriculum, that we knew what the standards were asking of us and our students. He encouraged us to take risks, to make changes, to think about what was best for students.

When teachers are given control over their curriculum they can be responsive to students who are in front of them in that moment. They take what they’ve done before and make changes based on what worked, what didn’t, and hopefully, feedback from their students. I used to teach a book I LOVED (A Swiftly Tilting Planet). Turns out a very small subset of kids also loved it and a lot of kids found it too confusing and not at all interesting. I had to give it up because that’s what was best for kids, but I could do that because no one was handing me a script and telling me to teach from it.

I taught Shakespeare to sixth graders. Admittedly, it was a honors level class, but still it was Shakespeare. We read Twelfth Night (based on book bans in various states, I suspect this would not even be an option for many today). It was one of my favorite units. We dove into language and how it evolves, we analyzed author’s craft, we learned about Shakespearean insults, students learned to read the notes on the side because that’s where the wildly inappropriate jokes were explained, we acted it out, we created social media profiles for characters, we played Survivor: Illyria.

Students who had never struggled in school suddenly struggled to read and to comprehend. They had to learn lessons that their classmates had learned years ago - how to persevere when school was hard, how to ask for help, how to be ok with not getting it the first time.

I could do all of those things because I had a principal who trusted me to know what I was doing, who saw to it that I was taught how to do all of those things. Was it perfect? Absolutely not. Was it a ton of work? YES. Would I do it all again? Absolutely.

Today

I am a much better teacher for having learned to write curriculum. I know what good curriculum looks like. I know how to craft lessons in a way that they build on each other so I get to witness the magic of students suddenly having that a-ha moment in class as they realize how all these things connect. I can change a lesson on the fly when it’s not landing. JH made sure I could do those things. He was a real instructional leader. When the division tried to hand us a boxed curriculum, he told us to use it as a resource but that he trusted us to do what was best for our students.

We are losing the veterans who can do these things because at no point do we trust our teachers to go beyond the script. If you’ve never had to write or analyze curriculum, you can’t tell when something in that box is a bad idea. Teachers are constantly lambasted for poor test scores when they have little to no say over what and how things are being taught in their classrooms. They’re being told to follow a script.

We get conflicting messages these days: Implement it to fidelity, use it as a resource, stay on this pacing guide, spend all of your time in text, but make sure you’re writing every day, read a lot of different passages, but make sure you’re doing deep dives into specific topics to build knowledge. Rather than teach students we’re expected to cover content. Even some of our best teachers feel that stress and they don’t know how to balance those competing directives.

There is no time built into that pacing guide or that boxed curriculum to teach students how to learn, how to keep working when it’s hard, how to set goals, how to reach those goals, how to keep track of those goals. We expect them to figure that out for themselves, which seems to be a ridiculous ask. Students are losing and teachers are being blamed, even though many decisions being made about their classrooms are being made by people who may never have spent so much as a minute as a classroom teacher.

Are there problems with having teachers in complete control of their curriculum? Absolutely yes. Some that immediately come to mind: Representation, depth, complexity, etc. All of those problems currently exist in boxed curricula, with the additional problem of not at all being responsive to student and teacher needs.

Perhaps the worst part of this is that we’re asking gifted teachers to not do what they do best because not everyone can do what they can. As teachers, we are asked to teach up, to plan high and scaffold so that all of our students can achieve at high levels. Yet we are then asked to teach from a box because, for a small number of teachers, that’s the best they can do - and without teaching up, expecting more, and scaffolding, it may be the best they can ever do.

Tomorrow

Teachers have the ability to create curriculum that invites students to learn, to see the wonder and the joy in the world around them, to show them they are not alone, to see times and lives they will not experience and could not have imagined, to open up worlds, but you have to give us the time, space, and trust to do that.