Do you spend weekend time looking for writing activities?
What would your life be like if you didn’t have to supplement, revise, or create curriculum? Would you have a few more spare hours in the week? I bet you would.
Sometimes we have lived with something for so long that we don’t even know that there could be a better way. In this case, it is curriculum designed too quickly for profit.
Robert Pondiscio, one of my favorite education writers, says:
“A new study from the RAND Corporation finds that nearly every teacher in America—99 percent of elementary teachers, 96 percent of secondary school teachers—draws upon “materials I developed and/or selected myself” in teaching English language arts. And where do they find materials? The most common answer among elementary school teachers is Google (94 percent), followed by Pinterest (87 percent). The numbers are virtually the same for math.
But don’t blame teachers. These data, for reasons both good and bad, reveal a dirty little secret about American education. In many districts and schools—maybe even most—the efficacy of the instructional materials put in front of children is an afterthought.”
Curriculum companies are great at supplying content, and tons of it. Where most curriculum fails is in poor design. What I hear over and over from teachers is “No curriculum is perfect.”. Teachers have just accepted with resignation that they will always have to supplement, revise, and create curriculum, whether it is in teaching kids to write or any other subject area.
To me, this is like women in the 1950’s being resigned to the “fact” that housework was a woman’s job. They were only resigned to that because no one was questioning it.
Well, I am here to say that you deserve curriculum materials that are tested out and proven to be effective and are easy to use. Great design includes: correct pacing so that teachers and students don’t feel stressed, awareness of cognitive overload, clear and specific objectives for each lesson, and explicit instruction so that every child can be on board, just to name a few.
Think about all the major things in your life that are scrutinized for safety and/or effectiveness… the car you drive, the medicine you take, the meat you consume, the public transportation you use, the public buildings you enter – just to name a few.
Then consider that there is no correlate to the FDA, Consumer Reports, or car crash tests for the curriculum you are handed. There was probably very little testing or revision of it and very little feedback accepted from the few teachers who field tested it. Because of course, teachers will do all that on their own after their district buys it for millions of dollars.
If students are failing and your lessons are causing frustration, for the most part it will be considered your fault and have no connection to the curriculum.
So, what can you do? Well, you can start to educate yourself in the basics of good curriculum design. I do this in my first few training videos for Growing Writers. (A few videos that are 10-15 minutes long and introduce the science behind excellent instruction). With this knowledge, you can at least be more prepared to look at new curriculum and assess it. This understanding will also help you to “just say no” to bad lessons and assessments you are given by your district.
If you teach K-2 writing, you can try using Growing Writers to get an idea of what field-tested curriculum is like.
And I believe we need to start a movement to demand an end to sloppy, profit-driven, unregulated curriculum that is not subject to any proof of effectiveness.
Pondiscio, Robert. “Failing by design: how we make teaching too hard for mere mortals”, fordhaminstitute.org, May 10, 2016.
https://edexcellence.net/articles/failing-by-design-how-we-make-teaching-too-hard-for-mere-mortals