5 Ways to Rethink Curriculum in 2022 and Beyond
It’s no secret that curriculum writing is a difficult process. It is often left to a small group of people, on rushed timelines, who are trying their best to meet their state/national standards and connect to pre-existing resources (textbooks) and assessments.
The first time I participated in a curriculum re-write we had 3 months to reshape all of the learning that was supposed to happen for students in English class from 6th-12th grade.
I frantically looked for resources, pulled other curriculum examples, and tried to read through new books to see what could “fit” into our “new” curriculum. After those three months of work, it looked very similar. Minor changes, most of the same resources, and a scope and sequence preparing students for a series of assessments throughout the year.
I didn’t think much of it at the time, in fact, I thought this was the way that you wrote curriculum and was ok with the status quo as a fairly new teacher still trying to wrap my head around our current curriculum.
Flash forward after 15 years of working on curriculum as a teacher, instructional coach, curriculum coordinator, and Director of Learning - I realize how awful that first re-write was, and have experienced much better ways to craft and develop learning experiences through curriculum writing.
The pandemic has made everyone in education think about what we need to cut, keep, and create. Whether you are heading into a curriculum re-write, revision, or just thinking about your current scope and sequence, here are five ways to rethink curriculum that I share in my new book Adaptable:
1. Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Doors
In 1990, Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop published an essay about the importance of providing young readers with diverse books that reflect the “multicultural nature of the world” in which we live.
In the essay, Dr. Bishop coined the phrase “windows, mirrors and sliding glass doors” to explain how children see themselves in books and how they can also learn about the lives of others through literature. Here is how she puts it:
“Books are sometimes windows, offering views of a world that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects back to us, and in that reflection, we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”
As a former middle-school and high-school teacher, instructional coach, curriculum administrator, and director of learning, I’ve been part of a number of curriculum revisions that sought to bring a variety of multicultural books and authors into the classroom. When I spoke with Erica Buddington (CEO of Langston League) on The Backwards Podcast, we chatted about some of the mistakes I made along the way, as well as the important work Erica is doing at Langston League to make curriculum (not just books) mirrors, windows, and sliding doors.
The focus of Erica’s current work with Langston League is to create mirrors. To be specific, a curriculum full of mirrors.
And as Dr. Bishop goes on to say in her essay, this work is for all of our students:
“Children from dominant social groups have always found their mirrors in books, but they, too, have suffered from the lack of availability of books about others. They need the books as windows onto reality, not just on imaginary worlds. They need books that will help them understand the multicultural nature of the world they live in, and their place as a member of just one group, as well as their connections to all other humans.”
So, how do we do that? How do we create a curriculum that goes beyond programs, textbooks, and “standards” that often lead schools right back to those same programs and textbooks that support test-prep?
As Erica Buddington mentioned on The Backwards Podcast, this is hard work. Not only is it hard work, but it also takes serious time to develop an adaptable curriculum. Buddington explains how they start the curriculum work at Langston League by getting to know the community where the curriculum is being created. They work with the community, with the students, the families, and the educators to create a curriculum with a purpose.
2. Performance Tasks > Standards
People care about what we are measured on. We focus on it, and we try to improve it. This is not only teachers, this impacts every person in any field.
In a recent HBR article they talk about how the measures in other fields (CEOs, Medicine, Science etc) have the exact same impact:
It can’t be that simple, you might argue— but psychologists and economists will tell you it is. Human beings adjust behavior based on the metrics they’re held against. Anything you measure will impel a person to optimize his score on that metric. What you measure is what you’ll get. Period.
This phenomenon plays out time and again in research studies.
There is no way around it, except to change what we measure. Or, to change the game entirely.
This is why I cared about tests so much as a young teacher. I was caught up in a circle of practice that was based on some misconceptions on how to improve the metric I was judged on as a teacher. It is important to note, I was trying to do what was best for my students this entire time. I believe almost all teachers have the best interest of students, and that their practice is predicated on preparing students in any way possible.
Author and Curriculum Expert Jay McTighe shares the misconceptions that led me down this test prep trap as a young teacher, and what many of us commonly believe as the reasons for preparing students for a test that we don’t believe in.
Misconception #1 – The best (and only) way to improve test scores is to practice the test.
Here McTighe shares an analogy of the yearly physical exam with your doctor. Although the physician examines and measures your health, spending all your time trying to prepare for this physical with practice on the strategies would not make much sense.
It would be thought silly to practice the physical exam as a way to improve one’s health. But this confusion is precisely what we see in schools all over North America. Local educators, fearful of results, focus on the indicators, not their causes. The format of the test misleads us, in other words.
Misconception #2 – Standardized test items involve primarily recall and recognition, and thus drill and practice will be the most effective method to prepare students for them.
Grant Wiggins (2013) points out the flaw in this reasoning:
“Even though the test format requires a selected response, it does not mean that the tested knowledge is necessarily simple. The [format] deceives you into thinking that since you are mimicking the format of the test, you are therefore mimicking the rigor of the test. But data show the opposite conclusively: local tests are often less rigorous than state and national tests even when they mimic the format.”
Too often, the information revealed by test prep exercises identifies whether students have chosen the “correct” answer rather than helping teachers determine if they have a conceptual understanding of the underlying concepts and skills and can apply (transfer) those.
It seems that testing students does not make them better test-takers, keep their retention, or improve their ability to achieve high scores on those state, AP, or SAT type assessments.
McTighe, who co-authored Understanding By Design with Grant Wiggins, firmly believes that Curriculum 3.0 will focus much more on Performance Tasks and much less on standards (that are often connected to traditional assessments):
McTighe shares some characteristics of performance tasks that promote transfer (and some examples in the full article):
Performance tasks call for the application of knowledge and skills, not just recall or recognition.
Performance tasks are open-ended and typically do not yield a single, correct answer.
Performance tasks establish novel and authentic contexts for performance.
Performance tasks provide evidence of understanding via transfer.
Performance tasks are multi-faceted.
Performance tasks can integrate two or more subjects as well as 21st century skills.
Performances on open-ended tasks are evaluated with established criteria and rubrics.
The key to making any performance task, relevant and meaningful, is to be able to fail the performance and continue learning. Performance tasks can fall into the same category of tests if they are not authentic. As McTighe points out, “While any performance by a learner might be considered a performance task (e.g., tying a shoe or drawing a picture), it is useful to distinguish between the application of specific and discrete skills (e.g., dribbling a basketball) from genuine performance in context (e.g., playing the game of basketball in which dribbling is one of many applied skills).”
3. Transfer As the Focus
What is transfer? Here is how authors Julie Stern, Krista Ferraro, Kayla Duncan, and Trevor Aleo define it in their new book, Learning That Transfers: Designing Curriculum for a Changing World.
Learning Transfer: Using our previous learning to understand or unlock a completely new situation.
This is generally the goal of education. Not to “prepare” our students for something that we can foresee, but instead, help them to prepare themselves for situations neither of us could predict.
The authors argue that not only can we teach for transfer, but we can also do so while teaching “less”:
What if we selected the most powerful, transferable, organizing ideas from our curricular documents, and anchored everything we explored in those concepts? Could this help educators turn off the conveyor belt of “covering” an endless list of objectives while also ensuring students are prepared to tackle topics they encounter without a teacher’s guidance? Yes, it can. We can both teach less and prepare our students to tackle more.
To do this, we can use a simple framework for teaching concepts and their connections. Enter the ACT: The Learning Transfer Mental Model.
ACT is a powerful way to reframe the learning process (all images from Learning That Transfers).
Step 1: Design learning experiences that help students acquire knowledge of single concepts.
Step 2: Connect those concepts in a relationship.
Step 3: Transfer those concepts and connections to new situations.
When we focus on Transfer as the main goal of learning, we understand that students need multiple opportunities to show their learning and demonstrate their understanding.
4. Universal Design For Learning
If we can agree (or come to an understanding) that part of our role in curriculum development is to help our students prepare for the unknown, then you may be like I was a few years ago and say, “What’s the point then!?”
Honestly, with the world, and education system, changing so frequently we are often stuck between trying to teach what was always taught, vs doing everything entirely new.
There is a common ground and process we can take to use a backward design approach to develop an adaptable curriculum.
As Michelle Lia says in her NCEA Brief, Universal Design for Learning: Getting Started with Backward Design:
We use Backward Design daily. If you cook, you decide what you will cook, what ingredients you will need, in which pot to cook it, for how long and so on. If you are a musician, before you set you decide which songs to play, in what order, when you will take a break, even what the lighting will look like. All of the tasks we do require us to think ahead and plan. Why? So we get what we want. Teaching and learning is no different.
Backward design is best used in curriculum development when pairing the process alongside Universal Design for Learning (UDL). So, what is UDL, and how can it help in curriculum writing?
UDL is Universal Design for Learning, an education framework based on decades of research in neuroscience and endorsed by the Every Student Succeeds Act. UDL is considered best practice for teaching all students in an inclusive learning environment.
The goal of UDL is to create learners who are purposeful & motivated, resourceful & knowledgeable, and strategic & goal oriented, in other words, expert learners.
With UDL, teachers transition their role to facilitator, removing barriers to learning by giving students options and choices that empower them to take control of their own learning and reach rigorous state-standards. To universally design lessons, teachers must provide multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation, and multiple means of action and expression.
Allison Posey of CAST, Inc provides three guiding principles when bringing UDL into lesson planning and curriculum design in her article at Understood:
UDL can transform your classroom practice. However, there is no “magic box” of tools and resources in a UDL classroom. Instead, when you integrate UDL, you’ll notice the following:
There is a strong focus on goals.In a UDL classroom, there is a strong focus on learning goals for students. Teachers and students talk about why those goals matter and how they support challenging, meaningful opportunities to learn. You’ll also see students creating their own learning goals.
There is a focus on variability.In a UDL learning environment, differences in experience, knowledge, and ability are expected. Flexible options are built into lessons for all students. That allows you and your students to talk about how different tools or resources support them as they work toward the goal. It also means not all of your students will be doing the same thing at the same time.
There is a focus on the barriers in the design of the environment. In a UDL classroom, the focus is on how to change the design of the curricular goals, assessments, methods, and materials — not on how to “fix” the students. For example, you may have asked yourself, “Why aren’t my students engaged?” UDL would encourage you to reframe the question: “How can the design of this lesson better engage students?”
5. Attention
You may be wondering why I have “Attention” on this list. At first, it may not seem to fit in with the other four shared. However, attention may be the most important piece of the curriculum puzzle.
For too long we have started our curriculum writing with a focus on the standards and “What” kids need to learn in our class, grade, etc.
In a compliance-driven education setting, that makes sense.
Today, we have no chance of helping students learn when we focus on the standards and compliance first.
Their attention is being pulled in so many directions at all different times, that if we don’t catch their attention, then no learning will happen.
Here is Peter Nilsson describing the four stages to learning on his blog, Sense and Sensation:
So how do people learn? What are the mechanics of memory? Can we distill thousands of articles and books to something that is manageable, digestible, and applicable to our classrooms?
Yes. In brief, the cognitive process of learning has four basic stages:
1. Attention: the filter through which we experience the world
2. Encoding: how we process what our attention admits into the mind
3. Storage: what happens once information enters the brain
4. Retrieval: the recall of that information or behavior
Almost everything we do or know, we learn through these stages, for our learning is memory, and the bulk of our memory is influenced by these four processes: what we pay attention to, how we encode it, what happens to it in storage, and when and how we retrieve it.
Let’s start with Attention. Learning begins with attention. Most of the time we pay attention for two reasons: Interest or Necessity.
Our brain is flooded with information from a multi-sensory world that is throwing sounds, sights, feelings, and everything else at us in rapid succession. With all of this information coming at us, we tend to pay attention to things that we are curious and interested about, or information that has a direct correlation to our physical, emotional, or psychological well-being.
I would argue that starting with “Why” students are learning or a “reason” for learning is more important than the standards right now. We can connect the standards after we have a real reason for learning because if we do it the other way it won’t matter how many standards we hit if students’ aren’t paying attention.
Next Steps
Check out my new book Adaptable if you are interested in learning more about crafting an adaptable curriculum and developing flexible learning experiences. And share below in the comments how you’ve been doing this work over the years! Our stories lift each other up and help us rethink what learning could look like!
