Dear Teachers: Don’t Write Curriculum. Demand It.

I was 39 when I started teaching high school social studies. Before that, I had lectured and conducted seminar discussions in a university setting for over a decade. So, assume that I knew almost nothing about teaching.

When I started, my department chair – now my 4QM partner – assigned me two courses, premodern world history and modern world history. It was a typical assignment, and came with the usual provisions: a textbook for each course, a department library containing some volumes of primary sources and reference materials, a set of atlases, and a mentor. Curriculum? Not exactly. My colleagues were lovely, and the ones who taught the same courses shared materials generously.

That first year I did two jobs, though it took me twenty years to realize it. First, I taught students, which, as it turns out, was mostly new to me. That happened every day in the classroom, during reflections and observation debriefings, and as I read, graded, and commented on student work. Second, I planned, which meant writing lessons, units, and assessments. That mostly happened in the evenings and weekends.

Am I crazy, or is this crazy?

Here’s the alternative: I’m 39 and basically new to teaching. My department chair tells me I’m going to teach premodern and modern world history. Then he gives me a curriculum for each course and a mentor who has taught this curriculum before. My mentor shows me how to interpret and adapt the curriculum for my students. My planning consists of reading the curriculum in advance and doing the exercises I’m about to assign to students so that I’m prepared to coach and correct them. Most of my energy, at least for those first few daunting years, is spent learning how to be a teacher rather than a curriculum writer.

This now seems obvious to me, and the alternative cruel and counterproductive: schools and districts must provide every teacher with a high-quality curriculum for every course they teach. That curriculum should include daily lesson plans and all the materials teachers will need to teach and students will need to learn, including assessments and answer keys. The curriculum should align with what we know about how children and other humans learn and with the academic standards appropriate to the subject. It should be clear and simple to use, with predictable format and structure, and leave space for teachers to adapt, accommodate and scaffold as necessary for their students.

Teachers should demand to receive such a curriculum when they are hired to teach students.

But: shouldn’t curriculum be written by teachers, people who understand the classroom and have taught real students? Yes. But not by all teachers as a condition of employment. And, for sure, not by new teachers as a condition of employment.

Teachers already have a job: teaching. They work all day, in the classroom, providing and guiding instruction, giving feedback, managing behavior and social interactions. In order to do all that, they need to prepare for class the next day, grade and comment on student work, and communicate with families and other educational professionals. By loading “write your own curriculum” into “prepare for class,” we’ve made the teaching job absurdly demanding.

And, by gratuitously lumping curriculum writing in with teaching, we’ve also denigrated the former. Curriculum writing is a skillful activity distinct from classroom teaching. Skillful curriculum writing requires research, planning, and, well, writing. It requires the ability to design coherent lessons that fit together into meaningful units and units that fit together into a coherent course. Content knowledge needs to be chunked, spiraled and assessed. Skillful practice needs to be integrated into content lessons and scaffolded and sequenced in a way that makes sense for the way human brains work at whatever grade level you’re writing curriculum for. Assessments, formative and summative, need to be integrated and paced for maximum impact on student learning. All of this is demanding and time-consuming work.

It stands to reason that some teachers will, over time, as they master their teaching job, develop the capacity to write high-quality curriculum. The ones that do, should, just as the ones who master classroom techniques should teach them to others. Teaching should have a career ladder, like all professions.

After a couple of decades in the classroom, I’m now writing curriculum full time. It’s extremely demanding. It’s taken three of us, each with decades of classroom experience and obsessive reading habits, more than a year to write one complete year of curriculum. It’s far better than anything I wrote myself as I was muddling through my other full-time job. It’s exactly the kind of support I needed back then.

I have no doubt now that I’d have become a much better classroom teacher if I’d devoted all of the time I spent trying to write premodern and modern world history courses early in my career, more or less from scratch, to interpreting a curriculum for my students, paying attention to how they responded, and assiduously giving them frequent, actionable feedback on their work.

I can’t start over, but new teachers can start right. If you’re new to teaching, know that your late nights and chronic anxiety are not your fault – and that even if the world were better structured for new content teachers, you’d still have plenty of work and anxiety. But it would be clearer that the school that hired you wanted you to succeed if they gave you all the tools you needed to teach well, including a complete curriculum for every course you teach. We should all demand it.

Gary Shiffman (gary.shiffman@4qmteaching.net)