Should Teachers Do Curriculum?

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Sorry I didn’t hit publish on Wednesday! I saw it in drafts when I started getting my links together and realized my mistake. I’ll post this instead of links today. As a reminder, while caring for my newborn I am going to be writing these posts day-of and without much editing because, well, I am tired. Error rates will be higher than usual until sleep stability resumes.

Teachers Doing Curriculum?

One thing that comes up when I read about or discuss teaching is the comment that teachers should not be writing or creating curriculum.

I don’t take this as an insult to teachers. This commenter makes a second point that one job is enough and the implication here is that teaching is in and of itself the job. There’s certainly a great deal of skill and knowledge required to teach effectively outside of the knowledge of the curriculum. Teachers need to know about child/adolescent psychological development, learning theories such as information processing, classroom management, and much more. It’s not necessarily dismissive or denigrating to teachers to suggest that this, plus knowledge of the content they need to teach, is enough to of a job. My thing is, I don’t think this is realistic for a few reasons.

My first objection is that the distinction between what is curriculum and what is the practice of teaching is not very clear-cut. Let’s imagine two math teachers teaching the same course to similar groups of kids. The only difference is that one teacher adheres very strictly to deadlines with penalties for late work while the other allows students many chances to turn in work for full credit. The teacher who adheres to deadlines makes the case that deadlines are an important component of what students need to learn in school. They must be timely and hand in assignments on time because that will be expected of them in life beyond school. The teacher who does away with deadlines argues that his job is to teach kids math, not how to be on time for some job down the line. In his view, the most important thing is that his students get enough chances to learn, say, factoring polynomials, and if some take longer or need more chances, so be it.

Most of the time we hear about this distinction it turns into an argument about which perspective is correct. In a sense, both are true. We all want kids to be timely and want them to learn to factor polynomials and while not always mutually exclusive, the difference really comes down to the kids who don’t learn to factor polynomials very quickly. In a sense, the difference between these two teachers is in how much they value the students mastering math content vs how much they value students learning to be timely. That is a choice about curriculum. After all, at its very core the point of curriculum is to decide what should be taught. Should we prioritize values we associate with success in life such as timeliness, or should we prioritize getting all students to master the content? “Turn in your assignments on time” isn’t part of the intended mathematics education curriculum for algebra but it’s a lesson being taught to kids nonetheless and that’s my point here. It’s not always easy to draw a line between what is curriculum and what is not.

That also brings up my second point: teachers are always making decisions about curriculum. Like the two teachers in the example, policies around late work are not just classroom management. They’re part of assessment (points off if you’re late is an assessment!). They’re part of a choice about valuing content vs valuing other important lessons kids learn while in school. Teachers have to make these tradeoffs all the time and it’s naive to think teachers don’t develop curriculum in some regard.

Beyond those reasons, though, it’s worth taking note of a classic teacher knowledge typology and the implications it has for teaching as a practice and for curriculum.

Teacher Knowledge Typologies

In a classic article about teacher preparation, Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle survey the literature on teaching and say there are three conceptions of teachers’ knowledge that inform how teacher prep programs think about teachers. I’d argue that since 1999 when this article was published, we could broaden that to say there are three conceptions of knowledge that inform how society thinks about teachers.

In short, the three are knowledge-for-practice, knowledge-in-practice, and knowledge-of-practice. Cochran-Smith and Lytle give us a semi-helpful table to get a bit more detail on each component. (I say semi-helpful because they make the table but leave it empty and make you go read all the long stuff to figure out what goes in each square.) I’ll reproduce it here with a bit of modification.

The authors are trying to address two specific problems which are somewhat related to my point today. First, they see a disconnect between views of knowledge about teaching and learning. On one hand there are bodies of disciplinary knowledge and research-driven best practices which hold that knowledge is independent of any one person. These are, however, going to address what should happen on average based on statistical understandings of distributions of students. On the other hand, there are experienced practitioners who’ve developed expertise in themselves through their many years of working. Under this view, the most important thing a teacher needs is time in the classroom doing the job. Knowledge is embedded in the teacher and is purely constructivist. There’s no room for “evidence based” because the only valid evidence is what an expert teacher has learned through experience. These views are essentially always in conflict, and you can’t really prepare teachers for both realities. The second problem they see is one of teachers’ professionalism. Under the knowledge-for-practice paradigm, teachers simply aren’t professionals. They implement and facilitate expert consensus, research based best practices, and directives from authorities. But, under knowledge-in-practice teachers are only professionals if they stick around and become experienced. New teachers never have any expertise, nor is there any space for research and policy so teachers are best “shutting the door” and doing what they want in their own view. It’s not really a proper professionalism because there is no professional community between different expert teachers.

In the authors’ view, teachers are best served when they are made aware of both perspectives and taught to 1) critically inquire about the tensions between the two that they face in their work and 2) form relationships with other teachers, their students, parents, school leaders, etc. to grow and develop practices that are locally responsive but also incorporate external expertise. That’s knowledge-of-practice. It’s sad to note that about 2 years after the article was published No Child Left Behind kicked off a decade and a half of standardization, centralization, and commercialization. The authors were somewhat aware of this potential, though, because they write that knowledge-for-practice is “one of the most prevalent conceptions of teacher learning” and that “many of the most widespread initiatives for improving teacher learning are grounded in a conception of knowledge-for-practice.”

In The Curricular Weeds

What does this all have to do with whether or not teachers should be doing curriculum? I think this typology can be easily and accurately applied to curriculum and let us see that society had three different versions of curriculum. Not only that, but just as knowledge-for-teaching became the dominant conception for education policymakers, a vision of curriculum as the domain of experts and as authoritative knowledge is also the dominant conception of curriculum. I’m going to call this first view curriculum-as-object (borrowing from the philosophical objectivity here). That is, the curriculum is objective, is created by experts, and contains everything experts and authorities believe is appropriate for kids to learn. The counterposing view is curriculum-as-subject. Far from being authoritative, curriculum is malleable and meant as a tool in the hands of practitioners who use it as they see fit based on their judgement. Knowledge in this second view is located in the teachers and planners, not in the curriculum itself. It is “merely” the content. Is there a third category that acts as a corollary to knowledge-of-teaching? I think so and I would probably call it curriculum-as-discipline. Rather than see curriculum as authoritative or as a tool, I think you have to see curriculum as a set of socially mediated practices. I’m going to leave that as an open inquiry at the moment. Maybe that’s good for a follow-up post. Let’s first consider teachers’ roles under curriculum-as-object and curriculum-as-subject. Let’s consider two cases of now-maligned curriculum decisions.

Case Study 1: Lucy Calkins Units of Study

I’ve written before about the science of reading and mentioned Lucy Calkins and her Units of Study Curriculum. If you need brushing up, the story we’re being told is that we were all “sold a story” about reading instruction that minimized phonics and instead followed a set of practices that are not evidence based and not drawn from research which led to a generation of kids not learning how to read. The figurehead of this failure is Lucy Calkins whose (now defunct) Reading and Writing Institute at Columbia University created a K-6 reading and writing curriculum called The Units of Study. As someone who has attended some of Lucy’s trainings and workshops, let me tell you, they had plenty of evidence on hand to show the efficacy of the Units of Study. You want standardized tests? Lucy could show you scores for days indicating kids learning from her curriculum outperformed everyone else. You want to hear from teachers and principals? They were there with you, talking about how great things were and asking questions directly to the developers and authors of the curriculum. (And, honestly, how often do teachers get to be on a first-name basis with curriculum developers?) Lucy would bring in major education researchers from around the world, such as Dan Willingham or Tim Shanahan, to assist in updating and revising parts of the curriculum and those researchers would themselves have data to back up what Lucy was doing.

Why do I bring this up? Because Lucy’s curriculum was definitely in the curriculum-as-object category. In fact, her Units of Study were so authoritative that they contained scripts for teachers to read from so they could deliver instruction with maximum fidelity. I know first-hand that many teachers hated this curriculum because it was so authoritarian. While Lucy and the Units of Study may have a reputation as being “vibes based,” it was perceived by teachers as anything but, and sold by the Reading and Writing project as evidence based. Not only that, but it became a popular curriculum because people in authority — Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein — while also being well positioned to lead teachers into the NCLB and Common Core era with a curriculum already aligned and standardized.

This is a really important point! Prior to adopting Calkins’ Units of Study, Klein announced NYC would be using a curriculum called Month by Month Phonics, but they later abandoned the curriculum because it turned out not to be phonics based. With egg on their face, the Bloomberg mayoral administration turned to federal guidance.

The final piece of the puzzle is that Calkins had a close partnership with the publisher Hineman who published all of the Units of Study as well as many accompanying curriculum materials and classroom libraries. So, we have standardization both federally and locally, we have centralization under an expert-driven curriculum and with the authority of the city’s government, and we have commercialization through the curriculum publisher. All of this aligns with a view in which teachers aren’t considered knowledgeable or professional. All of this aligns with curriculum-as-object whereby expertise and authority are independent entities residing in and empowering the curriculum which acts on teachers and students and schools.

Interestingly, the Science of Reading advocacy is operating in precisely the same way, arguing that what maters most is the weight of the evidence and that teachers and schools should be required to use highly scripted curricula that must be taught with fidelity. Teachers are, once again, the subjects with the curriculum as the objective, scientific, and authoritative approach.

Case Study 2: California Math Framework and BOARS

You may recall that California passed a reformed mathematics framework in 2023. One last minute omission was the new data science courses, rejected by the University of California BOARS committee. This was one of two sites of controversy (the other being a recommendation against algebra in 8th grade) for the new framework. What was so controversial about the data science courses? Well,

A lot of this was downstream from a controversy over the work of Stanford Education professor Jo Boaler. Hechinger Report explains that 

Critics went so far as to equate Boaler with Calkins. The dispute between one set of professors and another led the BOARS committee to reject the data science course as an advanced math course equivalent to algebra II, instead treating it more like computer science, an elective course.

The stakes of curriculum seem high but what this case illustrates is that policymakers often defer to subject-matter experts and disciplinary experts over experts in education. In Boaler’s work (not taking a side, here, just observing the qualities of her work) we see an approach to curriculum-as-subject, as a tool or even a plaything for teachers and students. She’s written a book saying as much. That view was rejected in California at the behest of authority, of “university professors in math and math-heavy majors”. I’m not saying they’re wrong to object. I’m not qualified to adjudicate what counts as adequate math preparation for advanced math in college. What I want to point out is who gets to influence decisions, policy, and the opportunities that students have in classrooms and how the way those people view curriculum tells us a lot about how they view teaching and learning.

What these case studies show us is how curriculum lives within the same tensions as teacher preparation. Where does curriculum come from? Does it come from academic experts and authority figures? Do teachers have a role in developing and interpreting curriculum in response to student needs, or do we insist on fidelity to what the experts have created? Can we treat teachers as professionals with their own knowledge and judgement under an expert-driven authoritarian view of curriculum? If not, what are teachers for? Perhaps we need only facilitators, babysitters, for automated curricula that deliver expert-derived content.

Yet, what do we do when reforms fail? How should teachers respond if they are implementing curricula with fidelity and students are still struggling, as many readers did under the Units of Study? If curriculum is not a subject, if it cannot be modified, judged lacking, and improved upon by the adults in the classrooms, do we simply wait for some NAEP scores to show us something isn’t working? Somewhere we must expect an alternative intervention when local conditions indicate one is needed. We’ve implemented bad curriculum before and will do so again. If we don’t equip our teachers with the ability to evaluate, judge, and alter what they teach, then we’re ultimately sentencing students to a sub-par education.

Thanks for reading!