Asking the WHY of curriculum
During the pandemic, educator-consultant Will Richardson published the following tweet:
“What if we just took every piece of the curriculum that we currently teach and just asked "why?" How much of it would fall under the category "Because it's required to make sense of the world today and to thrive in the future"? #justaskin
The tweet generated a lively discussion, in which several educators pointed to the strict adherence to content and established curriculum that often occur in schools. As a result, educators often complain that they “don’t have time” to be creative, innovative, or try new things in their curriculum. This perceived lack of time often centers on the pressure teachers feel to meet prescribed content standards to prepare students for standardized assessments.
And yet…
The COVID-19 crisis forced a rapid transition to remote learning, and standardized assessment was either eliminated or significantly altered. Teachers quickly found traditional standardized assessment impractical because students could easily cheat online. Even as students returned to the classroom, many teachers were reluctant to use in-school time to administer formal tests and quizzes because they felt hard-pressed to “cover” required curriculum content.
In any event, in-class instruction was reduced significantly in many parts of the country as students were not be coming to school every day. Moreover, in physical classrooms, time was spent on enforcing physical distancing policies, the logistics of moving from place-to-place, as well as sanitizing classrooms and materials. Teachers had to figure out how to adapt their curriculum to a blended/hybrid learning environment, all the while knowing that students (and teachers) did not want to spend an entire day staring at Zoom screens. All these different scenarios and logistics amounted to less time for teachers to spend teaching. More than ever, curriculum decisions had to be made about what content is truly essential for students to learn.
But, were they?
As a former AP U.S. History teacher, I know the pressure of teaching a vast amount of content in what seems like a paltry amount of time. My colleagues and I became frustrated with teaching content ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’. So, as a department, we decided to redesign our AP courses. We cut roughly 20% of in-class teaching time and roughly 25% of AP content. The result? Student AP exam scores increased. Not only that, one of my students scored a perfect 5 even though he missed two months of school, including the American Revolution unit, the topic of the Documents-Based Question. How was this possible?
In our course redesign, my colleagues and I decided to focus on implementing an inquiry-based approach. Our aim was to provide a framework for learning that helped students make connections between seemingly disparate content. We wanted them to think critically about those connections and draw their own conclusions. So, rather than slogging through the chronologically arranged content in our textbook, we established a core set of critical, inter-related essential questions as a framework for a problem-based course:
What is an American?
How has capitalism shaped America?
What is the proper relationship between the American government and its citizens?
What is the role of race in America?
What is America’s place in the world?
Though we substantially reduced the amount of content we covered, we also reduced the amount of content we had to prepare to teach. This allowed us to spend more time as teachers changing our instructional approach. For example, instead of focusing on helping students to memorize information for multiple-choice questions (50% of the AP exam), we focused on helping students develop their critical thinking skills to better analyze source documents and respond to unseen essay questions (the other 50% of the exam). Students may not have studied Millard Filmore (the 13th President of the United States), but they were able to craft and communicate creative and well-reasoned arguments to essay questions. They were also able to effectively analyze sources that they had never seen before.
That student who got a perfect score on the AP exam even though he missed two months of school? He told me he was able to figure out the American Revolution documents because the process was “what we had been doing all year”. Throughout the course, he was being challenged to make sense of new and disparate sources of information. As a result, he understood how to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize diverse sources and make connections between them. He was able to make meaning of entirely new documents on a topic he had not actively studied.
As teachers, we taught less ‘content’, but students learned more. During the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, educators have had to rethink (and likely reduce) content. But, less can be more. As educators examine their curriculum, I hope they have the confidence to ask “why?” of every piece of content in the curriculum. As suggested by educators Mehta and Peeples in a blog post, we have the opportunity to “Marie Kondo” the curriculum. In other words, we should spend time to identify what content will facilitate authentic, meaningful learning experiences and “spark joy” in students. Focusing on what is critical content, determining what is essential information for students to know and understand in our uncertain digital age, will help students to be more successful as learners and future citizens.