Fixing the Fit - Curriculum Buyer's Remorse [Part 3]

HQIM are really just materials. Some more raw than others.

A few weeks ago, Dr. Google and I diagnosed me with tennis elbow. “Experts” agreed: the websites of the Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic and WebMD described my symptoms exactly and called it tennis elbow. So, when I went to a Physical Therapist, I expected bracing, stretching and strengthening of my elbow. That is, after all, where I knew it hurt.

Thing is, everything’s connected, and the same set of symptoms matches a few root causes, and it turns out my elbow pain was not about my elbow and no amount of elbow-focused activities were going to do anything about it. It’s like, something in my lats was doing something to my shoulder which made me (over)use my bicep to compensate, and enflamed my elbow because (sorry, I stopped paying attention but it made lots of sense at the time), and so the answer is: Yes, ice your elbow. But, to fix this, we have to look higher up the chain of movement into the nerve, bone and muscle systems that move it. The “interconnected infrastructure,” if you will.

I was sure it was an elbow problem, and that an elbow solution would fix it, but I was wrong. Similarly, curriculum mandates were presented as a policy solution to a problem of instructional quality. It turns out, materials don’t do much to address instructional quality. To move the needle on instruction, you usually have to go beyond materials - higher up the chain to the people and processes that use them. The same is true after implementation: you need to be able to see what is on the surface - the lesson, the plan, the data - and understand what operates beneath to make it work.

To be clear, there is such a thing as a curriculum problem. Sometimes, what is sold as HQIM simply isn’t good enough. It has too much teacher talk, not enough writing, boring stories and not enough discussion. The phonemic awareness activities looked great on paper, but take three times as long as they should. `The phonics lessons are out of order or leave things out.

Or, there’s just…

So. Many. Workbooks.

So. Much. Time On Chromebooks.

So. Many comprehension fill-in-the-blanks.

And/Or - So. Few. Reasons for Engagement.

Often, there is no one to make the smart, necessary adjustments that could tailor materials for use because - as in NYC - we let hundreds of reading specialists go so we could afford the new materials we now need them to fix.

We need educators who can see how things are all connected and know how to adjust one to improve another.

We need people at the middle level of leadership who can focus on instruction, but have authority to make bigger changes than a individual teacher is allowed. Someone who can see the big picture enough to do a fit check, and who knows the systems enough to fix the fit.

Curriculum is only as good as its alignment and coherence within the school’s infrastructure for instruction. We need folks who can literally tailor (cut, add, rearrange) materials and plans to fit without diluting or distorting them.

What not to wear (teach)

Say there is a phonics routine that is written to take 10 minutes, but routinely takes 25 so we never get through the rest of the lesson. Can we responsibly cut some of the practice, limit time for turn-and-talks, or spread it across two days? Teachers make these kinds of decisions all the time because school life happens. The assembly went long, do we do half the lesson, or speed the lesson up? It’s Fire Drill Friday (not a thing, but you get the point), do we skip it, or modify it? But when we know we will need to make this modification over and over again in every classroom over the whole year, the impact of that choice accumulates.

It might seem logical to just shave 1-2 minutes off of each lesson step to make a 40 minute lesson fit in a 30 minute slot in the schedule, but someone has to be there to know that the script is repetitive in the beginning, or that students are not usually ready for independent practice until day 2, and that preserving practice time once students are ready for it is the main priority. They have to be able to zoom out across the grades, the year, the unit and the week while zooming in to what it would look, feel and sound like in real time. They have to reverse engineer the curriculum. Not deliver, or even write it, but understand why it is the way it is, and how to match the intentions with the reality, not just in one instance, but across grades and over time.

Teaching with materials

I have often heard people say that we do not need every teacher to be a good curriculum writer. It seems like duplicated work, reinventing wheels, etc. to have each teacher plan each lesson every year. I think those people are the ones that think teaching is a transfer activity rather than an interaction. “I have stuff, you open skull, I pour in stuff. Maybe repeat several times to get it through if skull is thick.” Even if the content is the same, the answer a lesson plan provides to the question, “how will I teach this stuff to these people in this place at this time with this stuff,” changes.

That does not mean people can’t work from a shared or pre-existing plan. The challenge is that teaching from someone else’s plan is like reading lines of a literal script. Just like you need to understand the character’s motivation, their backstory and what is going to happen next in order to deliver it in a way that is acting-not-just-reading, you need to see the lesson in 3D in your mind to teach-not-just-read it. There’s (still) a multi-step process for planning and it is one that requires seeing what each prescribed tool and lesson move is and could be. Seeing it in multiple dimensions.

This is why the quest for fidelity-as-strict-adherence-to-a-plan is usually a dead end, and admonishing teachers to teach their materials “with fidelity” most often displays the absence of understanding, not the presence of leadership. Teaching a lesson exactly as written very often misses the reason it was written that way. Understanding exactly what is written will help you deliver it in a way that is authentic, faithful even, to the lesson’s design in your context. It may be helpful to think of this as being faithful to the students (responsive to evidence of learning), to the intent of the lesson rather than the words of the script. Or as using curriculum materials as scaffolds rather than shackles.

This is very different work from planning. It’s very different work from teaching. Some teachers may not have developed this skill set or used it recently. Reverse engineering lessons, sometimes called “unpacking” or “internalizing” them means making them your own each time. Some people do like this better than planning from scratch. Others wish they had the freedom to create rather than inhabiting someone else’s creation. In some cases, it’s actually harder to animate someone else’s plan than build something from scratch on your own. But, this is what we are asking people to do when we implement materials. Implementing implements, so to speak.

We have to be careful of mixing up the message that we should use these tools well, which means using them well for these people, in this place, at this time (FTPITPATT), with the idea we should use them exactly as written.

As soon as someone says something like the statement above, I observe what I call a one-two switcheroo of emotions.

Step 1: nods of agreement. yes, of course. humans are in charge. materials don’t use us. differentiate! be responsive! go-go teacher power!
Step 2: fear behind the eyes. wait, who exactly gets to make these decisions, what do they know and are they going to ruin it?

Wait, didn’t we teacher-proof?

HQIM policies made it sound like we could hold the quality of a lesson constant by pre-selecting materials. As every competition show on the Food Network shows us every day, you cannot do that.

For the millionth time, maybe a little piece of us thought we were getting rid of human error, but leaving in humanity. As if that’s even a thing. We trust ourselves - maybe, sometimes. We trust some idea of science - we think. We trust authority - some of it, maybe. But we maybe don’t trust each of our abilities to do things right. There’s good reason for this: we’ve been burned before. Like, every time someone writes a think piece about NAEP results — which has become a genre unto itself with recognizable genre-specific features like the:

OH MY GAWD DID YOU KNOW NO ONE CAN READ!?

and the

EVERY OTHER COUNTRY IS GETTING AHEAD OF US AND THAT IS NOT OK!?

and the

SCHOOL PEOPLE ARE SO CLUELESS IT’S INSANE?!

and the

WAIT, BASIC IS OK, DON’T PANIC, BUT NO ONE WANTS TO BE BASIC THO, RIGHT?!

We layer on authenticators and officiators to bureaucratize decisions we are uncomfortable with. And yet, even with a state seal of approval and a science of reading stamp on the cover, there are still decisions we need to make and we’re wondering if we’re really allowed to make them.

There seems to be an added level of fear or anxiety around teaching with fidelity when states have approved sets of materials, therefore we assume that means they approved everything about them and that any deviation is disqualifying. We imagine (hope?) that someone, somewhere knows better.

The truth is that some states didn’t even view the programs they approved, they just rated them based on answers on submitted forms. Even when the materials themselves were part of a review, it is usually a sample of a unit (a sample of a sample), not all units of all grades that are adopted. There are no individual magic words, books or lessons that cannot be changed. But there are patterns and routines and places where content spirals and skills integrate. We need to be able to see what elements are load-bearing, which create/threaten the structural integrity of the lessons over time, and what can be easily adjusted. This requires knowledge and perspective, the ability to use a zoom lens well: zooming in to individual students’ responses and zooming out to the grade level, school and societal implications of what we learn, what we teach and how.

Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.

-Bruce Lee

When martial artists demonstrate forms they are performing patterns of movement that have been learned, taught and performed over hundreds of years the same way that classical music can be written, played and replayed over hundreds of years by different musicians. There are technical specifications for every last detail down to where you look and how you breath.

Somewhere around the 100th time you practice a form, you should be able to envision the combat sequences it has hidden in plain sight (the purpose of the movement) as you do it, and somewhere around the 1000th time, people watching you should be able to see the opponents you are fighting too. That is knowing the text in all its dimensions.

Teaching from a set of materials is not art. In most (all?) cases, what passes as HQIM simply cannot hold our humanity well enough to support that kind of practice or investment. But, the idea that implementation requires multidimensional understanding still holds. We aren’t doing it until we know exactly why we’re doing what we’re doing, and do it in a way that obviates that knowledge.

That means the way around human error in teaching is not circumventing human decision-making in material selection/creations. The way around human error is actually through: by investment in humans and their development.

A final word

In some cases, people are disappointed with the switch to HQIM because they thought Balanced Literacy and Structured Literacy were polar opposites, and switching between them would mean a total revamp of business as usual. If your main sources of information are news and social media, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Balanced Literacy= Business As Usual, which is BAD-and-WRONG :( and Structured Literacy= Definitely gonna be different, which is GOOD-and-RIGHT :).

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

However, sometimes alignment to scientific evidence for instruction does not look or sound like what we imaged. This mixed message is the topic of Part-4. Coming soon(ish).