How We Teach Gets Too Much Attention — How Much We Teach Doesn't Get Enough
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that the education profession obsesses over instructional methods while neglecting the equally important question of curriculum coverage.
Key Takeaways
- Method obsession distracts from content - Debates about pedagogy often crowd out discussions about what and how much students actually need to learn
- Coverage matters - Students can't think critically about content they were never taught
- Curriculum and pacing deserve attention - How much material students cover in a year has an enormous impact on their preparation for what comes next
Transcript
One major way that curriculum works is by increasing the depth and breadth of what's taught compared to a classroom where the teacher has to make up everything on their own.
A classroom where the teacher has curriculum is going to be able to get into a lot more depth about the content that they cover, and they're going to be able to cover a lot more content in terms of breadth.
And I saw this firsthand when I went from being a first year teacher who just had a textbook, not really a full curriculum, with science activities and, you know, actual work for kids to do, just kind of a content textbook with some questions.
When I went from that to a kit-based curriculum with different units, different modules, and hands-on materials, and a professional learning community of other science teachers in my district, and a science materials support center that would provide what I needed for students to actually do all of those activities, both the amount, the breadth of content increased, and the depth of that content increased.
And I think that's what good curriculum can do.
And that's not to say that people can't bring their own creativity, bring their own professional judgment to that curriculum and figure out how to best teach it.
But I think we focus too much on how and not enough on how much and what we're teaching.
And I think we're missing a lot of opportunities in this profession to simply teach more, to teach it at greater depth, yes, but also to teach more content, to teach more breadth and you know we could be doing that if we had more curriculum in more courses but there are so many courses in education you know in our schools that are taught without any curriculum and teachers are just being expected to make it up on their own and everybody can do that to some extent right you can find things you can make things but it's a time issue and it's an expertise issue and it's a like there's there's are just so many constraints on our ability to plan both depth and breadth in curriculum that we've got to start with good resources.
And it's just a world that is rapidly improving and increasing the amount of resources and the quality of the resources that we have.
And I think we have to make sure that we're using those resources to actually teach more.
And again, if we focus too much on the how, we're going to have some improvements from teaching better, from improving how we teach.
But so much of the learning depends on how much we teach and what we teach.
Let me know what you think.