In Defense of Curriculum — Don't Make Teachers Start from Scratch
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that teachers deserve high-quality curriculum materials rather than being expected to create everything from scratch.
Key Takeaways
- Curriculum materials save teachers - Quality materials free teachers to focus on instruction rather than content creation
- Starting from scratch isn't heroic - It's inefficient and produces inconsistent quality across classrooms
- Defend the right to good materials - Teachers should have access to well-designed curricula, not be expected to build their own
Transcript
All right, people don't want to hear this.
This is not going to be a popular idea, but I believe every teacher needs to be provided with a curriculum, either a commercially published curriculum or a district written and curated curriculum that is teachable out of the box.
And we have lots of ways of disparaging curriculum like that, like we call it scripted or we call it boxed or we call it like we have some sort of derogatory term for a curriculum that is already written and And look, I get it.
Everybody wants to write their own curriculum.
People like writing curriculum.
My wife's a curriculum writer.
It's great to write your own curriculum.
The problem is it takes time.
It takes time to write good curriculum.
And good curriculum does not come with a first draft.
And if you're teaching while you're flying the airplane, like if you're building the airplane while you fly it, if you're teaching your curriculum in real time as you're developing it, it's going to be a first draft.
So I really believe strongly in writing curriculum over the summer.
And if you don't have time to do that, starting with a curriculum that is already written.
Because what happens instead...
there's research on this at ed reports if you go to edreports.org you will see some very alarming graphs that say that only about 20 percent of teacher created materials or materials that teachers find online are at grade level the assignments that students end up doing are not at grade level if people either scrounge on the internet or make up their own as they go along it really takes a lot of work and a lot of collaboration and a lot of alignment checking to make sure that students are doing grade level work.
So again, I know this is going to be an unpopular idea, I'm sorry, but I believe every teacher needs to have curriculum provided to them.
Not to say you shouldn't be able to modify it, be able to adapt it, be able to supplement it, but starting from scratch is a terrible place to be.
And I'll never forget when my principal supported me with curriculum, which honestly it wasn't that great a curriculum, but I had a textbook when I first started as a science teacher.
And in middle school, a textbook is no way to teach science, right?
You really need hands-on stuff.
And we eventually got that.
But my first year, a textbook was all I had.
And I didn't have enough textbooks.
I didn't even have enough for every student.
And I'll never forget what my principal did.
She heard me out.
I explained the problem.
And she wrote on a slip of paper, Esther, order...
50 of whatever Justin needs or whatever the number was.
She wrote like 65 of whatever Justin needs.
And she just handed that to me.
I felt like I had a credit card and I took it to the secretary and I said, can you order some more of these books for me?
And boom, problem solved.
And that was one of the things that saved my bacon as a first year teacher.
And we have so many people entering the profession now who have no choice but to make everything else possible.
up as they go this is just not sustainable this is just not manageable for people to make up everything as they go so we've got to give people curriculum again not to box them in not to be overly scripted but as a starting point as a resource because the time is just not there in the day to write a curriculum on the fly let me know what you think