Two Teachers Teaching the Same Class with Different Curriculum Are Doing Totally Different Jobs
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how curriculum inconsistency means students in the same grade can have completely different educational experiences.
Key Takeaways
- Curriculum is the work - When two teachers use different curricula, students learn different content regardless of both teachers' quality
- Consistency serves students - Every student in the same course deserves exposure to the same essential content
- This is a systems problem - Schools that allow teachers to choose their own curricula are choosing inconsistency
Transcript
I think we need to stop pretending like curriculum doesn't matter.
If you're hired for a teaching job with one curriculum, that is a very different job than a teaching job where you're hired and not provided or expected to teach any specific curriculum, and you're just kind of expected to figure things out on your own.
Those are very, very different employment circumstances, and yet we evaluate teachers exactly the same way, whether they're given a curriculum or not, and regardless of which curriculum they're using.
I saw an argument today that I found very compelling that like we should actually pay attention to curriculum and we should assess students on the specific things that they're taught in their curriculum and I think if we did that we would have much better alignment between two things that are often not very aligned which is student test scores and teacher evaluation ratings and I think this is a tricky issue it's a challenging issue but it would move things in the right direction If we actually looked at a classroom and said, okay, here's the curriculum that this teacher is expected to use.
Here is how they are teaching it.
Here is what their students are getting on the assessments of that specific curriculum.
Because we try to do so much that is curriculum agnostic in this profession.
It seems easier, it seems less messy to have to worry about, oh, which curriculum were they taught?
Well, what students specifically were taught matters a great deal.
How you are supposed to teach specific material depends so much on the curriculum.
And I remember this as a principal.
When we adopted a new math curriculum, math hadn't changed.
The math was the same.
The teachers didn't have to relearn math, but the approach to teaching math was completely different from our old curriculum to our new curriculum.
And that put teachers in such a different position.
It put the administrators in such a different position supporting them.
It was simply a different job.
And yet we overlook this across the board.
Let me know what you think.