Want To Increase Student Learning Teach More Content
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why improving student learning means teaching the full scope of required content, not trimming standards too far.
Key Takeaways
- Coverage Matters - Students learn more when schools actually teach the full range of content required by standards.
- Quality Still Needs Quantity - Teaching a few topics deeply is not enough if essential concepts are skipped altogether.
- Pendulum Swing - Many schools have already shifted too far from coverage toward depth, creating unnecessary gaps.
- Pacing Is the Real Challenge - The issue is not whether to teach everything, but how to pace instruction within limited time.
- Standards Define Scope - Standards exist to clarify the breadth of what students must learn, and schools should align instruction accordingly.
Full Transcript
If you want to improve student learning in your school, consider increasing the amount of content students are taught. And a lot of people will hear that and say, what are you talking about? No way. We already teach too much. The standards cover too much. We don't need to teach more content.
We need to teach less, but better. And I think there was a time when that was true, right? It is certainly possible to try to cram too much in, and it can be necessary in those circumstances to slow down a little bit and to teach less but better. The thing is, we've already done that. We started doing that So, I think there's a huge opportunity now
In teaching everything that we are supposed to teach, actually increasing the amount of content that we teach up to the standards. We need to get back to matching the standards in terms of what we teach. And that opportunity has been created by the fact that we are not teaching enough, right? We've had this pendulum swing away from quantity toward quality. But that inevitably results, you know, when it's pushed to the extreme, in not enough quantity. And it doesn't matter how perfectly well we teach something if we fail to teach something else that's absolutely necessary at all, right?
There's no amount of quality In terms of trade-off, that is worth not getting to something essential. And I think the whole idea of standards is that they give us the scope. They give us the breadth of what we need to cover. And then, of course, we have limited time to get to all of that and to do the best we can with it. So we always want to trade quantity for quality. We'd rather have quality.
But at the end of the day, we have to have quantity. We have to teach everything that we're supposed to teach because if you have a kid who gets to ninth grade and they've never been taught division because we were too busy teaching everything else to a high standard of quality, well, that obviously is an extreme example, but it's going to produce gaps. If we take that idea and say we're always going to trade quantity in favor of quality, we're going to have big gaps. So the opportunity now before us is cover everything that we're supposed to cover. Don't worry quite so much about quality in the sense of giving up quantity and skipping concepts. Worry about quality in the context of pacing, right?
We do not have infinite time. We have 180 days a year at most, usually closer to 150 or 160 after you account for all of the interruptions. So we have very limited time to teach everything. If you want students to learn more, teach them everything that they're supposed to be taught. Let me know what you think.
