Session 1, Part 4: Read Curriculum Resources with a Critical Eye

Create Your Ideal Curriculum, Session 1: Develop Your Purpose for Teaching and Learning

Just as a pitcher can hold only so much lemonade, a unit or lesson template is limited in what it can contain with regard to instructional goals, outcomes, and tasks. It is similar to the constraints of our respective school years; we only have so much time, so we have to be judicious about the choices we make with what we allow in our classrooms.

With that, I’ll make a provocative statement here: you cannot teach all the standards. At least not well. Nor can you cover every lesson in the textbook. In fact, it’s not possible, even before the Common Core came out. In an analysis conducted by Robert Marzano, schools would have to expand from K-12 to K-22 to adequately cover all the content (Scherer, 2001). 

So what do we hold on to and what do we let go of? In addition, what have we not yet considered in our changing times, yet should? These questions are at the core of our work. What makes it difficult is that a) there are so many choices, not just in standards but in curriculum resource…