How to revise your curriculum when you’re doing “too much”

Throughout much of any given year, I wonder to myself, are we just trying to do too much? What I mean by that, is are we trying to do it all in the classroom at our own peril? Cover all the bases? Get to all the content? I mean, we have our standards. There’s so many of them. We have state standards, the national core arts standards, school standards, district standards. We have initiatives galore. If we are teaching music at the elementary or middle school level, we have expectations from our colleagues that once your students get to them, that your students would know how to X, Y or Z. On top of that, we have the constant need to center students’ social and emotional and academic needs. We need to be adaptable, be flexible.

Yes. Teachers are trying to do too much.

The symptoms of trying to do it all are clear: the constant need to re-teach concepts and skills taught before (more than you would expect), the frustration of not getting to everything, the stress of not being able to “check off all the boxes”.

But really, we might not have to. Of course this is not true for everyone, but many teachers I work with in various schools wind up having more flexibility with this than they originally thought. I’ve found that one of the greatest factors of being able to give yourself a “pass” on having to teach everything is when all teachers in a school or district can come together and do the work (in real time) of deciding what really is important and when those important things should occur in the curriculum. This is usually when I come in and help schools who are really craving the structured collaboration and the necessary conversations to get this accomplished.

When working with teachers, I find myself saying, “When it’s all important, then nothing is important”. What I mean by that, is wouldn’t you rather teach students about a few things well over the course of any given school year instead of trying to cover and cram in all the things? I know I would.

One year, I did this. I created a diagram where I really dug deep and made some difficult decisions about what was really worth including in my classes. I started broad, where I threw everything but the kitchen sink into the mix, and narrowed it down (see my diagram below for the visual I created for myself to do this). I wound up throwing away some of my cherished content and picked four main content topics and embedded them what I deemed as the most important skills throughout for each grade level.

The result: Students actually doing better, progressing faster, digging deeper and demonstrating their understanding and skills at deeper levels. Because I was teaching less content, I was also promoting equity, because students were engaged in the same content and skills in so many ways. With the extra time, I was able to really adapt to meet their needs. I was also less stressed. I could breathe. It did challenge my creativity as a teacher (how many different ways can we experience and apply the ideas of musical form?!?). But that was kind of fun because I enjoy those types of challenges.

I was curious about whether this was just a fluke, so I did it a second year. It wasn’t a fluke. Students came back the second year having recalled most of what we did the previous year (less re-teaching, yay!). They were also able to apply those things from year #1 as we continued on with year #2 content and skills. Wow. My mind was blown. I did it again for a third year. Still with the same results.

Was it risky? Yes.

Was it always perfect? Nope.

Was it worth it? Absolutely.

Perhaps you are reading this and thinking that there is no way this would be possible in your school or district. That might be true. We all operate under different contexts, different circumstances. But I encourage you to take advantage of some moments when you really can choose to teach less so that your students can do more. Start with one grade, one class, or even one class meeting. But whatever you do, decide what’s most important. Narrow your focus. Because if it’s all important, then nothing is important.