Learning Forward: What Makes Curriculum Work

Trussville City Schools has a history of being committed to comprehensive, high-quality curriculum.  The Knowledge Matters Campaign, a coalition of education leaders who encourage schools to focus on developing students' foundation of content knowledge, toured elementary schools for the purpose of discovering what kinds of professional learning teachers found most helpful in successfully implementing a high-quality, content-rich curriculum. 

Here are four lessons for administrators and teachers:

Embrace a “we’re-in-this-together” school leadership stance.

Teachers and coaches stressed the vital role of school leaders in driving robust implementation. Most important to staff was the passion that leaders conveyed about the learning the school was undertaking.  Principals in the schools they visited were constantly in and out of classrooms, as much to learn and grow themselves as to observe how teachers were doing. Teachers expressed their deep appreciation for the presence in their classroom of leader learners, rather than leader evaluators.

Tend to the hearts and minds of teachers by sharing the philosophy and research behind the new curriculum.

It is monumentally important to ground teachers in the research behind new shifts and to build authentic faculty buy-in and enthusiasm, based on a shared understanding of the philosophical underpinnings and research base for the curriculum.

Make professional learning curriculum- specific.

What characterizes the professional learning opportunities described by teachers and coaches in the schools they visited is that they’re messy - experiential. The process is similar to the Japanese concept of lesson study.  Grade-level and cross grade-level teams are rolling up their sleeves and working together, engaging in the content of what they’re teaching in the classroom and figuring out the best way to deliver it, leaning heavily on the curriculum.

Invest in your teachers through yearlong professional learning systems.

Significant time is necessary for ongoing, sustained professional learning. Examples included time for teachers to plan lessons together with their grade level team every day, early release time for districtwide collaboration, faculty book studies, and multiple days for coaching to implement new curriculum, 

Successful implementation requires significant resources. But there is a payoff for such an investment: Researchers report that teachers who participated in sustained, discipline- specific professional learning that dealt concretely with what they were teaching in the classroom — professional learning that averaged 49 hours across nine separate studies — saw student achievement increases of about 21 percentile points.

This definitely makes me think about our Elementary Math Teachers Cohort and the roll out and implementation of Lucy Calkins Units of Reading.  Principals, assistant principals, and coaches have embraced and studied these new curricula, along with teachers.  And the most significant part of EMT (Elementary Math Teachers Cohort) is the study of the research behind student learning and understanding.  Teachers regularly plan and collaborate in grade level meetings and across the district.  This targeted, curriculum-specific professional learning continues to support the learning of teachers and students.  

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