In this post I would like to discuss the place of teacher-created materials in the big picture of math curriculum.
In some ways, the topic is of limited importance. Teachers in the US do not have a lot of time and energy for this once they are done with lesson planning, paper grading, and assorted additional responsibilities. This reflects teachers’ low status and limited power. Still, if they can create curriculum materials, those will have the advantage of being based in their lived classroom experience.
During my 43 years in the classroom, I did develop assorted curriculum materials to use with my students. Some of my creations reached a much wider audience with the help of commercial publishers, and later by sharing them directly on my website. A colleague once asked how I managed this while still teaching, over several decades. As a full-time teacher and the parent of young children, he was curious: what was my secret? It’s true, full-time teaching drastically limits one’s availability for curriculum development — and even more so if one wants to get adequate amounts of sleep, have a personal life, and pursue other interests. Teachers who get involved in curriculum development usually have to leave the classroom in order to do it.
The only reason I was able to pull this off is that for much of my teaching career I was teaching part-time. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation, because part of the reason I was able to afford this was that once I had some materials published, I could complement my teaching salary with income from various consulting gigs. (The income from royalties never amounted to all that much, as I failed to produce a decent-selling textbook.)
Most teachers have no choice but to use the textbooks approved by states, districts, schools, and/or departments. Not needing to create everything from scratch saves a lot of time, but those materials vary greatly in philosophical outlook and in quality. In any case, it is impossible to conceive of a curriculum that is appropriate for every district, every school, every teacher, every student. There is just too much variability! Even in the best-case scenario of high-quality materials that match your philosophy of teaching, some of it may not work, or some critical piece may be missing.
It follows that part of what makes a good curriculum is its adaptability: rather than 180 lessons that must be taught in an inflexible schedule, it would make sense to design materials so as to make them easily adaptable to diverse classroom situations. The belief that one can design a program that would work universally reflects extreme hubris, arrogance, or naïveté. Textbooks should:
- Clearly identify bits that can be skipped without undermining the overall arc of the course, and conversely bits that are absolutely essential.
- Offer additional exploratory and practice activities which teachers may choose to incorporate as scaffolding and/or extensions.
- Suggest alternate paths through all this in order to facilitate planning.
This of course assumes that teachers are given sufficient autonomy to interpret and adapt the curriculum to their own classes. Would that all schools made that possible!
In general, it is not possible for a teacher to enhance an existing curriculum the first time they teach it. It is hard enough to just get through it. It is especially challenging for beginning teachers, as they tend to be swamped by the demands of the job. But as one gets familiar with a textbook, its strengths and weaknesses in one’s own situation become apparent. As that unfolds, it is helpful to replace individual lessons or even whole units with material from other sources. These insertions into the curriculum can come from a different textbook, an online resource, a colleague, or if time permits, one’s own creations.
In fact, whether the textbooks are designed to be easily adaptable or not, many teachers are forced by the reality of teaching actual students to create materials which they feel would be helpful for their classes. If one is not trying to create a full course from scratch, it is possible to create bits and pieces as needed for exploration, practice, and assessment. Those materials can be shared with colleagues in one’s own department, and given the existence of social media, with colleagues anywhere. In my own experience, over time I was able to combine such bits and pieces with excerpts from existing textbooks to eventually add up to a full course.
Still, teacher-created materials suffer from the same limitations as any curricular materials: there is no such thing as one-lesson-fits-all. In order to actually work, some teacher-created activities rely heavily on the presence of the author to interpret and complement what is on paper. To make my own creations useful beyond my own classroom, I incorporated feedback from others in my department, and wrote up some Teachers’ Notes to spell out assumptions and context. Some of the materials that were subsequently accepted for publication were much improved by my editors’ comments. (Alas, that was not always the case.)
In an ideal world, teachers’ jobs would include sufficient time for this sort of creativity. Perhaps the newly invigorated teachers’ unions can include more paid prep time as part of their demands? That would certainly help improve the educational landscape for both teachers and students.
— Henri