It won’t be able to anticipate the wide range of special needs, language levels, personalities, areas of interest, cultural backgrounds, or regional values.

Differentiation: There may be some recommendations for differentiating instruction in a pre-packaged curriculum, but it certainly won’t be customized to meet the specific needs of students in a teacher’s class.

If students are working faster, teachers will need to identify what they’ll do with the extra time they have between units or at the end of the school year. Working out the timing of lessons or units is essential - if students are working at a slower pace, teachers need to make critical decisions about which units to include and which to skip. If students enter the course above grade level, they will finish faster. If students enter the course below grade level, it will take them longer to complete the tasks outlined in a lesson.

Timing: When we adapt the rigor, content, or context of the curriculum, we recognize that we’ll likely need to adapt the timing.

It might mean that we need to add a few lessons to provide background knowledge, or pre-teach some concepts in order to build a bridge between the curriculum and the students. This might mean that we make some tasks more complex, and some tasks simpler. Whether we’re working with students who are above or below grade level, we will need to adapt the rigor, the content knowledge, or the context of the curriculum to meet the needs of our students. This is rarely the case, as our classrooms are filled with diverse learners.

Adapting rigor, content, and context: It’s worth restating that pre-packaged curricula makes the assumption that all students show up on day one with grade level content knowledge and skills that are aligned with state or national standards.

After taking time to understand the curriculum’s structure, key components, and tensions, we’re ready to begin making adaptations. For a curriculum to be highly effective, it must be adapted to meet the needs of students, the style and personality of the teacher, and the mission and vision of the school community. These will be key points to examine when we begin to adapt the curriculum.Įven the very, very best curriculum cannot be used straight out of the box. We need to highlight these assumptions as tensions between the ideal and the real. It is essential for us to identify the places where the curriculum has made assumptions about our teaching conditions, our students’ background knowledge and skills, and our school’s systems and structures.

Unpacking tensions: Pre-packaged curriculum is developed for the ideal classes where all students have prior knowledge of past lessons, arrive on grade level at the beginning of the school year, speak perfect English, and are never absent.

In this analysis, it should become clear what is essential and what is enrichment. When adopting a curriculum, consider how the critical components work together and how they are organized throughout the materials.

Unpacking key components: Within any curriculum, there are some components that are critical to the execution of the goals, while other components are stylistic choices that have a negligible impact on the learning experience.

Make notes about how these structures are similar or different than the structures at your school.

When adopting a curriculum, first look to understand the structure of the curriculum materials and teaching methods, as well as the organization of the unit and lesson plans. Unpacking structure: We first want to acknowledge that every curriculum is developed differently, with a particular set of values and beliefs about what is important to teach, what teaching methods are most effective, and how the content should be structured and organized.We encourage school leaders and teachers to unpack the curriculum materials by focusing on three main pieces - structure, key components, and tensions - and making connections to current instructional practices, student culture, and school climate. Whether a school is moving from one curriculum to another, or moving from teacher-designed to a pre-packaged curriculum, there’s a lot of work that goes into adopting something new. The curriculum is the driving force behind the teaching and learning within a course.

Unpacking level 3