"I don't have time to do all of those things. My district/principal/central office requires us to cover so much content by a certain date."
While I remain outwardly calm when this statement is said, I am inwardly quite peeved. Why? Because, to put it bluntly, it's nothing more than a cop out. An excuse. A weak justification. For what? For continuing to use outdated instructional practices. For simply covering content rather than teaching students how to think, or how to learn.
This statement also implies that curriculum-and lots of it-is something to which students should be "exposed." Well, if this is the case, then we have too many students mentally dying of exposure. I understand that this panic-driven "I have to expose students to everything in this nonspecific set of state standards or I may lose my job" panicky attitude is a direct result of the accountability paranoia manufactured by the joy known as NCLB. But we all have to snap out of it and get back to what's important. Curriculum isn't for coverage; it's for LEARNING. And not surface-level learning; deep learning that involves higher-order thinking skills.
Curriculum should be used as a vehicle through which learning occurs. Learning should be the priority in classrooms, not the content. Too many teachers are such slaves to content coverage that, because they're whipping through the book or scope and sequence so fast, their vision of student learning becomes blurred.
Depth, not breadth, is the ideal here. Students need to sit with ideas and concepts for a while, putting them together and taking them apart, turning them over, under, sideways, and backwards, and examining them from different angles. Then, they need time to process and create their own meaning. This means you have to slow down, and let students take the time to learn.
It's time to reexamine what's in most curriculum documents. It's time to get beyond the scope and sequence, beyond the curriculum map that no one looks at once it's written. It's time to take a good, hard look at what is in these documents, and then it's time to cut out the nice-to-knows, and focus on the need-to-knows. Then teachers can use those need-to-knows to build solid, effective instructional activities to help students deeply learn.
I know, I must be crazy, touting these ideas about making curriculum useful for learning. But we're doing this to help students learn. Remember?