What We Get Wrong About 'High-Quality' Curriculum

What does England have to teach about good curricula?

Education is swamped with talk of “high-quality” curriculum and the “science of reading.” But what does it take for those things to deliver? On this pressing question, I recently checked in with the inimitable Doug Lemov, founder of Teach Like a Champion, an organization focused on curriculum development, professional development, and instructional practice (he is also, not so coincidentally, author of the hugely influential book Teach Like a Champion). We discussed the current state of curriculum and instruction, where they’re falling short, why he sees big lessons in what Great Britain is doing, why he views its success as more than another passing fad, and what it takes to drive curricular change. Here’s what he had to say.
—Rick

Rick: Doug, we’ve seen a surge of popular interest in reading instruction and “high-quality” instructional materials. What do you make of this?

Doug: Generally, it’s a very good thing. It’s hard to improve how you teach unless you improve what you teach. Great teaching needs great curriculum, and great curriculum needs great teaching. That said, I still think many people struggle to see the difference between curriculum (what gets taught) and standards (goals we set for student learning). I also think reading assessments are poorly designed. It’s also very hard to align them with curriculum due to the decentralization of curriculum decisions. And—I say this as a small developer of what we hope is the highest quality reading curriculum possible—there are real barriers to entry for small entrepreneurial and nonprofit providers of high-quality instructional materials. So, I’m glad to see curriculum getting its moment. But I think there are significant challenges to making sure that the best materials are being taught well to more students.

Rick: Academic achievement is down over the past decade or more. What have you seen instructionally over that time?

Doug: The last 10 years in American education have been nothing short of devastating. Steven Wilson tells a big part of this story in his book The Lost Decade. In the schools that we count on to create opportunity for young people not born to privilege, too many educators equated the exercise of authority—something that is necessary to highly functioning institutions—with authoritarianism. We traded the long-term, life-changing freedoms created by learning and achievement for a cheap knock-off version of “freedom” that mostly boiled down to not having to do as asked in school. And we told our students, and ourselves, that this was liberation. That was, of course, a lie. At the same time, we gave up more broadly on meritocracy and rigor across every type of school. The costs will be borne for decades by a nation less prepared to compete with international rivals and by the erosion of the opportunity pathway that good and demanding schools create. I wish I could be more positive. Your pal Paul Banksley would be.

Rick: You’ve spent a lot of time with educators in Great Britain, where they’ve posted some eye-opening gains over the past decade or two. What have you been up to over there and what have you seen?

Doug: Education officials in every state should read the former Minister of State for Education Sir Nick Gibb’s book Reforming Lessons. It outlines how, over the last 15 years or so, England reinvigorated its schools and achieved tremendous improvement on international assessments. From 2009 to 2021, English schoolchildren climbed from 19^th to 6^th in the world in reading, making them the best readers in the Western world. They also went from 26^th to 11^th in math. There were some critical policy levers. For example, Gibb was driven to make sure that rigorous curriculum was in place in every school. But that curriculum is also assessed at a much higher and broader level. In England, students get into university by taking the highly rigorous GCSE exams in subjects like chemistry, biology, history, literature, and the arts. The content of what determines admission to higher education is determined by an exam board that considers the national interest. Compare that with the United States, where the SAT is used by only some universities in the admissions process and where even that test includes only basic math and “verbal” batteries. The SAT test-makers decide what gets assessed, mostly in response to market forces. Recently, they decided to eliminate multiparagraph reading passages. Compare that with England, where the GCSE exam in English literature asks students to discuss a play by Shakespeare and a 19^th-century novel.

Rick: We’ve seen previous instances where seemingly miraculous gains later proved ephemeral. Given that, what lessons do you take from the British experience?

Doug: One concerns teacher knowledge and preparation. One British school head said to me, “You almost can’t find an NQT [newly qualified teacher] any more who doesn’t understand the basics of human cognition such as the limitations of working memory and the key role of knowledge in critical thinking.” Teachers in England have a much better understanding of effective instructional techniques, whereas many American teachers still subscribe to the debunked concept of “learning styles.” I also think teachers in England have a different relationship to the institutions they work for. If a school in England decides it is going to ask students to write brief distillations of what they’ve learned in each lesson, a teacher in England thinks: Right, I’ll give it a go. Even if they aren’t sure they agree.

I’ve seen this myself. I recently spent 16 months working with a group of primary schools in the West Midlands—one of the most economically deprived areas of England—doing workshops and then visiting the schools to provide feedback. And it was just stunning how quickly they got better. We’d talk about the power of writing-intensive classrooms, and suddenly, all of the teachers were trying out the methods we’d suggested and adapting them in sensible ways. I remember walking out of a school in West Bromwich with a few colleagues and everyone thinking, “That would never happen in the U.S.” Many teachers in the United States think it’s their right to defy the institutional endeavor if they disagree with it. And it’s very difficult to execute any idea when that’s the case, which makes it hard to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Rick: For skeptics who remember the “Finnish miracle” and other celebrated education reforms that ultimately disappointed, what gives you confidence that what you’re seeing in Britain has staying power?

Doug: That’s a great question. I’m not an expert on Finland, but many experts were skeptical from the outset. For example, Tim Oates called their decline years before it happened. I think he’d say that what the data showed was actually the legacy of a much more traditional model the Finns were already dismantling when their results spiked. But from what I’ve read, I think there were also two other reasons for its temporary rise, too. One would be the status of the teaching profession there. Teaching is by all reports a prestigious and respected job in Finland. And there’s a culture of rigor in their schools. People take learning seriously. Those two things can paper over a lot of flaws. But when the Finns had initial success, they doubled down on a lot of the things that were not in fact drivers of their success. From the outset they were at odds with much of the cognitive science, for example. They went hard and early on ed tech. And they really ignored the importance of measurement. My sense is that even with the endemic strengths, once they went doubly progressive, it fell apart very quickly.

I’m more confident that England’s success will be durable because there are so many measures of clear change dating to the same point of action—the test scores and the cultural changes and the GCSE results. And because England is serious about measurement. And maybe because what we see is an intentional design of multiple systems aligned to what research and cognitive science work. But so many things can be undone quickly, and changes are already afoot in England. So sadly, the risk is real.

Rick: Now, you’ve been working to develop a new curriculum. Can you talk a bit about that?

Doug: Yes! Though I sometimes joke that we wrote a curriculum by accident. We were training teachers in research-backed reading instruction when we realized they really couldn’t make those changes unless they had better curriculum. They needed daily lessons that were rich in knowledge, writing intensive, and based on complete books of the highest quality. Creating that is a different skill set from teaching and takes a lot more time than most teachers have. So, we decided to make it ourselves. Six or so years later, we have a middle school and soon-to-be high school curriculum called Reading Reconsidered. But it’s a very hard market to enter due to the incentives. What’s available is often determined by commercial factors more than educational factors. We’re trying to battle that—to bring to market something that’s educationally optimal and uncompromising about quality. Suffice it to say, that’s very hard.

Rick: Why is another curriculum needed?

Doug: In our new book, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading, Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway, and I argue that once students master phonics, they need to read whole books, and excellent ones, for sustained periods of time. We need to curate the experience of reading so that it rebuilds students’ fractured attentional skills. But they also need to read those books in a knowledge-rich environment. A major misconception in American reading instruction is the belief in “transferable skills,” such as teaching students to make inferences in a single lesson and then assuming they can do so with any text. In reality, we make inferences—not to mention learn more, comprehend more, remember more, and come to value books more—when we have background knowledge on what we’re reading.

Take the line, “Lemov walked the #9 hitter on four pitches, and Hess signaled to the bullpen without leaving the dugout. Lemov stalked by him to the showers.” If you know baseball, you immediately infer tension: Lemov walked the weakest hitter on the team, and Hess is mad. He doesn’t give him the respect of walking to the mound to pull him. If you don’t know anything about baseball, you wouldn’t even know that Hess was the manager. This is why students must read in knowledge-rich environments. In our Number the Stars unit, for example, students read short nonfiction passages about World War II Denmark—about resistance movements, sabotage efforts and their risks, and Sweden’s neutrality—to build the understanding that makes deep reading possible.

Rick: That sounds like a heavy lift. But what are some of the challenges of curriculum development that might not be visible to those of us on the outside?

Doug: Well, you have to write it first before you can sell it. For a small nonprofit like us, this is time-consuming and risky. You have to fund thousands of hours of development before you get a dime back. Then, to be viable in most states, you need to get on state approval lists, which requires a lot of expertise in government relations. Big publishing houses have dozens of people whose only job is overseeing the approvals process, while we have 20 people total on our team. The approval processes involve massive checklists, incentivizing publishers to put everything under the sun in a curriculum so it ticks every imaginable box. But then you have something that’s sprawling and unusable to teachers. The incentive is to design for the regulatory process, not for the classroom. And then, when schools and districts choose curriculum, they are not always guided by science. They want appealing. They want technology. You have to create something that looks, to quote a colleague, like a clown exploded on every page, rather than something that harvests attention and focuses it deeply on text, which is what students actually need to be successful.

Rick: If you’ve one piece of advice for educators frustrated by the materials at their disposal, what is it?

Doug: Um, hold fast to high standards. And call me: I have a curriculum for you.

This post originally appeared on the blog Rick Hess Straight Up at Education Week on March 10th.