THE UNEXAMINED CURRICULUM IS NOT WORTH TEACHING

I said it the other night in a Twitter chat (the #ISEDchat; first Thursdays 9–10pm ET), and I’ve said it privately to folks, so I guess I can say it here, for the world:

The unexamined curriculum is not worth teaching.

It may have been worth teaching fifty years ago, and I may have experienced it then. But in 2019 any school with the freedom and the resources to ponder its program in light not just of its own mission and values but also the wave of new understandings and ideas about how brains learn and how more compelling and relevant learning experiences and assessments can be constructed simply must be engaging in a continual process of what we call (in educationese shorthand) “curriculum review.”

I still hear tell of too many schools stuck in the mud of their own status quo. Some eschew program development through arrogance, some through a kind of willful ignoring of new ideas, but way more do so, I think, from fear: fear that new and perhaps unfamiliar ideas will drive away already sparse customers, or that something valuable in their secret sauce will be lost.

At least those are the fears to which these laggards will admit. But there is a bigger, more compelling fear, and we all know what it is—especially those in schools that have faced and mastered it. Of course, it’s fear of the process of change, of intentionally exploring new options and assembling the strategic understandings and the strategic will to incorporate these into a system and probably a culture that has gone too long without the kind of exposure to disruptive new ideas and expectations that (incidentally) schools boast of putting upon their students in the name of rigor or, heaven help us, “excellence.”

This isn’t news to any readers of this post. We’ve all been hearing and thinking about and probably trying to enact new ways for a decade or maybe two or three times that. But we’ve all been in conversations with school folks who tell us, often quaveringly, that in their special market or with their experienced faculty or with their limited resources, building their U.S. history curriculum around a four-pound textbook or their English program around years of Warriner’s, is the best they can do.

And it won’t surprise readers that I invoke terms like “mission-aligned” and values and relevant and [insert your P word here]-Based Learning and design thinking to suggest that there are deeply student-focused ways to get into the process of a full-on, never-so-satisfied-with-the-result-that-it-has-to-end curriculum review. Later this year my colleagues at One Schoolhouse and I will be offering up some new resources to support schools—all kinds of schools—in starting and engaging with such a curriculum review process, and I am a firm believer that the best of such processes don’t require consultants or gurus—you’ve gotta trust the people you have. (Which means that the more I think about Jim Collins’s old Good to Great advice about “the right people on the bus”—implying that some folks may have to be thrown off or even under the juggernaut of change—the more I think this notion is not just extreme but largely misguided for the kinds of human, relational communities that schools are and want to remain if they are to be schools.)

But I present the mantra, The unexamined curriculum is not worth teaching, in the hope that its brevity, its perhaps too-clever-by-half language, and its absolute sentiment might catch on, and that the sentiment’s pungency might inspire some people to take the risk of examining  their programs and practices, regardless of the apparent constraints that have stymied change at their schools.

For we all know that the independent school market right now is a little dicey. We know there hundreds of schools for whom demographic and financial sustainability are in serious question. But we also know and can name examples of schools in just such situations that have made courageous decisions to be themselves, to develop innovative programs not just here and there but school-wide. And we know that these schools tend to be the success stories of our time.

A while back I shared the mantra with my friend Tiffany Hendryx, genius-in-chief at Firebrand for Education and my source and idol on all things related to school branding and self-presentation (okay, yeah, marketing; but it’s so much more). Tiffany seemed to like it as it was, but she spends a lot of time working with schools and is not afraid to remind them that the quality of what they actually do is really the central element of their image in the world and the marketplace.

So Tiffany added a bit: The unexamined curriculum is not worth teaching, and it’s not worth marketing.

Schools forget the link between the real quality of the experience they offer and the promise they make to families and students in their mission, values, and indeed their marketing, at their peril.