Market-driven curriculum publishers are never going to meet all your needs for curriculum and materials. If you're reading this article, chances are you already know that. As new requirements emerge and teachers identify new gaps in relevance, the notion that a comprehensive curriculum working equally well for all localities could come in one package seems less and less credible.
Large districts are realizing this, particularly those that have made policy commitments to cultural-identity-affirming curriculum. New York City and Chicago public schools recently dedicated nine figure budgets to developing bespoke curricular offerings, driven largely by commitments to cultural relevance (Schwartz, 2022).
Denver Public Schools is another urban district taking a detour from traditional curriculum adoption pathways. The district is rethinking its approach to sourcing and developing curriculum, starting with how it determines what "good" looks like. I spoke with Heather Haines-Kohler, the district's associate chief academic officer, who told me about their process:
As a district, we are re-envisioning our curriculum adoption and revision processes to be in partnership with school leaders, teachers, community stakeholders and to be informed by feedback from students. Our humanities department, with the support of school board resolutions and alumni groups, developed a curriculum evaluation tool that prioritizes culturally and linguistically sustaining materials to drive that process. (Denver Public Schools, 2022)
Resistance to Real Curricular Change
Opportunities to serve some of the largest school districts in the nation should provide enough incentive for curriculum publishers to invest in extensive revisions, right? Sometimes—but often publishers choose to make only minor revisions or tag existing curriculum with new standards. (By curriculum, I'm referring to designs at the course or unit level, including standards, topics/themes, texts and materials, and lesson plans.)
For example, when the National Council for Social Studies produced the C3 Framework, offering states guidance for developing their own social studies standards, 36 states took them up on it (New et al., 2021). These indicators, like the Common Core, were meant to help teachers make the shift to inquiry-driven instruction. Rather than embrace this challenge, most curriculum publishers chose to tag existing curricula with C3 indicators. From what I've observed, to date, very few have truly embraced the shift toward inquiry and developed wholly new materials.
Ryan New, who leads social studies for Jefferson County Public Schools in the Louisville-metro area, found the curricula available on the market to be misaligned to Kentucky's new C3-aligned standards and the district's equity stance. He decided the district needed to create its own inquiry-based curriculum. New recently told me:
For a diverse, large district like Jefferson County [we needed] to create our own inquiry-based curriculum. There is no national curriculum that mirrors our standards, let alone clings with our district's Racial Equity Policy.
Similarly, when the national conversation about antiracism created political pressure to increase cultural relevance within the curriculum, providers could have met the moment by truly revising materials. This would have facilitated significant shifts in instructional practice and been a step toward realizing the benefits of culturally sustaining teaching practices (Dee & Penner, 2017). But rather than incurring the training and development burden, most publishers chose to increase "representation" by adding non-white authors or protagonists to existing curriculum. While representation is progress, it's only one of many changes a curriculum designer must make to center non-dominant histories or narratives (Gutiérrez, 2021).
Megan Amelia-Hester led the development of the NYU Metro-Center's Culturally Responsive Scorecard, which became a go-to tool for evaluating curriculum. Hester told me:
Parents and communities, along with progressive educators, have been calling for culturally responsive curriculum. Some curriculum publishers have taken that call seriously. … Many more, however, have made small, superficial changes that allow them to claim a diversity in curriculum that still centers white and dominant perspectives, while marginalizing and demeaning communities of color.
A Solution: Expert-Mediated, Teacher-Powered Design
Few districts have nine-figure budgets to allocate toward filling the gaps left by commercial curriculum publishers. And many have found teacher-created curriculum to be difficult to sustain. Curriculum development, after all, is a time-consuming process, requiring expertise and bandwidth few districts have at their disposal.
But, as necessity is the mother of invention, many districts have not allowed this difficulty to stand between them and creating curriculum and materials aligned to their vision. Several models—best described as expert-mediated design processes—have sprung up to help them. These models involve a cohort of teachers (including those who'll use the materials they create), an expert mediator who oversees the design process, and subject-matter experts who are deeply familiar with the content. The involvement of the mediator and subject matter experts ensures the materials produced by the cohort are meaningfully aligned with the discipline and strong enough to be shared in school communities. These expert-mediated processes lean on frameworks that are used repeatedly, generating large volumes of high-quality curricular content.
Few districts have nine-figure budgets to allocate toward filling the gaps left by commercial curriculum publishers.
Even small districts can employ an expert-mediated design process to develop curriculum aligned to their priorities, simultaneously creating a vanguard group of teacher-leaders and a connection to a larger library of resources. I'll share two examples here: the Inquiry Design Model created by the scholars who developed the C3 Framework for social studies, and a method I developed for designing culturally sustaining humanities curriculum.
The Inquiry Design Model
The C3 Framework for Social Studies was published by the National Council for Social Studies in 2013. Even while the framework was under development, the need for educators to be involved in creating aligned materials became clear. The lead authors of the framework, S.G. Grant, Kathy Swan, and John Lee (2015) developed a design process to support teachers in creating curriculum that would facilitate the shift to inquiry. The trio pressure tested this design approach by gathering educators to develop inquiry topics aligned to New York State standards. That group developed 84 inquiries spanning an array of topics, and the process was published as the Inquiry Design Model in 2015.
Carly Muetterties, formerly of C3Teacher.org, explains:
Teachers led the design process, identifying inquiry topics that met their curricular and classroom needs. The Inquiry Design Model blueprint not only helped teachers consider scaffolds their students needed to engage in inquiry-based learning, it was also a helpful design scaffold for our teacher team. … It allowed us to identify and remedy design weaknesses and emphasize design strengths pivotal to inquiry learning.
Since that time Grant, Swan, and Lee have facilitated this process for districts across the country. They serve as expert mediators of the design process and ensure that districts meet standards for quality, clarity, and consistency that are necessary for wide distribution. This process has generated hundreds of freely available inquiry-based units that are a full expression of the inquiry pedagogy undergirding the C3 Framework (available at C3teachers.org).
How Acero Schools Created Culturally Sustaining Curriculum
In 2014, I led curriculum and assessment for Acero Schools in Chicago. This network of schools had been started by Latino community activists roughly 20 years before. The schools served 8,000 students in grades K–12 and did so quite well; in both 2016 and 2017, it was the top-performing network of schools in Chicago, according to the city's School Quality Ratings Policy.
We had schools named for authors like Esmeralda Santiago and Sandra Cisneros who the students weren't reading.... We wanted a curriculum that included such works.
But there was little of the "for us, by us" ethos of the network in English language arts or social studies classrooms. We had schools named for authors like Esmeralda Santiago and Sandra Cisneros who the students weren't reading and leaders like Rufino Tamayo and Héctor P. García whose history the students weren't studying. We wanted a curriculum that included such works and history.
I headed up the network's curriculum unit during a time when the adoption of new social studies standards (aligned to C3) created the opportunity for change and when school leaders were grappling with tensions between buying and creating curriculum. I assembled a coalition of willing classroom and network leaders to workshop the new standards, develop guiding documents and, ultimately, design units for use throughout the network.
I served as process mediator, ordering the design steps; facilitating discussion and peer review; and editing for quality, clarity and rigor. Héctor García Chávez, chair of Loyola University Chicago's Latinx Studies Program, served as an indispensable subject matter expert. He lent us books from his personal library and helped us rearticulate questions to better reflect Latinx studies scholarship and the debates and key understandings authentic to the discipline. The cohort of educators we worked with had strong, clear perspective on what would work well within their classrooms, what their students would find engaging, and the balance between guidance and flexibility they would require.
We developed 15 units, which could be used in social studies or ELA classes at the teacher's discretion. Teachers' use of these units increased over time. Generally, a teacher would pilot one unit their first semester and incorporate two the following semester. Teachers who used several units might design a Latinx studies elective using those units to teach the following year. The network didn't dictate what curriculum teachers would use, so letting teachers determine which units, if any, they would use was crucial. Seeing reliance on our units spread over time was strong validation.
Steps for Teacher-Powered Design
Balancing design, subject matter, and classroom expertise as elements in curriculum creation isn't easy. The dance between the three, if not carefully coordinated, can result in a jumbled mess. Below are four key steps for a successful design process, with a focus on the goal of culturally relevant instruction.
Step 1: Know Your Audience and Invite Collaborators
It's critically important for the teacher cohort designing curriculum to know what community they plan to center in the curriculum or various units. Designers, grounded in a love for and commitment to their students, will often decide to center a particular community in the curriculum, such as the Latino or African American community, exploring that community's experience to sustain students' connection to its intellectual tradition. All design decisions should reinforce that centering. If many different ethnic or cultural groups are represented in the student body, designers can craft units to use throughout a course that center these various traditions.
The expert mediator should support designers in identifying the community or communities their designs will center and identifying and inviting a subject matter expert as a collaborator. In some instances, one or two experts can serve the whole cohort; in others, the cohort will need to find and include experts familiar with each centered community's history. In my experience, scholars and elders are enormously generous in sharing their time and wisdom with teachers. I've seldom seen a request for support declined.
Step 2: Articulate Authentic Questions
Getting to a strong question (or questions) to ground a course or unit in, one that's well-aligned to the relevant discipline, can be make-or-break for a design effort. Since the design process is driven by questions, the wrong questions will drive it in the wrong direction. Strong questions are asked from the perspective of a member of the community being centered; they are questions members of the intellectual tradition would ask and debate. For example, a unit on indigenous communities' struggle for stewardship of natural resources might be driven by the question, "Who is responsible to the land?"
The expert mediator's role in this step is to facilitate discovery. Most designers will benefit from more information and exposure to, and exploration of, the relevant intellectual tradition. For Acero Schools, this meant learning about the people our schools were named for. Reading about these figures introduced other figures, historical events, and themes previously unfamiliar to designers. As participants steep themselves in these histories and narratives, they can better come to a question that is authentic and strong enough to drive the design. Designers need to embrace that the intellectual tradition being centered is a discipline (for instance, Latinx Studies is a discipline that can be practiced through doctoral studies and beyond). The K–12 curriculum's job is to offer students a developmentally appropriate encounter with that discipline.
The subject matter expert can offer feedback on how the question grounding the evolving curriculum is articulated, whether it's resonant and reflects discourse within the discipline. Their familiarity might translate into redirection ("I understand what you're trying to get at, but we talk about that a little differently. Let me offer an alternative") or affirmation ("What a great question—that will allow you to explore some important ideas").
Step 3: Surface the Best Voices
As designers select texts and other sources that students will reference throughout the unit, it's easy to gravitate toward those that are familiar to them. Often, however, the best sources of information aren't as easy to find. Identifying these sources and making them accessible to students can be arduous. But good sources make a significant difference, particularly when the aim is to amplify narratives that have been excluded from traditional curriculum.
The subject matter expert, by virtue of their deep familiarity, can recommend types of sources (like interviews or testimonios), source hubs (archives and libraries), or specific texts, articles, or interviews that will move designers in the right direction. This person's breadth of knowledge sometimes results in a large volume of leads to be run down (which can present a new set of problems). In any case, these recommendations are likely to result in stronger source materials than designers will find on their own.
The expert mediator can also help ensure that learning materials will be presented in a way that will be useful to a broad audience, like teachers who are not part of the cohort but may choose to teach the curriculum they produce. The cohort's approach to excerpting, creating scaffolds (like annotations) or generating source material where none exists (such as by interviewing their subject matter expert) should be consistent, and designers will need clarity on what is allowable.
Step 4: Invite Bold Responses
Designers will want students not only to encounter authentic questions and sources presented in the curriculum, but also to respond accordingly. They will seek to design tasks that reflect the unique ways of knowing expressed throughout the unit. For instance, students may be asked to demonstrate their multilingualism—or other cultural practices—for some assignments. Or, if sources present students with visual vernacular common to Mexican muralists, they may be asked to identify use of that vernacular on the walls of their own neighborhoods. This feature of the curriculum design should reinforce the principle that cultural relevance allows students to leverage their best effort—both meeting grade-level requirements and strengthening their connection to their intellectual heritage.
The expert mediator will support the designer in identifying various ways of knowing presented by the sources within the unit and characteristic of the centered community. They will help to ensure that prompts throughout the unit point toward high-leverage learning outcomes, allowing students to practice skills at the appropriate level of rigor. The mediator will also edit curriculum documents, making small modifications to the language that will have a big impact on coherence.
The Payoff
An expert-mediated design process is an investment, but the up-front costs pay off later. When district, school, and classroom leaders build a shared understanding of what "good" looks like, later disagreements about curriculum can be more easily resolved. When those leaders have mutual investment in the materials that drive instruction, implementation plans become simpler. Most important, when students are engaged and cultivated in the intellectual traditions of their communities, every metric we, as leaders, are accountable for improves (Sleeter, 2011)—because we're all pulling in the same direction.
