Keep it Off the Shelf: 4 Ways to Give your Curriculum an Implementation Boost

Katanna Conley, Ph.D.

The last time I did a curriculum implementation walkthrough with a district, the finding that stuck with me was both one of the most inspiring and the most frustrating. At schools where ELA scores were rising, the curriculum resources were in the hands of teachers and students alike. Books were open, student journals were marked up, stories were full of sticky note annotations. In schools where scores were stagnant or dropping, on the other hand, these same resources were pristine, unused, tucked away under desks or languishing on shelves. It was heartbreaking, frankly, to see materials that were clearly making a difference in some locations completely wasted and ignored in others.

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The curriculum of a school is the coursework or academic content students engage with in a given class. It’s what they do in class, what they do for homework, what they’re assessed on, and what we count on to prepare them adequately for college and careers when they leave us. It is, in short, at the core of our work in education. Moreover, the United States typically spends more than $2 billion a year on textbooks alone (National Association of Educational Statistics text expenditure data, http://nces.ed.gov).

It takes no research or particular insight to observe that an unused curriculum is no more useful than having no curriculum at all. However, despite what is clearly a commonsense observation, I continue to see these valuable investments squandered completely.

For curriculum to impact student learning, it must be used, and used well. Otherwise, you’re wasting dollars, time, and the chance for that curriculum to help raise student achievement. To help you avoid this, here are four ways to keep a curriculum off the shelf and make sure it gets used to improve the academic lives of the students for whom it was designed.

1. Share Your Vision:  Why did the district make this curriculum investment? What do you hope to achieve in terms of student outcomes? How should this curriculum be leveraged to meet those goals? Develop repeatable, shareable, and memorable answers to these questions and repeat them until every single team member involved with this curriculum can do the same. Share your excitement for work and your team will share it as well.
2. Find a Champion: If you’re a district level leader, your chances of ensuring the success of your curriculum, and getting it back into the hands of teachers and students increase at least geometrically if you identify a champion for the effort in every implementing school. Establish a site-based liaison whose job it is to drive the implementation at that location. If you can get someone at each site rowing in your direction, they can then be charged with getting the rest of the team on board. 
3. Establish Solid Structures: Curriculum leadership means, among other things, setting up the right oversight, support, and accountability structures to make sure that the vision you established (see Tip #1) has a chance of being realized. You need to be able to keep tabs on what’s going on, make sure everyone has what they need to be successful, and hold everyone accountable to the district expectations, one another, and the students and families you serve.
4. Train your Team: Or rather, make sure your team gets trained. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to answer curriculum questions only to find out that teachers have no idea how their curriculum works, what it’s designed to do, where to find things in it, or how to plan lessons from it. Make this investment a priority if you want that curriculum out of the bookshelves and into the classroom. The product was worth a significant budgetary outlay; surely making your teachers know how it works is worth something, too.

If we wish to move American students from the middle of the global academic pack, and return them to the front, we would be wise to consider how we, as schools, districts, states, and a nation, can leverage our curricula more effectively (Desilver, D., 2015. U.S. students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries, http://www.pewresearch.org). A big part of my job is working with schools and districts on curriculum implementation, and what I’ve seen over and over reinforces the idea that curriculum poorly implemented is tantamount to having no curriculum at all. Make the most of your curriculum investment by focusing on your implementation, and get it off the shelf.

A little bit about me: I'm currently the Content Director for College and Career Readiness at Public Consulting Group. I typically write about curriculum, instruction, and educational equity. I'd love to hear from you.  Email me at kconley@pcgus.com. ​