Utah teachers I know and work with are angst ridden and downtrodden over recent movements to oversee and micromanage curriculum in Utah classrooms. Their dismay is for good reason, as they feel undermined by legislators and groups that should be always supporting our educators, perhaps now more than ever.
Recently, bills introduced under the dome of the capitol such as HB234 and SB114 advertise themselves as providing “transparency” or “review” for any curriculum a teacher could imagine or implement. Many of us in education have been wringing our hands over the burdens these suggest.
It’s easy to imagine that these add to a workload of an already overworked educator, further tying hands that should be free to innovate as the professional educators they’ve worked to become. New stacks of pressure on teachers are likely to create crisis and drive these devoted educators out of a field that already loses half its workforce every five years. And yet, this isn’t the biggest problem with these efforts to monitor curriculum.
Proposals that could require review, approval or advance posting of classroom practices fundamentally misunderstand schools and learning. In collaborating closely with teachers, I know they are already accountable to standards in their grade levels or subject areas, and they plan the framework of a class around those big learning goals that have already been subjected to thorough public review.
However, day-to-day curriculum planning is a completely different issue. We know in learning research that students are not empty vessels ready to be filled with knowledge — if that were the case then we’d turn over the whole affair to robots. Instead, our learners interact with new ideas, reconstructing them and applying them to their own collection of experiences and problems at hand.
This means that the curriculum isn’t a static plan but a response to the direction that our students point or pull. This is where the role of an adaptive, thoughtful, and professional educator becomes particularly valuable, the kind of teacher that we see develop at places like Weber State University and other accredited programs around the state.
Kids have questions; they observe subtleties; they formulate their own ideas. In the science classrooms I help prepare teachers for, and where I have the privilege of observing, expert teachers are responding to those ideas, often pivoting the details of their instruction to dive deeply into the understandings of their learners. Teachers have a destination in mind and techniques at hand, but they are continually adapting and responding to the questions and needs of the students, often requiring new lessons and resources at a moment’s notice.
This might not be the educational experience of our legislators, but it’s what we’ve learned is effective, and it’s informed both our instructional techniques and our learning standards in Utah and elsewhere.
I’m grateful that my doctor does not diagnose my condition before he sees me in his office to understand the unique details of my raised blood pressure, my hip out of joint. Similarly, we can’t expect that all 8-year-olds or even any classroom will be the same. Teachers actively adapt to the needs, questions and understandings of their learners, navigating the ocean of their subject and standards while letting students seek out islands of interest along the way.
It would be malpractice to require teachers to sail straight by and ignore the needs of children, just as it would be malpractice for my doctor to prescribe medication before he’s even seen me.
Our schools are more than clearinghouses of information for our students to consume, and our teachers are so much more than deliverers of a sequence of pre-planned facts. Our classrooms are the places where our next generation of citizens learn how to analyze data, to solve problems, to work together, to communicate and listen, to discover themselves.
Our kids, our future leaders, deserve as much; and our teachers deserve the respect and agency required to provide such an education.
If we can’t support our teachers in their professional roles, our state and our children will lose them at exactly the moment we need them the most.
Adam Johnston
Adam Johnston is a professor of physics and director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at Weber State University, where he helps to prepare future teachers and provides support for classroom educators throughout Utah.