Some educators say district-provided curricula aren’t culturally relevant and don’t serve student needs. Experts fret that teachers customizing lessons will cause too much drift from standards.

It’s a Sunday in June, and high school history teacher Chris Dier is poring over readings, lesson plans and other resources to put together next year’s curriculum for his Advanced Placement U.S. and World History classes.

School doesn’t start until mid-August. But Dier, Louisiana’s teacher of the year in 2020, has followed this same routine for years. He spends part of his Sundays throughout the school year and summer customizing lessons for his classes. In his 14 years of teaching, Dier said he has never really had a curriculum provided by his school district that he can use without significantly customizing lessons. In fall 2020, he started teaching at Benjamin Franklin High School, in New Orleans, a top-performing charter school that doesn’t offer teachers any curriculum or materials.

“For better or worse, essentially, we are responsible for creating our own curriculum,” Dier said. “The curriculum I teach is purely something that I create.”

Every year, school districts across the country spend millions of dollars on curricula, the planned sequences of materials teachers use to guide instruction. Many buy off-the-shelf materials created by curriculum companies, while a few districts create their own.

The Case for Customizing Curricula

But many teachers say those materials don’t always work well — at least not without changes. Teachers say curricula aren’t culturally relevant or inclusive, don’t prioritize a student’s perspective, ability and experience and seem to be created by providers who are removed from the classroom. In some cases, teachers say a lack of professional development on how to implement a curriculum can make it hard to use.

It’s long been common for teachers to customize curricula, writing lesson plans and adapting instruction to their students, to a degree. Some districts and schools, like Benjamin Franklin, where Dier teaches, even expect it, asking educators to create their own curriculum using state standards and subject-specific frameworks from groups like the College Board as a guide.

Read the full article about customizing lessons by Javeria Salman at The Hechinger Report.