Teaching is a rewarding profession for many of the same reasons that it is a difficult profession: Crafting a plan for students’ education is a challenging intellectual task, and every day brings new and different obstacles and opportunities for problem solving and decision making. I spent 6 years in the classroom as a middle school math teacher, and I don’t think I’ll ever leave the field; there is a sense of urgency and focus, and a clarity of mission that binds us as teachers together. We want more than anything to do our work well and we know just how important it is.
So, with that in mind, in this notoriously time-intensive line of work, it makes sense that we look for the most efficient, most effective tools to help us. One of the most impactful decisions you make about your classroom is what curricula to use. When considering your options, you’ll find that they exist on a spectrum. At one end, there are fully-scripted, off-the-shelf curricula and at the other is, well, nothing—a blank page leaving you unlimited possibilities for what to plan.
Too Big
On its face, a fully-scripted curriculum seems like a great solution—minimizing the amount of time teachers need to spend planning and giving new teachers lots of support. Unfortunately, in practice, this can mean that teachers are provided with a lesson script as a shortcut around meaningful engagement with the lesson, robbing them of the intellectual challenge that likely drew them to teaching in the first place and cheating them out of the satisfaction of utilizing their own voice and expertise in their day-to-day work.
A scripted lesson plan is also inflexible. Anyone who has taught for more than a week can tell you that even the best laid plan rarely survives contact with the classroom, at least not in the long term. It can fall to pieces as soon as someone gets a nosebleed, or there’s a fire drill, or you and your students just don’t move through the lesson as quickly as you hoped. Never mind the inevitable and crucial snap decisions you are making based on insights you gain in real time from your students.
Even the best scripted curriculum can’t be a perfect fit for your classroom—it wasn’t written with your specific circumstances in mind. You may be fortunate enough to have a second teacher, special educator, or paraprofessional working with you. You might have a distinct speaking or presentation style that makes a scripted curriculum feel inauthentic. Or you could have a classroom full of students with diverse, complex needs that require careful planning and a whole suite of scaffolded, accommodated, and/or modified material. In short, even the best prescriptive curriculum might have to be painstakingly edited to fit your unique circumstance. At which point you may find yourself thinking, Wouldn’t it have been easier to do this myself?
Too Small
At the other extreme are the teachers who have no choice but to do it themselves. Teachers who have no curriculum to draw from, no inherited materials, or no meaningful guideposts have to beg, borrow, and create out of whole cloth 180ish days of rich, engaging, cogent, effective lessons, projects, activities, and assessments. Oh, and grade. I sincerely hope that this is rare. If you are in this circumstance, you are in my prayers.
As well-educated professionals, most teachers are perfectly capable of and may enjoy the intense, deep-dive research necessary to write their own lesson plans. But adding the work of curriculum design to the already full plate of an average teacher can make it incredibly difficult to be creative, thoughtful, and thorough. When you’re under a tight deadline (like, having class tomorrow), the likelihood of making errors or having to bring something into your classroom that doesn’t meet your personal standards increases dramatically. Working solo like this makes you more likely to forget something—be it a topic or idea or a student’s accommodation—or get something wrong.
If you are faced with a school year where you have a completely blank slate, you have little choice but to put in the blood, sweat, and unpaid overtime to get the job done. Let’s acknowledge this extraordinary ability and work ethic and agree that it isn’t a reasonable or efficient curriculum solution.
Just Right
Like any extreme option, curricula at these edges have significant weaknesses that outweigh their strengths. The detail and completeness of a scripted curriculum is outweighed by its brittleness and disengagement. The freedom and flexibility of starting from scratch is outweighed by its oppressive workload demand and limited perspective. The team here at Fishtank sees these serious drawbacks and we think that the answer lies somewhere in the middle: a lean lesson plan.
Designed to strike the perfect balance between guidance and autonomy, our lean lesson plans follow a carefully constructed sequence and provide a framework of lesson objectives, instructional materials, guiding questions, and target tasks, but leave the decisions about how to deliver each lesson up to you.
Unlike a scripted curriculum, lean lesson plans are flexible because you get to decide how best to tailor them to suit your and your students’ needs and circumstances. In turn, this engagement with our painstakingly researched and vetted lesson plans promotes deep understanding of the material, encouraging both new and veteran teachers to connect with what they’re teaching.
Unlike a blank slate, our lean lesson plans provide you with a framework to work efficiently. By leveraging our research and analysis to build lessons that get the job done, you have time to be creative and thoughtful instead of having to rush or slog. You also get to benefit from the multiple perspectives, redundant checks, and feedback loops that our team brings to our work.
You could think of Fishtank like a meal kit delivery service. We focus on sourcing, preparing, and packaging the ingredients (researching, writing, and editing high-quality curriculum) and delivering them to you. You are the home chef cooking the ingredients to perfection for you and your loved ones (planning and delivering a lesson custom fit to your classroom), building your skills in the kitchen and getting the satisfaction of preparing your own food. If you decide you want to add more cayenne pepper (or leave it out!), that’s up to you. No more wandering in the grocery store without a list. No more delivery. You’re in control.
Kate Gasaway is the Curriculum Associate for Mathematics. She holds a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Psychology with research and business certificates from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Master’s in Effective Teaching from the Sposato Graduate School of Education. She started her teaching career at Neighborhood House Charter School, spending five years teaching 8th grade math and one year teaching 6th grade math.