Why is the new school curriculum so bloated?
Current curriculum modules are packed with an overwhelming amount of material that still fails to provide what teachers actually need. This forces educators to spend excessive time sifting through files and hunting for substantial content to keep students from becoming bored.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1bring in and assign extended texts from the modules to stretch these lessons out
- 2fill the gaps in with something substantial
- 3Rewrite the curriculum using age-appropriate language
- 4Explicitly teach the vocabulary, use examples, and create a word wall
- 5Allow students to fail the tasks to show the inadequacy of the curriculum
- 6Translate abstract objectives into "I can" statements
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Our reading curriculum requires slides that are ridiculously inappropriate for first grade.”source ↗
“I find that incredibly abstract for first graders”source ↗
“I hate this curriculum. It’s inappropriate for six year olds and they’re obsessed with it. We can’t change a thing.”source ↗
“Not only is there an absolute encyclopedia’s worth of modules to sift through on my end, but it’s unnecessarily bloated.”source ↗
“They’re going to be SO bored if I don’t fill the gaps in with something substantial.”source ↗
“Yeah, I've had the same issues.”source ↗
“New curriculum is weird... it simultaneously gives me way too much stuff while at the same time not really giving me what I want or need.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2How do you pace a new curriculum when you're forced to move too fast?
- 3Why is classroom quiz software so cluttered now?
- 4How to teach high school reading with elementary literacy curriculum
- 5Why does teaching involve so much paperwork and useless bureaucracy?
- 8Taking intermediate accounting, tax, and cost accounting all at once
- 2Why are honors classes full of average students?