Posting conversation #6 today, which lasted more than an hour with my friend and former district leader, James Monti. Jim retired last spring after managing several curricular implementations over the past several years.

"One of the biggest failures in education that we repeat again and again is trying to simplify extremely complex systems. Instead, we should lay out the complexity of what we’re trying to accomplish and then build a roadmap. Learning how to read is mind-dizzyingly hard for many students. We really need to take all facets of a learner into account - their past experiences, their successes and unfinished learning, their social emotional well-being, and their bandwidth available for the literacy task at hand - while doing the same for the adults involved!

Trying to figure out how we value everyone in the work is an essential, rewarding, and messy part of the journey, and it’s too bad that it’s often the first thing we eliminate. When we take 'humanness' into account, we start to validate all of the cognitive understanding we have about brain chemistry and how to design learning experiences where we can purposefully engage, instead of fight, flee, or freeze.

The intentions regarding curriculum legislation in different states for different subject areas may be laudable, but one of the unintended consequences is that we are accelerating conditions for educator burnout. The cognitive demand placed on teachers and students while they’re implementing a new curriculum is intense. When we place a high cognitive demand on educators and students alike with limited support, we begin to fire the wrong neurotransmitters in our brains. We might begin to produce too much cortisol and impact serotonin and dopamine levels, leading to negative long-term effects on the physical and mental well-being of individuals.

Often educational leaders will create a roadmap that considers professional development of whatever curriculum they are about to implement. Typically, the publisher includes a series of workshops that gives teachers the essential 'how to' components of the curriculum. These sessions typically feel like a fire hose of information to the teachers. Even though most of the initial learning that is done by educators can be really superficial, and overly focused on the nomenclature used by the publisher.

When publishers build professional learning services around what specific curriculum icons mean, or where a specific resource can be found then it’s not about the cognitive demand of the work on students, or the pedagogy of the lessons. It’s usually not about our specific students, the specific challenges the curriculum may pose for them, or whether or not the curriculum structure ensures student engagement. It’s typical that the initial work is focused on just unpacking the curriculum."