Laura Bungarz

When curriculum is changed, the focus is often on how we teach rather than questioning what's actually being taught and why.

We've changed how we teach students to arrive at answers in math. We emphasize number sense and conceptual understanding rather than relying exclusively on memorized procedures. We've introduced different approaches to literacy instruction, writing frameworks, reading strategies, and assessment.

But how often do we step back and question the purpose of the content itself?

When was the last time we looked at the math curriculum and questioned whether everybody really needs to know trigonometry and advanced algebra? When was the last time we questioned whether being able to write poetry was a necessary skill for everybody?

It's not that these skills aren't valuable. Writing poetry is a great interest subject, and there is absolutely cultural and historical value in exposing kids to poetry. There is definitely a future engineer who needs trigonometry and geometry.

But are we being fair to students by expecting them to decide whether they need those things at 14, 15, or 16 years old?

We already have different academic pathways that allow students to choose which subjects they want to pursue in greater depth. But those choices come with consequences. A student who decides at 14 that advanced math isn't for them may discover at 25 that they want to become an engineer. Suddenly, they need to go back and acquire the prerequisites they didn't know they would need.

Why are we expecting teenagers to make educational decisions that can create barriers well into adulthood?

And if we take away the pressure of deciding future careers from teenagers, how does that influence what we teach those same teenagers? What would high school look like if its primary purpose were to expose students to different subjects, skills, and interests rather than sort them into future educational and career pathways?

How do we design a system that doesn't punish a 20-something for not knowing they wanted to be an engineer at 14?

There is another question we need to ask: How much of what we teach, and what we've stopped teaching, is determined by educational value, and how much is determined by administrative convenience?

Part of my role as a tutor is enrichment for kids whose parents feel they need a challenge. Not everything I teach is remediation.

I have one student whose parent has requested that I teach deeper thinking because much of the writing the student is doing in school involves stating an opinion and backing it up with a fact or two from a book or article.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that type of assignment. It teaches students to support their ideas with evidence.

But there's a difference between identifying evidence and examining what that evidence actually means.

We can ask students to make deeper inferences, question why an author included a particular scene, consider why something was written a certain way, or explore whether there are other reasonable interpretations of the same text.

Is it a problem if students aren't being asked to do those things? That depends on what we're actually trying to teach.

If we're teaching critical thinking, then being able to question meaning, make inferences, and examine different interpretations matters. If we're only checking for basic comprehension, then forming an opinion and backing it up with evidence from the text may be sufficient.

The purpose of the learning matters beyond the stated outcome.

And that brings us back to how curriculum is organized.

Teachers have limited instructional time and an enormous number of outcomes to address. They are often expected to combine multiple skills into single assignments, assess numerous outcomes, and demonstrate that the required curriculum has been covered.

Integrating skills isn't necessarily a problem. In fact, it can be excellent teaching when students understand how different skills and concepts work together.

But when the pressure to cover curriculum outweighs the time available to teach it meaningfully, we risk creating assignments that serve administrative requirements more effectively than they serve students.

Some skills are taught in isolation with no meaningful connection to anything else students are learning. Other skills may receive less attention because they take too much time to teach or assess properly. And sometimes we combine so many outcomes into a single assignment that it becomes difficult to determine what the student actually understands.

What if we approached curriculum differently?

What if we started by identifying what students should ultimately understand and be able to do, then worked backward to determine which knowledge and skills actually contribute to those goals?

We could examine which skills everyone needs to function independently, which skills develop over many years, and which subjects are better suited to exploration and specialization.

We could also question whether every student needs to demonstrate learning in exactly the same way, or whether the method of demonstrating understanding should depend on the skill we're actually assessing.

None of this means abandoning foundational knowledge, memorization, or traditional assignments. It means understanding why we're using them and whether they're accomplishing what we intended.

If bureaucracy, time constraints, and the pressure to cover every outcome are influencing what gets taught, what gets dropped, and how students are assessed, then perhaps we're losing sight of the larger purpose of education.

We spend an enormous amount of time asking how to teach the curriculum more effectively.

Maybe we need to spend considerably more time asking what belongs in the curriculum in the first place, and why.

Discuss...