Educational Alchemy: How HQIM and Teachers can Transform Learning
In schools, school systems, and even state legislatures, there is tremendous momentum behind “high quality instructional materials” (HQIM) aligned to college and career readiness standards. More and more states are mandating or incentivizing their adoption, citing research affirming their potential to improve student outcomes. (1) Their impact may be even greater for BIPOC students or multilingual learners and who are too often limited to low level coursework. (2)
Those who work closest to the classroom know that curriculum alone cannot transform schools. But when well-used, these materials can offer a powerful foundation for meaningful instructional improvement within and across classrooms.
The key lies in the complex relationship between curriculum and learning. Students’ learning depends on what they actually do and create during instruction - which is, in turn, shaped by the dynamic interactions among teachers, content, and students, known as the “instructional core.”
HQIM can influence each element of the instructional core–and learning–by specifying not only the content to be taught, but also how teachers and students might engage with it and each other. However, the materials’ effectiveness ultimately hinges on the knowledge and skill teachers bring to the work of interpreting and using these materials in teaching. In other words, instructional effectiveness lies in the interactions between teachers and the resources available to them. (3)
So how can we unlock the synergy of HQIM and teachers to support student learning? In the following sections, I highlight five vital supports that well-designed curricular materials can offer teachers when combined with their knowledge, skills, and agency.
Support #1: Guidance for Clarity, Coherence, and Cumulative Impact
HQIM can help teachers to translate research and other recommendations about effective teaching into concrete practices, and to coordinate their work with others across time to support better and more consistent student learning.
Indeed, when well-designed, HQIM can transform what can often be abstract or decontextualized guidance about content and effective teaching into a codified, coherent set of units, lessons, and instructional routines. In this way, HQIM can:
Explicitly articulate what are often implicit ideas about effective teaching, making them easier to learn, use, and discuss in tangible ways.
Connect educators to the professional knowledge embedded in the curriculum so they can hone their craft without needing to reinvent the wheel.
Foster essential debates about the specifics of teaching and learning, which can promote more effective, equitable instruction and outcomes for both teachers and students.
Align the content and efforts of different teachers within and across grade levels so they can have a cumulative, exponential effect on individual students’ learning and enhance the overall reliability, effectiveness, and equity of the educational system over time. (4)
While HQIM’s guidance may be particularly useful for educators new to the profession or a new approach, they can offer all teachers resources to enhance their effectiveness.
Support #2: Reclaimed Time
Currently, teachers dedicate an average of 5 to 12.5 hours per week creating or searching for free or paid resources, which vary widely in quality. (5) This variability has an especially negative impact on the learning experiences of students of color or those from low-income backgrounds. (6)
Similarly, teachers know that designing a high quality curriculum requires significant time and expertise. It involves deep study of the content and how it might best be taught; creating well-sequenced lessons with meaningful academic tasks; selecting appropriate text or problem sets; developing aligned formative and summative assessments; considering historical and cultural contexts; and creating clear student-facing materials.
With access to HQIM, teachers can reclaim many of these hours and use them instead for other vital aspects of excellent, equitable instruction like personalizing instruction and collaborative professional learning - both of which I elaborate on below. However, it is essential that school and system leaders protect this reclaimed time for teachers for these purposes instead of burdening them with less impactful tasks.
Support #3: A Foundation for Personalization
When teachers have access to HQIM and a deep understanding of its design and purpose, they can redirect their time and energy from creating initial lesson plans to the essential work of personalizing learning for their unique students in ways that preserve the most important, or “load bearing,” features of the curriculum.
Personalization is critical to student learning and teacher agency. Afterall, while HQIM can offer valuable guidance for the instructional core, no pre-written base can fully dictate effective teaching. As scholars David Cohen and Deborah Ball observe, “teaching occurs in particulars— particular students interacting with particular teachers over particular ideas in particular circumstances.” (7) Attending to these particulars not only makes the curriculum more effective, but it also has the potential to bring a curriculum to life for the unique human beings working with it.
For teachers with access to robust HQIM, the work of personalizing instruction might look like:
Internalizing units or lessons and refining them to better support the academic, cultural, or social-emotional strengths or needs of their students.
Studying student work or other data to understand student thinking and plan specific, targeted feedback for individual students or groups.
Creating supports to provide diverse learners and other students with appropriate access to specific content while maintaining productive struggle. (8)
Planning new ways to connect and build relationships with specific students.
Analyzing instructional video or student work to reflect on how to adjust instruction to better stretch or support particular students.
Furthermore, a strong curriculum can enhance teachers’ capacity for in-the-moment personalization by incorporating principled, flexible instructional routines. Grounded in evidence or learning theories, these routines–such as a routine for launching a lesson–provide an adaptable, yet predictable, framework for engaging with content over time. Once ingrained, they reduce teachers’ cognitive load, allowing them to focus on their students’ unique needs, relationships, and thinking at that moment - yielding better and more responsive outcomes. (9) Routines can similarly support students’ cognitive load, enabling them to focus on the most important thinking in the lesson rather than on new procedures.
Support #4: Resources to Foster Collective Learning and Efficacy
In the United States, teachers are rarely alone during their work day, but teaching itself can feel lonely. Unlike many other professions - and even the teaching profession in other countries - American educators often spend the majority of their day working in separate spaces with limited opportunities for meaningful, sustained collaboration about instruction. (10) However, HQIM can serve as a catalyst for powerful collaboration among educators, facilitating a shift from an individualistic to a collective vision of teaching in multiple ways.
A pivotal part of this transformation involves educators working together to interpret, use, and study the curriculum and related materials–including student work samples, instructional videos, and curriculum design principles. This collective exploration can enable educators to build a shared vision of success, which offers a clear benchmark for student work quality and supports greater equity in teachers’ expectations. Moreover, this process cultivates a common language that can be used for meaningful discussions about the outcomes and methods of effective teaching and their improvement.
Robust curricular materials provide a similar foundation for instructional leaders’ shared learning. When organized around HQIM, instructional leaders’ professional learning can focus on enhancing their knowledge and skills in coaching, intellectual preparation, and data analysis cycles in the context of specific curricular materials and routines so they can better support teacher and student learning.
Ultimately, this internal coherence among educators within a school or school system can significantly influence the group’s collective efficacy, defined as the shared belief that the group can collectively positively impact student outcomes. Research consistently links collective efficacy to positive factors such as improved student outcomes, increased teacher motivation and job satisfaction, a positive school culture, and a group’s capacity for deep investment in continuous improvement. (11) Given these potential advantages of shared work around HQIM, it is no wonder that researchers consistently find that job-embedded, curriculum based professional development is impactful for student learning, and more effective than other approaches. (12)
Support #5: An “Infrastructure” to Support Innovation
While it may initially seem surprising that a common curriculum can do much to support rather than inhibit teachers’ innovation, it can do so in several ways. For instance, when HQIM are integrated with ongoing collective learning practices–such as coaching or intellectual preparation focused on studying the curriculum, teaching, student thinking, and outcomes–teams often generate innovative solutions to address specific challenges they are facing and collect data on their effectiveness. This responsiveness allows for immediate adjustments that improve instructional effectiveness in the moment, but also often spark insights that can improve not only educators’ knowledge and skills over time, but also the HQIM themselves.
Indeed, a strong curricular base can also serve as a framework for organizing and disseminating practice-based learning. (13) When educators incorporate new learning into existing curricular materials, routines, or professional development structures, insights from one part of the system can become accessible to others in the specific contexts in which they are most relevant. This integration ensures that new professional knowledge is not isolated but is built upon and shared over time. This can benefit teachers and students throughout a school or school system - or even beyond to a larger network of organizations when designers of HQIM organize to collect these important innovations from teaching teams. These efforts to capture and share valuable professional learning can contribute to a more effective, equitable system overall.
Conclusion
While the excitement for HQIM is well-founded, it is essential to acknowledge that the future of education does not rest solely in their potential but also in the transformative capabilities of educators who build from and amplify that potential through expertise and ingenuity.
This recognition necessitates a paradigm shift around how we perceive teachers’ role in HQIM adoptions. Simplistic views of curriculum implementation as a project of “holding teachers accountable” to using a curriculum with rigid fidelity must shift towards a vision of implementation as a sustained initiative of collaborative learning. (14) This evolved perspective requires a reevaluation of how we support teacher agency and innovation within a coherent system organized around HQIM, as well as an expiration of how system leaders might leverage and integrate educators’ knowledge, skill, and innovation into the very fabric of the instructional system over time.
By acknowledging the symbiotic relationship between curricular guidance and teachers’ interpretation and application of that guidance, we pave the way for a more dynamic, responsive, and innovative educational ecosystem – and ultimately, to the stronger, more equitable learning experiences our nation’s children deserve.
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Seneca Rosenberg is an education leader and consultant with over two decades of experience researching and facilitating trajectory-changing learning experiences for students and adults. Most recently, Seneca served as the founding chief academic officer for Valor Collegiate Academies, a charter school network in Nashville, TN committed to academic excellence and well-being. Under her leadership, Valor’s three schools annually ranked in the top 2-5% of the state for both growth and achievement.
