Mike Schmoker on Curriculum Focus and Simplicity

“In the realm of organizational improvement, complexity kills,” says author/consultant Mike Schmoker in this powerful article in Education Week. “It demoralizes employees and distorts the critical connection between effort and outcomes. It is the enemy of the most indispensable elements of improvement: clarity, priority, and focus… It prevents us from perceiving the simplest, but most effective practices and then focusing our limited time and energy on mastering them, one at a time.”

Over-complexifying is a major problem in school-improvement efforts, says Schmoker. In most initiatives, educators have to wade through thick binders of jargon-filled mandates and endless lists of goals, tasks, and action plans, most of them “maddeningly ambiguous and confusing” and unrelated to what really improves teaching and learning. He says that when he visits classrooms, he often sees little evidence of the intended curriculum, but instead “a profusion of worksheets and aimless group activities.”

“All this pedagogic complication and accretion found its way into teacher evaluation…” Schmoker continues. “Done right, good evaluation criteria could greatly clarify good instruction and thus promote its improvement. But the most popular teacher-evaluation templates and rubrics bury or entirely ignore the most critical elements of good instruction… This has corrupted lesson planning itself, as teachers (as I’ve been seeing) are feeling that they must submit elaborate, multipart, five- to seven-page technology-drenched lesson plans concocted to address the innumerable evaluation criteria. Sadly, most of these lessons still lack the elements most critical to success… The best lessons I’ve ever seen are simple, low-tech affairs that could be described in half a page.” They contain these elements:

• A clear purpose or objective;
• An assessment aligned with that objective;
• An ongoing cycle of small, manageable teaching steps;
• Frequent, informal assessments of learning at each step – for example, the teacher circulating to observe student work;
• Reteaching when necessary;
• Ensuring that all students succeed on every phase of the lesson until they are ready to successfully complete the assessment or assignment.

Although Schmoker believes the Common Core State Standards are a step in the right direction, he says its grade-by-grade curriculum lists need pruning. “Officials at the highest level of both the English/language arts and math common core have admitted to me that there are still too many standards,” he reports, “and that much of the language is still mystifying – fraught with the potential for improper practice.” Schmoker says the “Three Shifts” addendum to the ELA standards is very helpful, as is the simplification of the math standards. Here’s the link: http://www.achievethecore.org/content/upload/122113_Shifts.pdf 

Schmoker closes by saying the transition to simple, priority-driven education “might require a kind of civil disobedience: a refusal, by a critical mass of educators, to implement anything unless it has been adequately piloted, amply proven, and then made clear and simple enough for educators to learn and implement successfully.”

“Education’s Crisis of Complexity” by Mike Schmoker in Education Week, Jan. 15, 2014 (Vol. 33, #17, p. 28, 22), www.edweek.org; Schmoker is at schmoker@futureone.com.

From the Marshall Memo #520