While curriculum specialists, administrators and outside educational companies spend countless hours developing curriculum, it is the teachers who know best what the curriculum should look like. After all, they work directly with the students meant to benefit from the curriculum. In order to create a strong curriculum, teachers must play an integral role in every step of the process.
Teachers know their students' needs better than others involved in the curriculum process. While state or federal standards often dictate the skills covered by the curriculum, a teacher can provide insight into the types of materials, activities and specific skills that need to be included. Teachers from multiple grade-levels may collaborate to identify skills students need at each level and ensure that the curriculum adequately prepares students to advance to the next grade-level and to meet the standards.
Because teachers must use the curriculum, they should have input in its creation. A teacher can gauge whether an activity will fit into a specified time frame and whether it will engage students. If multiple teachers will use the curriculum, allow as many of them as possible to provide input during the creation stage. As teachers provide input, they will gain ownership in the final product and feel more confident that the curriculum was created with their concerns and the needs of their particular students in mind.
Teachers must implement the curriculum in their own classrooms, sticking to the plan that has taken so much time, careful planning and effort to create. When a teacher fails to properly implement a strong curriculum, she risks not covering standards or failing to implement effective practices in the classroom. That does not mean a teacher cannot make minor changes. In fact, a strong curriculum is designed to allow a teacher to be flexible and to insert a few personalized components or choose from among a selection of activities.
Reflecting on a curriculum allows teachers and others involved in the process to find any weaknesses in the curriculum and attempt to make it better. Teachers reflect on curriculum in multiple ways, such as keeping a journal as they implement the curriculum, giving students surveys and reviewing the results or analyzing assessment data and individual student performance. Not only can reflection serve to improve a specific curriculum, it may guide the creation of new curriculum.
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