Trim or Chop?

Many curriculum materials have more content than you could ever do. Where do you make cuts?

In my work over the past 9 years that I’ve done coaching work, I’ve helped over 20 districts select new curriculum materials or implement materials. If you count my side work as a professional learning specialist for two different curriculum companies, that number is even higher! All this to say, I’ve worked with hundreds of teachers implementing new materials.

In the “old days,” curriculum materials were a teacher edition and student book. Maybe, if it was fancy, there were some manipulatives or even some transparency slides to use on your overhead projector. These days, with the addition of digital platforms and resources, there is SO MUCH included with the purchase of curriculum materials. I also think that companies, in the interest of capturing the most districts, includes as much as possible. Need support for EL students? How about differentiation? Is your district looking to implement intervention, small groups, problem-based learning, extra practice, fluency…. you get the idea.

All of these pieces are there, called out, so that review committees can be sure to check it off on the rubric they are using to select materials. Of course, quality differs, but if you are looking for an education buzzword, you will find it. An issue with this much being included in curriculum materials is it does end up being pretty overwhelming. Especially in the first year(s) of implementation, I often work with teachers that feel like they are drowning as they wade through the offerings and try to select the parts that make sense for them.

Another issue in the first year(s) of implementing is that lessons just tend to go slower. You don’t know what you don’t know and that means you might spend too much time of something that afterwards you realize could have been more brief. So as I meet with teachers that have been implementing for a few months, I’m not surprised to learn they are probably not too far into the units. With a quarter of the year behind them, they are no way near a quarter of the way through the content. Uh oh.

On top of the fact that they feel behind, there might be a district or school mandate to “use this curriculum with fidelity.” (I plan to write a whole other post about that!) But with pressure to do everything as written combined with a slower pace because it’s new, we find ourselves with a hard choice. I call it “trim or chop?”

Trim or chop is the choice you have on what you won’t get to this year. If you keep going at the slower pace, but doing all the lessons, all the problems, skipping nothing, you will end up having to CHOP the last unit(s) at the end of the year. You will simply not get to entire standards or content. There is no way to recover time or make more time. On the other hand, you can decide to TRIM. This is a strategic way to look at the units you have left and decide what to trim along the way to get as much content in before the school year ends.

Perhaps you can tell that I prefer the strategic trimming along the way than the full-on chop at the end. And most administrators that I talk with, even the ones that value fidelity, agree that trimming seems like the better choice. But we can’t just go around trimming randomly or based on our own preferences for lessons we like or standards we find more fun to teach. The trimming does need to be strategic and usually guided by a foundation in backwards design.

When you backwards plan, you start with the assessment. What do you want students to be able to do by the end of the unit. Then you look at the progression of lessons, how are those ideas being developed throughout the unit. Finally, you look at the lesson. What is the goal of each lesson. How can we achieve that goal and are there activities or problems that we can trim? Are we spending too much time on any part of a lesson that we can trim and still get to our goal? There are the coaching questions I use as I help teachers make these decisions.

Finally, as we look to future years of implementation, we start thinking about adding back in some of those trimmed pieces, hoping to have to make less of those hard decisions as we get more comfortable with the resource and are better able to anticipate pacing.

Have you ever been in a position of too much content to fit into the school year? What do you do? Trim or chop?