Teachers as Curriculum Designers: Inviting Teachers into the Productive Struggle

Abstract

This exploratory, embedded single study examined the experiences of middle grades teacher design teams over 10 months as they were immersed in the development of interdisciplinary curriculum units using a backward design framework. The teachers were supported by a researcher-practitioner partnership and situated in a middle level school structure that valued teachers’ engagement with curriculum design. Most notably, we found that the teachers experienced productive struggle throughout their design process and, as a result, shifted their pedagogical design capacity from adapting or offloading to improvising their curriculum. These findings are particularly significant to middle grades education because of the importance of curricular learning experiences for young adolescents that are challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse. Teachers can better create these kinds of experiences for their middle grades students if they are the ones designing those experiences with their particular students in mind.

Keywords:

• curriculum design, middle grades, UbD, qualitative

Introduction

Academic curriculum is a topic of debate that has been consistently examined and reformed throughout the history of education in the United States (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992; Labaree, 1996; Pinar, 2012). Curriculum reflects the knowledge deemed important for students to learn in school, and curriculum undergoes changes to reflect societal values (Kliebard, 1982; Pinar, 2012). Some scholars have suggested that curriculum is not simply the knowledge for which children and youth are responsible, but it also includes the instructional methods employed by educators (Cal & Thompson, 2014; Clandinin & Connelly, 1992; Gujarati, 2011). According to Egan (1978), for example, “Curriculum inquiry is educational inquiry; both properly address the what and how questions together” (p. 70).

Few would argue against the importance of rigorous, content-rich, and meaningful student learning experiences; the bridging of curriculum and instruction is critical for creating these types of experiences. In the middle grades particularly, scholars suggest that curriculum should be “challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse, from both the students’ and the teachers’ perspectives” (Bishop & Harrison, 2021, p. 32); and it should open up possibilities for students to “learn about matters of personal, social, moral, and ethical significance” (p. 32). To create opportunities for middle grades students to engage in these kinds of learning experiences, teachers need to be intimately involved in designing the curriculum and instruction their students are experiencing.

The purpose of this study was to document the experiences of six middle grades teachers who engaged in a 10-month curriculum design collaborative with support from two teacher education researchers with curriculum design experience. We draw on theoretical perspectives from pedagogical design capacity (PDC) (Brown, 2009) and productive struggle (Hiebert & Grouws, 2007) to describe how middle grades teachers experienced designing and implementing their own interdisciplinary curriculum units using a backward design framework. Our study was framed by the question: What are teacher teams’ experiences when designing and implementing interdisciplinary units using a backward design framework? Our findings suggest that if middle level schools aim to prepare students as collaborators, critical thinkers, and socially concerned citizens, as scholars suggest (Bishop & Harrison, 2021; Jackson & Davis, 2000), curriculum design should involve the very teachers who are responsible for cultivating these qualities.

Background

The concept of productive struggle is central to our understanding of teacher-led curriculum design. Widely used to describe and understand student learning in mathematics classrooms (Hiebert & Grouws, 2007), its meaning has a long history rooted in learning theories centered on engaging a learner in confusion or doubt (Dewey, 1910) or leveraging the power of cognitive dissonance for decision making and problem solving (Festinger, 1957). Given the inherent challenge of designing curriculum, we attended to the curriculum design process in this study as an authentic problem-solving situation. In this section, we offer a conceptualization of teachers as curriculum designers and describe the Understanding by Design (UbD) (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) framework that guided our work with the curriculum design teams.

Teachers as Curriculum Designers

Research exploring teachers’ involvement in curriculum design cites a lack of design expertise among teachers (Bakah, Voogt, & Pieters, 2012; Gerrard & Farrell, 2014; Handelzalts, 2009; Havnes, 2009; Huizinga, Handelzalts, Nieveen, & Voogt, 2014; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008), with particular gaps in pedagogical content knowledge and curricular consistency expertise (Huizinga et al., 2014). While some teachers embrace roles as co-designers or editors of curriculum and textbooks, others refrain from making any modifications out of “respect for the expertise of the textbook authors” (Even & Olsher, 2014, p. 346). These findings suggest that many teachers do not feel they have the competence to design meaningful curriculum.

An approach that has seen increasing appeal in professional learning spaces are teacher design teams, which often take the form of professional learning communities (DuFour, 2004a,b) or communities of practice (Vangrieken, Meredith, Packer, & Kyndt, 2017; Velthius, Fisser, & Pieters, 2015) in which teachers work collectively toward improved instruction and student learning. In their review of teacher communities, Vangrieken et al. (2017) cited the most common objectives, which center on collaboration among teachers regarding planning lessons, discussing practical challenges, increasing content knowledge, sharing resources, conducting research, and providing feedback on instruction. Ronfeldt, Farmer, McQueen, and Grissom (2015) showed a positive relationship between teachers working in instructional teams and student achievement. Binkhorst, Handelzalts, Poortman, and van Joolingen (2015) studied teacher design teams and described them as collaboratively analyzing, designing, implementing, and evaluating shared curriculum. Teacher design teams are a part of the collective leadership in the school, meaning participants are responsible for contributing to the leadership involved in curriculum design (Binkhorst, Poortman, McKenney, & van Joolingen, 2018).

As part of a teacher design team, teachers become curriculum designers. Huizinga et al. (2014) found that teacher design teams benefitted from facilitators who provided feedback and guidance to the groups of teachers throughout the design process (Voogt et al., 2011). Teachers working in these teams reflected on their professional growth as a result of participating in curriculum design (Voogt et al., 2011) and reported an increase in self-efficacy on account of participating on the team (Velthius et al., 2015).

Researchers noted successful teacher design teams included (a) participating teachers who begin with an interest in the curriculum (Binkhorst et al., 2015), (b) clear goals for the team at the onset of the project, and (c) evaluation of the curriculum design during classroom implementation (Voogt et al., 2011). Recently, Tronsmo and Nerland (2018) studied teachers’ curriculum development processes and suggested that because of the complex and creative nature inherent in curriculum development, teachers need sufficient time, space, and resources to share responsibility and ownership for curriculum design.

Understanding by Design

The purpose of this study was to document the experiences of the six middle grades teachers who engaged in a 10-month curriculum design collaborative (August 2015 to May 2016) with support from two teacher education researchers with curriculum design experience. For the purposes of this article, we focused specifically on the teachers’ experiences designing the curriculum because of the dearth of empirical research documenting this process. We relied on the UbD curriculum design framework (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) because of our collective success using it in our secondary and university teaching and with in-service teachers nationwide over the past two decades.

UbD (also called backward design) offers a “planning process and structure to guide curriculum, assessment, and instruction” (McTighe & Wiggins, 2012, p. 1). Wiggins and McTighe (2005) suggested that curriculum “shapes content into a plan for conducting effective and engaging teaching and learning” (p. 6). Additionally, Clandinin and Connelly (1992) viewed the teacher as an “integral part of the curricular process … in which teacher, learners, subject matter, and milieu are dynamic interactions” (p. 392). Taking up these perspectives, we too see curriculum as more than a list of topics or standards, a textbook, or a pacing guide and instead position it as a comprehensive and dynamic teaching and learning plan. Backward curriculum design takes place in three stages (Kelting-Gibson, 2005; McTighe & Wiggins, 2012; Murray, McDonald, & York, 2006; Stiler, 2009). In the first stage the designer identifies the intended outcome of the lesson or unit. Following this, the designer decides how students will demonstrate that they learned the objective(s). The final stage involves designing the learning experiences that align with the goals and assessment.

While there is limited empirical research on the use of backward curriculum design in schools, researchers have noted its use in designing experiential learning in mathematics (Davidovitch, Yavich, & Keller, 2014), in science (Hendrickson, 2006), and in online course development (Murray et al., 2006). An analysis of traditionally designed lesson plans compared against backward designed plans showed that teachers using backward design rated higher on their knowledge of (a) resources, students, and content; (b) goals of instruction; (c) coherent design of the lesson; and (d) student assessment (Kelting-Gibson, 2005). When compared with traditional methods of planning, backward design is a more time-consuming process (Bigelow, Weseley, & Opsahi, 2009; Britton & Johannes, 2003) in which the teacher takes an active role in differentiating between what students are expected to understand and what they need to know (Childre, Sands, & Pope, 2009). Graff (2011) explored teachers’ experiences using a backward design model for curriculum development and found that teachers using this framework expressed increased self-efficacy in their preparation for planning and instruction and their ability to evaluate materials supplied to them by their schools.

Two studies explored student achievement associated with using a backward design model and found different results. Purnell (2007) noted an increase in students’ academic achievement and interest after participation in three weeks of lessons using a backward design framework, while Stiler (2009) reported no evidence of increased student achievement. Purnell examined the experiences of middle grades students (Years 5 to 9) in Queensland over a three- to four-week fieldwork experience. Purnell compared student achievement results in two sets of students—one group that experienced UbD-designed coursework and one group that did not. The students who experienced the UbD coursework showed an increase in student achievement, especially in geography, and this increase continued from grade 9 into grade 10.

Stiler’s (2009) participants included twenty pre-service teachers who were tasked with designing a service-learning unit over the course of a four-week period using the UbD framework. These students were taught the UbD framework during an 80-minute class meeting. The pre-service teachers’ lessons were then scored on a rubric which served to evaluate the teachers’ knowledge and ability to plan a lesson on seven criteria, including meeting community needs, improving the quality of life of those served, and using new knowledge and skills in a real-life setting. Stiler found that the pre-service teachers scored low on all seven categories and hypothesized that this was due, in part, to the novice nature of his participants, suggesting a follow up study that includes veteran teachers. We would add here that the limited amount of time the pre-service teachers were provided (one 80-minute class meeting) to learn the UbD framework could have also contributed to the low rubric scores.

Bigelow et al. (2009) conducted a multi-year qualitative project with a small group of teachers who used backward design to create multicultural curriculum units. The researchers were particularly interested in teacher engagement and found while some teachers enjoyed creating the units because they felt their lessons had greater depth, other teachers disliked backward design due to the amount of time involved and the unfamiliar format.

Theoretical Perspectives

Given the paucity of research on teachers as curriculum designers, coupled with the small amount of empirical evidence surrounding the UbD framework, we were particularly interested in documenting teachers’ lived experiences in both of these spaces. To do this we drew on two theoretical perspectives in the design and analysis of this research: PDC (Brown, 2009) and productive struggle (Hiebert & Grouws, 2007). PDC attends to the level of autonomy teachers’ embrace when designing curriculum and productive struggle prioritizes the importance of a learner grappling with the sensemaking process in order to gain understanding. These two theoretical perspectives resonated with our intentions when designing this study, and we relied on both while crafting each component of the study’s intervention and data collection. Furthermore, we also drew on these perspectives as coding frameworks during data analysis, as we anticipated that teachers would experience productive struggle while enacting PDC.

Pedagogical Design Capacity

PDC describes the interaction between teachers and curricular resources with particular attention paid to the action of teachers’ noticing, and hence decision making, about curriculum and instruction (Brown, 2009). Acknowledging the importance of material resources, PDC focuses on teachers’ capabilities to recognize and use critical features of these resources to design goal oriented, standards-based curriculum. Brown (2009) situates teaching as a design practice and describes the ways instructional plans transpire as offloading, adapting, and improvising. These three ways of interacting with and designing curriculum attend to the interplay between teachers and resources and create a continuum of interaction within curriculum design. When offloading, teachers remain fidelitous to the written curriculum, and in doing so, disengage from the cognitive load of designing teaching and learning experiences. Adapting curriculum engages teachers in modifying classroom-ready curriculum to meet their students’ learning needs. Improvising is on the opposite end of offloading, in that teachers have complete autonomy in the design process. In order to be/become curriculum designers, we believe teachers benefit from a curriculum design framework when developing their own curriculum, as well as committed time and support. In keeping with this theoretical frame, our intervention centered on the opportunity for teachers to develop curriculum using a backward design framework and our analysis included codes specifically looking for teachers’ enactment of PDC.

Productive Struggle

Designing curriculum is not inconsequential, and much like problem solving, places the teacher in the middle of a muck. We liken curriculum design to problem solving, in that both of these activities call upon one’s inventive faculties to craft a solution. As Hiebert and Grouws (2007) note, cognitive theorists have argued that struggle is a necessary component to deep understanding, particularly when problem solving (Brownell & Sims, 1946; Festinger, 1957; Hatano, 1988; Vygotsky, 1978). According to Hiebert and Grouws (2007), struggle happens when solving problems that are within our reach and then grappling with key ideas and concepts that are “comprehensible but not yet well formed” (p. 387). In their work on productive struggle in the field of mathematics education, Hiebert and Grouws (2007) called upon Dewey’s (1910, 1926) assertion that struggle is an integral part of developing deep understanding, while also drawing from theories such as Hatano’s (1988) cognitive incongruity and Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance to describe the ways learners used the process of struggle to facilitate learning.

For the purposes of this study, we conceptualize the teacher employing the curriculum designer role as the problem solver working to resolve a curriculum design problem. Similar to problem solving, then, designing curriculum calls upon the teacher to engage in a productive struggle. Designing curriculum places teachers in a problem-solving situation in which the solution and associated strategies are within reach and engagement in the design process results in deeper understanding of the curriculum. While the struggle that teachers may experience when learning to design their own curriculum might not feel productive in the moment—because they are learning to unpack standards in ways they might not be used to, while they are simultaneously engaging deeply with content to create meaningful learning experiences for students, all while checking for cohesiveness and alignment across and within lessons—the struggle is productive because the end result is the teacher having a deeper understanding of the content, and thus, creating more meaningful learning experiences for students. In other words, just as we want students to grapple with subject matter in an effort to gain a deeper conceptual understanding and be able to transfer knowledge to other areas of their lives (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), teachers benefit from the productive struggle associated with the curriculum design process, because they too have to grapple with the subject matter in an effort to gain a deeper conceptual understanding and then transfer that understanding to exploratory, challenging, integrative, and diverse curriculum and instruction. Similar to a teacher guiding students in problem solving, in this study we guided teacher learning through the design process. Moreover, as noted in our data analysis section, we coded our data with an eye toward teachers’ experiences of productive struggle.

Methods

We used exploratory embedded single case study methods to answer the research question: What are teacher teams’ experiences when designing interdisciplinary units using a backward design framework? As stated above, in this article we will focus on the design experience. Case study methods were useful for this research, because case studies allow researchers to understand how “organizational or environmental context has an impact on or influences social processes … organizational behavior, and everyday practices and their meaning” (Hartley, 2004, p. 325). In this study we were interested in understanding the how the environmental context of the school in which the teachers taught (i.e., student population, class scheduling, administrative support, state and district mandates) influenced the teacher teams’ experiences of designing their own curriculum units through the lenses of PDC and productive struggle. More specifically, embedded single case study methods allowed us to engage with multiple levels of data collection and analysis (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2018).

Background of the Study

Over the course of this 10-month study (August 2015 – May 2016), we worked with six middle grades teachers (grades 7 and 8) designing interdisciplinary curriculum units using a backward design framework. The teachers participated in a two-and-a-half day professional learning collaborative that we purposefully held off their school campus in which they were introduced to the UbD curriculum design framework and began conceptualizing their curriculum units. Following the collaborative, each team met bi-weekly between October and February to plan one interdisciplinary unit of study, which they implemented in March.

Participants and Site Context

This study took place in a middle level school in the southeast in which 92% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch prices. Like most schools in the United States, educational decisions at this school were impacted by state mandates, such as the state assessment system, which is a comprehensive summative assessment that measures how well students learn knowledge and skills outlined in the state-adopted content standards in ELA, mathematics, science, and social studies. Students in grades 3 through 8 in this state took an end-of-grade assessment in ELA and mathematics, while students in grades 5 and 8 were also assessed in science and social studies. The results of these tests were linked to teacher evaluations, which impacted whether high poverty schools such as this one received Race to the Top incentives instituted by the Obama Administration in 2009. At the time of our study, fifty percent of our participating teacher’s evaluations were based on students’ standardized test scores. Not surprisingly, these evaluations placed pressure on teachers to teach to the test (Booher-Jennings, 2015), which can often result in disconnected, activity driven curriculum (Crocco & Costigan, 2006).

Tschannen-Moran (2009) noted that, as a result of these pressures, school reform efforts often take one of two organizational structures: a “movement toward greater standardization of work processes, such as ‘teacher-proofing’ the curriculum … [or] the move toward professional development and coaching as coordinating mechanisms” (p. 220). The principal was in her third year in the position and expressed a proclivity toward the latter. She shared her interest in interdisciplinary curriculum (e.g., Bishop & Harrison, 2021; Jackson & Davis, 2000) and was amenable to providing the necessary support for this process. Specifically, the principal protected teachers’ planning time, which allowed them to co-plan units, and she supported an alternative bell schedule for the teacher participants’ classes when they implemented their units.

All faculty in the school (N = 30) were invited to participate in the project, and six teachers accepted the invitation. We based our decision to invite all teachers to participate on Binkhorst et al.’s (2015) research citing characteristics of successful teacher design teams. Teachers who chose to participate in our study already taught in teams of two, with one teacher responsible for social studies and mathematics and the other responsible for ELA and science. In addition to the two teams, one special education teacher and one science teacher participated in this study (See Table 1). Within the single site were two teacher design teams and embedded within each team were six additional subunits.

Table 1 Teacher Design Teams

Teacher*	Subject Area	Grade
Paul	Mathematics/Social Studies	7th
Jennifer	Science/ELA
Jacob	Special Education
Natalie	Science
Rebecca	Science/ELA	8th
Sam	Mathematics/Social Studies

*All names are pseudonyms.

Data Collection and Sources

Over the course of 10 months, we collected data that included audio-recorded pre-and post-interviews and video-recorded bi-weekly curriculum planning meetings. All teachers engaged in video or audio recorded interviews and focus groups, which took place in August prior to the start of unit planning, and again in the spring following the implementation of the curriculum units. The semi-structured interviews lasted 40–60 minutes and focused on the teachers’ conceptualization of curriculum, experiences with curriculum design, and beliefs about their subject matter. Researchers took field notes during pre-interviews and met to review field notes and audio-recordings after each interview.

The participating teachers and university researchers worked in a curriculum design collaborative for two and a half days prior to the beginning of school. Each day of the design collaborative was video-recorded, and the researchers and teachers engaged in an audio-recorded focus group at the end of the collaborative to explore the teachers’ experiences. On a bi-weekly basis, the principal protected the time of each team to support their continued work. The researchers joined each team’s planning meeting, took field notes and audio-recorded each meeting. The researchers met each week to discuss field notes and audio-recorded planning meetings as initial data collection and analysis ensued. The teachers designed their units using Google Docs, which were shared among teams and researchers. The researchers video-recorded every day of unit implementation. All data were labeled and organized in a case study database shared among the research team.

Data Analysis

Both the design and the analysis for this study were framed by theoretical concepts from PDC and productive struggle. We used both an inductive and deductive coding approach by integrating theory-driven codes from PDC and productive struggle, as well as data-driven codes derived from our research question (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2018). We searched for patterns, insights, or concepts that emerged across the data (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2018) and relied on reflexive research memos as an analytic strategy throughout the data collection and analysis. Once initial patterns and themes were identified, we continued analyzing the data, juxtaposing theory-driven themes with data-driven themes to identify new/existing themes that represented the complexities of this real-world schooling context (Yin, 2018).

To develop a coding scheme, each researcher used open, inductive coding on the transcribed interview data (i.e., individual pre-and-post interviews and post-project focus group interviews) and took field notes on both the video-recorded two-and-a-half-day collaborative and the video-recorded bi-weekly planning meetings. We then coded those field notes. Our codes were influenced by our theoretical framework, PDC and productive struggle, which helped us identify how teacher teams experienced designing their curriculum. We then discussed this initial phase of open coding, identifying common codes and indicators for these common codes which we organized into a table. This initial categorical aggregation phase (Yin, 2018) resulted in a suite of codes during the teachers’ design process, such as frustration, content knowledge, and activity-centered design.

In the second phase of analysis we used analytic induction (Ragin, 1994) to group initial codes into larger themes. Developing larger themes involved an interrogation of our initial analysis. During this interrogation, we looked for confirming or disconfirming evidence of our initial suite of singular codes and interpretation of events, and we considered the greater context within which these codes were situated. For example, we noticed while teachers voiced frustration about lack of time, resources, and understanding of the curriculum design process throughout the project, they simultaneously talked about the passion they had for teaching and the passion they each had for their subject matter during the designing of their units—one did not exist without the other. Because productive struggle was important to our framework, we recognized that this sense of struggle coupled with teachers’ passion had the potential to result in productivity. This paradox, together with our theoretical framework, led us to group codes into separate themes of productivity and struggle.

In generating these larger themes, we discovered that the productive struggle paradox occurred not only within each teacher’s individual case, but also over time for all the participants. For this reason, we engaged in a third phase of analysis and examined our data chronologically by listing our initial set of codes and indicators for each teacher and team over a timeline. Examining the data in this way revealed, not surprisingly, teachers and teams expressed confusion and frustration when faced with this new way of designing curriculum. As time progressed and teachers and teams continued to grapple in their curriculum design collaborative, they expressed feelings of clarity and success.

While we looked for instances of PDC in our first level of coding, once we began grouping codes into themes of productivity and struggle, we again examined these themes against our theories of PDC. To do this, we analyzed our two levels of coding (initial codes and the larger productivity and struggle themes) for varying levels of PDC over the course of the project. We found that when the project began, each team’s PDC seemed to be closer in line with adapting curriculum and, over time, each team felt more comfortable improvising curriculum lessons, as described in our findings.

Findings

When you have scatter plots in mathematics … you look for associations. That’s kind of how it feels when you do a regular unit. There isn’t an association between the blips of information that we are feeding our students. We can see that association. We know that it exists. It’s a strong association at times, but having this backwards design, being able to have it become a theme, and constantly hit that theme, is creating a line of best fit for that scatter plot, which is linear and is going to capture the trend. It’s gonna capture the strength of that association. (Sam)

Teachers who participated in this study worked in two grade-level teams to develop interdisciplinary standards-based curriculum units, each centered on social issues. The seventh-grade unit addressed a global issue—access to clean water and organism dependence—and the eighth-grade unit explored issues of race, identity, and equity in the local community and in the United States. Units took a student-centered, interdisciplinary approach, and each unit included an authentic summative performance assessment.

Our analysis indicated that because this approach was unlike the activity-oriented teaching or textbook curriculum models most teachers were accustomed to adapting or offloading (Brown, 2009), they experienced constant struggles when designing their curriculum units, but those struggles ended up being productive because of the overall success teachers experienced from design to implementation. For the most part, the struggles the teachers experienced seemed to manifest as they moved between and away from adapting curriculum lessons and improvising their lessons (Brown, 2009). In other words, when teachers talked about their lesson design during their pre-interviews and the two-and-a-half-day collaborative, their PDC seemed more aligned with delivering the content from the mandated textbooks and/or adapting various lessons they were given by instructional coaches.

As the teams spent more time together each week designing their curriculum units, they experienced multiple struggles and stuck points, fits and starts of inspiration and frustration. But those struggles continued to create opportunities for the teachers to delve more deeply into their content mastery and to discuss the purposes of what, why, and how they were teaching the content and how they thought their particular student population might take up these new learning experiences. Overall, teachers expressed that this goal-oriented, backward design model gave them the tools they needed to design focused, coherent curriculum units that enhanced their instruction and students’ engagement in the lessons.

For clarity, we grouped the challenges and affordances teachers experienced while engaging in the unit design process under the subheadings Initial Struggle and Transition from Struggle to Productivity. However, as stated above, for every challenge there was always an inherent affordance entangled with that challenge, as is the nature of productive struggle. Despite our participants’ struggle, by the end of the project all teachers agreed on the value of identifying clear learning goals for curriculum design, which validated the productive nature of their struggle.

Initial Struggle

As we explored teachers’ PDC to improvise (Brown, 2009) and draw from multiple resources in designing interdisciplinary units, we observed their struggles when they attempted to shift from offloading or adapting activity-oriented lessons to conceptually-oriented, improvisational planning and implementation. Often with traditional curriculum planning, the focus of design begins with the activity or a coverage of the material instead of what the students ultimately need to know and understand (Andrews, 2008; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). We refer to this as an activity-oriented planning approach. As Sam noted in the opening quote of this section, “There isn’t an association between the blips of information that we are feeding our students,” and this often results in a disconnected set of learning experiences rather than a cohesive system of learning.

Throughout September and October, the teacher design teams continued the work they began during the two-day collaborative, developing their units’ clear learning goals. The teacher design teams used Google Docs to write their goals, which allowed us to iteratively provide feedback specifically focused on the alignment between and among the standards, knowledge, skills, and understandings. We recognized early on that our feedback related to writing clear learning goals needed to be very specific to effect change. Below is an example of the explicit feedback we provided to teachers in which we aimed at stretching their thinking about the purpose and nature of learning goals.

8^th Grade Teacher Design Team’s Learning Goal:

SS8H7b. Analyze how rights were denied to African-Americans through Jim Crow laws, Plessy v. Ferguson, disenfranchisement, and racial violence.

• Jim Crow Laws, Plessy v. Ferguson, and disenfranchisement were all examples of institutional racism that was meant to disempower black people.

Researchers’ Feedback:

If we now know what Jim Crow was, and we have analyzed how Jim Crow denied rights to African American people, then what is the bigger picture we want kids to ‘get’ from this story? Isn’t it bigger than disempowering? It’s dehumanizing; it’s chopping people’s legs out from under them. When this happens the structure of a society is broken down and it affects everyone—not just the people who are oppressed. It also hurts the oppressors. So how can you get at that bigger idea?

We found that this transition in thinking (starting with the end in mind) challenged teachers to face their conceptions of a clear learning goal, an end product, the alignment of curriculum, and curricular cohesion because they were conditioned to an activity-oriented way of lesson design. Jennifer and Natalie’s veteran teaching status—30 and 22—years, respectively, influenced their perceptions of a backward design approach. While they too were challenged by the act of unpacking standards to create learning goals and crafting a meaningful and rich performance assessment, they also reflected on a time, prior to standardized testing, when they felt more fully engaged with their curricula. During her pre-project interview, Natalie speculated why she believed lesson planning practices had since changed.

I think it’s [teacher-led curriculum design] probably not been encouraged lately due to the high stakes testing. As a result, I think teachers are afraid to veer off the path that’s been charted for them. If they go the path that’s been charted for them, they know that they’re gonna be OK. But if they try to do something different, it’s uncharted territory, it’s unknown. It might be better; it might be worse. We don’t really know.

In describing the process she was currently using to design her lessons, Natalie said:

I would look at the standards and then I’d look at activities in a unit that I might like to try with the students that would help them understand the skills and concepts. Um … often I’d work with other teachers and we’d try to collaborate somewhat. I thought it was really effective.

As Natalie noted, her lesson planning centered on finding activities. During these first few months of our study, we found ourselves continually re-focusing the teachers’ attention toward the unit learning goals and end product. Each time the teams veered off course and began planning activities, we would inquire, “What are your learning goals? How will this activity inform the end product? What is the big idea? This questioning sometimes caused teacher to be frustrated because the learning goals and/or end products were not fully developed. Despite the frustration, participants did eventually see the importance in establishing these final outcomes prior to planning the learning experiences. During the post-unit interview, Rebecca noted, “I think that’s because when we sat down the first time and started trying to think through it, it was hard because we couldn’t come up with that final thing [product].”

Like Natalie, Sam commented:

My worry coming into the second day [of the collaborative] was, it’s not activity based, wait what? That’s where my brain is if I’m going to create an activity that combines these things from this content, and then that’s all going to build toward the main goal.

Interestingly, Sam held this view throughout the professional learning collaborative. As evidenced in his conversations and body language during our two and a half days together, he felt frustrated. More than once, Sam pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, tightening the strings to only reveal his eyes. More than once during our ten months with him, Sam explained that he was accustomed to designing learning activities based only on the content topic without detailing the knowledge, skills, and understandings associated with the standard or topic.

Much like Rebecca and Sam, Team Clean Water (the self-chosen name of the 7^th grade team) struggled with focusing on standards and clear learning goals. Because the teachers were not accustomed to this kind of curriculum design, it was not common practice for them to grapple with unpacking the standards. This, in turn, made it difficult for them to align standards, assessments, and learning experiences or to recognize the amount of knowledge, skills, and understandings to include in a unit. During the post-unit interview with Team Clean Water, Jacob reflected:

I have never ever thought twice about standards. Standards were something I just had to throw onto whatever I was making, because I have never had the time to look at them. This was the first time I actually looked at standards, took them apart, analyzed what we could do with them—what they need, what their value is—and actually create something, a lesson plan around it. That was the first time I’ve ever done that outside of college.

Paul then added:

I think one of the things that we struggled with as we were developing this was the idea of, what do we want the kids to know? … We’ve got the standards and the KUDs that we developed, and the practice of going back to those just to see if all the things that we have aligned with them is not something that we get time to do often enough. So it is not a natural practice; it’s not second nature. I think that is one of the challenges we experienced, because we would have all of these great ideas and we would say, “That’s a great idea – does it fit [the learning outcomes/standards]?”

By late October, the learning goals were solidified. The teacher design teams turned their attention toward developing performance assessments, and in doing so they recognized the added challenge of creating parameters for their end products and aligning them to standards and learning goals. Historically, some of the teachers relied on the end of unit tests that were already prepared for their students and accompanied their curriculum materials. As Paul noted, “It took a while to set that [final project] out there for us, as opposed to knowing there is a test with this information on it.”

The teachers’ struggle with the backward design framework was also evident during their common planning time. As noted above, Sam was particularly frustrated and challenged by using the backward design framework throughout the project. Approximately one month into the project during the eighth-grade team’s civil rights unit planning session, Sam lamented his frustrations about feeling the need to explain himself to us when we came to their team planning meetings:

I feel like I just unpack it naturally … I almost feel like I have to show you [the researchers] what I’m doing this week just to say this is what the standards gave me; this is how I approach it just to show you I do unpack. I do have an idea in mind of what I want my students to know and understand … I guess I do what I feel like I am supposed to do—unpacking it … When we make our calendar, we are trying to knock out what our unit will look like over the four weeks … I feel like I’m in between grounds. I don’t feel like I’m doing too much work in the KUD [know, understand, do] part. I could be more specific there when I’m talking about Jim Crow and what I want them to learn.

As the conversation ensued among Sam, his co-teacher, and the research team, it became clear that Sam focused his energy on creating engaging activities and then designed assessments to measure student success on those activities. This was also evident in the team’s initial unit plan for the project. The unit plan detailed a list of activities aligned with the state standards without clear indication for the kinds of knowledge, understanding, and skills that students needed to acquire. By November, the eighth-grade teacher-team’s thinking pivoted from planning classroom activities to planning learning experiences centered on clear learning goals, and their initial struggle morphed into productive, rich unit planning experiences discussed below.

Transition from Struggle to Productivity

One of the characteristics of the UbD framework is that it provides teachers with the tools necessary to craft meaningful learning experiences for their students while, at the same time, engages teachers in practice-based, professional learning centered on student learning needs, content, and pedagogy. As previously reported, teachers felt challenged by many aspects of the design process and, from a learning theory perspective (Hiebert & Grouws, 2007), the outcomes of those challenges resulted in new knowledge and more appreciation for the art and skill of teaching. Taking up this backward design approach, the teachers used the standards as they were intended to be used—to guide teachers’ thought processes without restricting their ownership or creativity. Once the struggle of re-framing their approaches to curriculum design subsided, teachers noted the affordances of using a backward design approach and recognized the difference between the two methods.

Sam and Rebecca had a particularly transformative experience from the initiation of the project to the end. In analyzing the unit artifacts, interviews, and video-recorded common planning times between teachers, we found that Sam moved from activity-oriented adaptive planning to recognizing the power in carefully unpacking standards and designing cohesive learning experiences based on clear learning goals—more of an improvisational approach. In his post-unit interview, Sam explained:

That sort of thematic approach, I appreciated it because instead of feeling like I had to squeeze in a couple things from the standard … three seemingly random pieces of information that you need to know—is much easier as we are designing it to find purpose within the sub-standards that we were teaching. Being able to pick out, determining why I was teaching something, and how that interlaced itself amongst the other standards, that was important for me and for the kids to grasp: why they were learning about what they were learning.

Not surprisingly, each of the teachers’ thinking around planning shifted at different times over the life of the project, with most of the teachers recognizing the value in backward design after cementing their learning goals. Once teachers’ perspectives on the usefulness of standards for identifying these learning goals shifted, they were better able to craft a summative unit assessment. Their final products were designed to align with the standards and provided a roadmap for teachers to develop purposeful learning experiences for their students.

Consequently, crafting the summative assessments was another contributing factor to the productivity of teachers’ success when designing cohesive units. In the post-unit interview, for example, Rebecca and Sam talked about how the service learning project they constructed as the culminating performance task for the unit brought everything together for them. Sam then remarked on how this way of approaching curriculum design changed everything for him and for his students.

I feel like once you’ve seen it, once you’ve felt it, it would make our approach to planning future units like this much more streamlined. There is something larger, something deeper that the students can continue to think about. That was different. That was special.

Rebecca then added:

That’s the whole point of backward design, that you have the end in mind. Once that happens, everything kind of flushes itself out more clearly and you have more of a path to follow … That steam-powered the rest of the unit for us because we were able to see what we wanted them to accomplish.

Early in the planning process, the teacher design teams were challenged by coordinating the timing of the learning goals for four different content areas into one unit of study. Paul, for example, was flummoxed by the thought of veering away from the textbook driven mathematics program that he typically used and, as a result, eliminated mathematics standards from Team Clean Water’s final unit. Despite this omission, video recordings from the unit implementation coupled with teachers’ interviews portrayed students’ ambitious and well received learning experiences in science, social studies, and ELA. Students expressed disappointment, for example, when the bell rang and they were forced to stop working on their projects and go to their next class; moreover, they chose to continue working on their projects outside of class and during other classes. The teacher design team believed that this motivation was due in part to the “low floor-high ceiling” opportunities that challenged all of the learners in their classrooms and motivated students to reach beyond the minimum standard. Jennifer stated, “The students who hadn’t produced anything all year long worked on this project.” Paul added, “And produced voluminous amounts.” This evidence of student engagement contributed to the teachers’ sense of productivity and success as demonstrated in their decision to use this unit again, in addition to three more units they would design in this same way the following school year.

The productive struggle teachers experienced in unit planning as a team challenged them to think differently about the pedagogy and content within their units and within each lesson. In doing so, they began thinking like curriculum designers who could better improvise their lesson design (i.e., PDC) by considering the overarching, long-term goals of the learning experiences and how these goals created a pathway for connection-making within and between the content. These moments illustrated how the struggle teachers may have experienced in particular moments eventually allowed something productive to manifest—one never taking place without the other.

Discussion

This study examined the experiences of teachers in design teams who developed interdisciplinary curriculum units while they were supported by a researcher-practitioner partnership and situated within a school structure that valued teachers’ engagement with curriculum design. We found that teachers experienced productive struggle throughout the design process and demonstrated a shift in their PDC from adapting or offloading to improvising their curriculum. These findings are particularly significant to middle grades education, because curricular learning experiences for young adolescents that are challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse (Bishop & Harrison, 2021) are not possible if teachers are only expected to adapt or offload curriculum that someone else designed without particular students and contexts in mind.

Productive Struggle

There were clear links between teachers’ struggles and their curricular engagement to the extent that the teachers’ persistence was due, in part, to the opportunity for self- and team-motivated professional learning. This learning included curriculum design expertise which called upon content and pedagogical knowledge and was supported by the UbD curriculum framework.

Huizinga et al.’s (2014) findings illustrated three guidelines for supporting the successful execution of the curriculum design process among teacher design teams. Support should (a) be offered “just-in-time”; (b) focus on developing teachers’ curriculum design expertise, pedagogical content knowledge, and curriculum consistency expertise; and (c) offer curricular frameworks and guidelines. We found that the teacher design teams persisted through their struggles and were productive because they attended all planning meetings and received just-in-time support offered through a professional learning collaborative that proactively exposed teachers to the UbD framework.

As noted by Hiebert and Grouws (2007), “struggle results in restructuring one’s mental connections in more powerful ways” (p. 388). Teachers participated in professional learning experiences that challenged them to restructure and develop their cognitive frameworks related to curriculum design through the development of new pedagogical approaches and the acquisition of deeper content knowledge specifically related to interdisciplinary content. It is important to note that while designing interdisciplinary curriculum units was new to most of our participants and added repeated moments of struggle throughout their design process, the teachers’ satisfaction with their end products and watching their students thrive during their units beautifully illustrated the importance of teacher-designed curriculum for young adolescents. As Bishop and Harrison (2021) remind us:

Expecting students to grapple with and master advanced concepts and skills requires middle grades teachers to stretch themselves well beyond “covering material.” School administrators therefore ensure that teachers have sufficient time and support to both deepen their knowledge of content and pedagogy and design challenging learning opportunities. Using their professional judgment and in consultation with students, teachers guide the selection of ideas and concepts for in-depth study. To help these issues come alive, teachers invite students to examine values, assumptions, basic principles, and alternative points of view, addressing why things happen as well as how. Students learn skills and concepts in context as they become explorers, thinkers, and communicators. (p. 29)

Our study also supported Huizinga et al.’s (2014) third recommendation, to the extent that the design teams appreciated resource support such as the UbD framework, curriculum design templates, and curriculum evaluation measures. Moreover, we recognized the tools’ importance for organizing the vast amount of information used by teachers over the course of their 10-month experience.

As Graff (2011) observed, these three areas of support help teachers persist through their struggle with curriculum design. Teachers need to engage in productive struggle to experience their own “aha” moments and stuck places if we expect their students to persevere through their own struggles when learning.

Unfortunately, many middle level schools are not structured in ways that promote or enable the productive struggle of teachers. As Hoy and Sweetland (2001) noted, “Like it or not, schools are bureaucracies—they are structures with hierarchies, divisions of labor, impersonality, objective standards, technical competence and rules and regulations” (p. 296). Within the framework we propose here, it is critical that teachers are empowered and supported by their administration and districts to make decisions about student learning, including designing curriculum that focuses “not only on what students may need later in life; [but that also] integrates students’ histories to help them see how they can use what they are learning in the here and now” (Bishop & Harrison, 2021, p. 30). This enabling school structure is only possible with trust between teachers and administration, whereby teachers have the opportunity to experiment with curriculum design and learn from their mistakes. This kind of structure has been shown to promote both individual and organizational learning (Hoy & Sweetland, 2001) and more sustainability within school structures (DuFour, 2004b).

Implications for Policy and Practice

The findings from this study have implications for policymakers, school leaders, and middle grades teachers interested in exploring teacher-led curriculum design as a construct of teacher professionalism. This study suggests that involving teachers in curriculum design efforts is not without challenges, though the challenges are outweighed by the benefits to teachers, students, and the school’s professional community. Middle level school leaders are invited to reconsider the working structures within their schools, paying particular attention to logistical and philosophical frameworks. Logistically, middle grades teachers need protected time to work in teams on creative curriculum planning, and they need on-going support by way of guiding standards and additional curriculum expectations. The current study was conducted in middle grades classrooms in a school in which the administration considered interdisciplinary curriculum as critical to young adolescents’ learning; however, teaching interdisciplinary curriculum units was not a common practice throughout the school. It is important to note that these findings can be taken up in any middle school/system willing to reconsider what is working and what is not in their particular school (i.e., class/bell schedules, protected teacher planning time, professional autonomy with curriculum design).

With that said, this study also speaks to the importance of policymakers and school administrators whose educational philosophies value teacher professionalism. In practice, teacher teams were trusted to align their curriculum design to standards, meet student learning needs and interests, and maintain the integrity of the subject matter while designing interdisciplinary units situated within an authentic context. Indeed, when making legislative decisions, policymakers are faced with the monumental challenge of balancing the benefits and costs associated with mandates designed to measure student achievement. These findings suggest that school decisions should include supports necessary for teachers and schools/administrators to allow teachers greater involvement in curriculum design. For example, how might state legislation promote teachers as integral voices in the decision making around school start times, bell schedules, and number of course preparations, which all have direct implications on the time teachers have to dedicate to learning about and designing their own curriculum? Middle level schools are interconnected systems in which each connecting node influences the other, with student learning as the nucleus of the system. Given middle grades teachers’ integral role in student learning, it is not surprising that their involvement in school policy would provide a much-needed perspective.

As policy leaders, administrators, and educators alike learned during the recent COVID-19 schooling crisis (Hughes & Jones, 2020a, 2020b), our education system is more malleable than we construct it to be. It simply takes changing the system and examining the results of those changes over time. In general, policy leaders interested in school change should include educators and education researchers in policy decisions that impact high poverty schools, such as the amount of time and money committed to standardized testing. In this way, at least some of the time allocated to “preparing students” for those tests, as well as some of the millions of dollars allocated to purchasing and grading those tests, could be redirected to teacher-chosen professional learning time and resources that support teacher-led curriculum design.

More specifically, middle level school leaders interested in teacher led curriculum design can engender a school community that empowers teachers as leaders who contribute to organizational learning. Because middle grades philosophy already purports the importance of young adolescents learning in teams and engaging with an interdisciplinary curriculum that is challenging, exploratory, and diverse, teachers need to be entrusted with the time and resources to pursue these philosophical goals. Even more, middle grades teachers interested in engaging in curriculum design benefit from collaboration with one another and open and continuous communication with administration. Middle grades teachers taking on the role of curriculum designer should expect to feel challenged, invigorated, and gain a deeper understanding of the content they are teaching by going through the process of unpacking standards and aligning those standards with meaningful learning experiences. Deliberating with colleagues and sharing these challenges collectively are ways to transition from struggle to productive struggle.

Limitations and Future Research

The purpose of this study was to document how the environmental context of the middle school in which the teachers taught (i.e., student population, class scheduling, administrative support, state and district mandates) influenced the teacher teams’ experiences of designing their own interdisciplinary curriculum units through the lenses of PDC and productive struggle. While we feel this goal was met, we also acknowledge several limitations to the investigation, such as scale and the relationship between teachers’ involvement in curriculum and student learning. Because this was an exploratory investigation and because of our particular research question, we did not collect diagnostic student assessment data, as that will be collected in the longitudinal study. Qualitative methods were appropriate for making sense of the complex nature of interactions in this study, but this particular approach does not lend itself to generalizing findings—nor should it. Furthermore, because the participants in this study taught in the same middle school, the singular site may have provoked similar experiences among participants. Multi-site studies would provide a platform for cross-case analysis and purposeful sampling of participants who have access to a variety of resources and/or work in settings with different levels of administrative support. Again, these limitations will be addressed in the future longitudinal study. Future research should investigate teacher-designed curriculum as a vehicle for student engagement and teacher self-efficacy through the lens of teacher professionalism. Further, middle grades research would greatly benefit from an investigation of the influence of these constructs on student achievement.

Conclusion

Ten months working with the six teacher-participants clearly illustrated to us that teaching and learning can be incredibly powerful and meaningful when teachers are provided time, support, and professional autonomy to design curriculum that is based on their students’ interests, a deep knowledge of the content, and a thoughtful unpacking of mandated standards. We were reminded over and over during this work that, at its core, teaching is indeed a complex and nuanced entanglement of art and skill; a craft, if you will, that calls on practitioners to constantly engage in productive struggle.

In conclusion, we argue that teacher professionalism, by way of curriculum design, is one tangible way to enact middle grades philosophy regarding the kinds of curricular experiences young adolescents should have in successful middle schools (Bishop & Harrison, 2021; Jackson & Davis, 2000). Empowering teachers and providing them the time and resources to be fully involved in their curriculum design honor the expertise as a trusted professionals and may help them design more meaningful, contextual learning experiences that will interest and inspire their students.