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.