Balancing Curriculum and Student Needs
How do teachers respond to the unexpected while also covering the school or state-mandated material of their course? Some teachers choose to designate a class or part of class as a reflective moment, separate from the course curriculum. Others, in contrast, incorporate discussions of controversy into their lesson plans and assignments.
The Common Core Standards English Language Arts standard calls for 70% of the required reading to be non-fiction. While one might assume that this non-fiction tackles an equitable number of contemporary conversations, the required reading is composed mostly of texts written prior to the 20th century, often by white male authors. Keeping this in mind, teachers that must follow the common core face an inevitable if they hope to introduce classes to contemporary non-fiction. Either they must deviate from national standards, or sacrifice course time that would be given to another issue.
Staying on the Curriculum
While addressing contemporary social issues can often be pertinent, there are a range of stances teachers take on whether or not to follow common core curriculum exactly or deviate to include more references to current events.
Prioritizing Learning Goals
Teachers who rarely deviate from the planned curriculum may see this as prioritizing the learning goals of their students, this approach does not always permit time to discuss issues of national trauma in depth.
While private school teachers to not typically face as much pressure to teach to state or national standards, many schools still enforce an established English curriculum that teachers must follow. Most teachers I spoke with were allowed some flexibility, but often lacked the time in their course to get to any supplemental reading beyond what was the grade level standard. For upper-level AP courses, the idea of teaching outside of the test is almost unthinkable until after the May test dates. This creates an unlikely continuum of achievement as high-performing AP students and the lower-achieving students become the least likely to benefit from additional texts that offer contemporary connections or class time for in-depth discussion. In this these types of situations teachers at both the lower and higher-performing range of student achievement find that there is not enough time to cover material beyond the curriculum.
Teachers have become more creative in designing lessons that include required texts, while simultaneously crafting lessons that connect the fiction and non-fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries to contemporary issues. One teacher interviewed detailed how they and their students discussed the connections between the wealth and excess of the Gilded Age in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to the controversies within the 2018 presidential administration. In instances such as this, we see how teachers must simultaneously teach to state and national standards, while addressing contemporary issues that students encounter on the news and social media.
​
When Curriculum can be Triggering
When teaching required lessons on the U.S. election process during the 2016 election, one social studies teacher struggled with how best to approach candidate politics to a classroom of primarily immigrant students.