How Is the Best Curriculum Created?

TLDR:

The best curriculum is molded around natural student curiosity, uses accurate, logically sequenced content, and centers on well-crafted questions that promote flow, engagement, and deep, self-driven understanding.

To begin, what is curriculum anyway?  Curriculum is an optimized sequence of ideas and experiences to consistently produce understanding and skill in students.  It should be fun and perpetually improved too if we really want it to be the best.  So then, when crafting curriculum, what considerations should we keep front-of-mind?  First, the curriculum must be molded to the child, not the child to the curriculum.  The child should be conditioned to the classroom routines and procedures, which should be simple and pleasant, but the curriculum should feel completely natural to the student.  Second, the material we feed the student must be of the highest quality: accurate, beautifully organized information in the most efficient, effective sequence.  It’s upon us to prepare the course so thoroughly that all the student has to do is participate to understand, the experience must be smooth as silk.  This helps the student slip into flow, total focus, completely engaged.  Friction diverts our concentration and pulls us out of flow.  Then third, and perhaps the root, is the careful crafting of wise questions.  It is the question that enlightens, that begs thought, demands effort.  That investment on the part of the student also helps the knowledge stick and fit into context, the act of thinking opens the mind to receive the answer, and it’s best earned by one’s own effort.  The right question just shows us where to hunt.  If these principles are enacted, the curriculum can produce impressive leaps in development in relatively short time – and bigger and faster if the student is particularly disciplined and hard-working.  Now, what do we mean when we say the curriculum must be ‘molded to the mind of the child’?

What’s every child’s favorite question?  “Why?”  They ask “why” about everything, and as well they should, because they’re piecing together how the world works.  Some phenomenon catches their attention, and perhaps it’s the first time they’re exposed to it, so they trying to figure out how it all works.  “Why did that happen?”  “How does that work?”  This is the way a child’s mind works, and it makes perfect sense.  As such, the best curriculum is molded to this nature because it’s universal to all children – and to those adults whose curiosity hasn’t been snuffed out too.  So then, if introducing some data point, idea, or phenomenon naturally stimulates questions from the children, the next question is: What questions do the children most commonly ask?  If the same lesson is delivered to five classes, and all five classes unprompted ask the same two or three questions, then we’ve discovered what questions to ask in our curriculum.  This is how we capture the natural curiosity of the students, we prompt them with an idea, a definition, or a phenomenon, then let their minds run wild and free.  Our job is to catch their thoughts, bottle their natural curiosity by writing those questions in the curriculum in the most natural sequence: the one in which the children asked them.  We make the curriculum feel natural by modeling it off the nature of the student.  And the more broadly we expand our student population, the more accurately we can capture the deepest curiosities of the youth and deliver them marvelously for the next class of students.

Now, this is much easier said than done!  The difficulty here lies in the necessity for feedback in the crafting of the next lesson in sequence.  We know the path we ultimately need to walk, where we need to get, what topics need to be understood, but we don’t know each individual step that we’ll take along the way.  This is what we learn from the students.  As such, it is categorically possible to get ahead in curriculum planning, which is stressful.  Gotta deliver on a deadline, every week, all year, and you’re only ever safe for a week.  Can’t get ahead until we see the students’ reactions.  It’s extremely difficult to do this, which is why it’s rarely done, but the results are magnificent and the student experience is incredible.  The highest achievement, the most deeply satisfying feeling, is when a student unwittingly predicts the next question.  We ask question #1, we answer it, then a student asks another question naturally stimulated by the first.  When that student is then asked to read question #2, only to behold the very question they just unwittingly asked, we all have a good laugh at the serendipity.  In well-crafted curriculum this can happen often.  We can predict the child’s natural curiosity without pushing or pulling them in any specific direction – sometimes they may even skip a question or two ahead!  And on that note, if students are already preempting the next question… Is there any clearer indication that they’re genuinely engaged and understand what’s going on?

So, in molding the curriculum thus to the student, how do we order the questions?  What determines the sequence of ideas and experiences?  Well, the ideal is to deliver 100% accurate information, all organized with everything seamlessly interconnected, in the most efficient, effective sequence.  Several pieces to unpack there.  First is the accuracy – we have to test everything ruthlessly to know whether we indeed have the truth.  Lots of research, cross-referencing, and hands-on experiments ourselves to see firsthand.  Then in that experience, we can begin to organize the pieces in the order that makes most sense.  In math, for instance, we should probably know how to add and subtract before we do multiplication, because multiplication is basically adding at scale.  Then we should learn multiplication before division, and division before fractions, because each next step requires an understanding of the previous.  Plus, if we skip step 2 and jump from 1 to 3, most kids will ask questions that only step 2 can answer anyway, so we ultimately end up going in order, just less efficiently.  Good curriculum is tightly organized, no wasted time, no wasted effort, smooth, and everything makes sense to the student.  At the end of the day, sequence in the best curriculum is determined half by sheer logic and half by student curiosity.  Logic provides the skeleton, curiosity the flesh and color.

And at last we arrive where rubber meets road: The question.  We know the sequence we should progress through, we’ve captured the students’ natural curiosity, and now we must formulate wise questions.  The question must be abundantly clear, any words used must have been previously defined or be generally basic vocabulary to ensure understanding.  It’s interesting to note here that when we distill everything down to its essence, there are really only two types of questions: a definition and a “why”.  “What” is ultimately a question of definition (What is that?  What were you doing?), and “how” is just asking “why” back-to-back for a while to reveal a mechanism of causes and effects (A because B, B because C, C because D, etc.)  These relatively simple questions should be artfully worded, however, and should cleverly show the student where to look without revealing the mystery.  The student should be compelled by curiosity to explore, and when they’re done, we should ask them what they observed, help them contextualize it, then fill in gaps to really polish the idea.  The degree of clarity that results is a beautiful gift to offer a student indeed.  Then little by little, these efforts soon compound into a something much bigger, piece by piece the puzzle is put together and the grand image comes into focus in all its rich detail.  Everything makes sense.  The kid gets it, they know how to apply it, and they’re confident in both theory and practicum.

The natural curiosity of a child’s mind, raw logic, and the potency of a wise question are the key ingredients to the best curriculum.  It should feel natural to the student, help slip them into flow, and beget further curiosities to explore and contextualize.  Everything should make sense and it should all interconnect cleanly.  But perhaps most of all, it should feel deeply satisfying to the student.  The child should feel good.  The best curriculum instills in the students a love of learning to complement and synergize with to their natural curiosity.