1. Becoming a Dynamic Teacher with an Emergent Curriculum
Melanie Meredith
November 5, 2002
Many teachers aspire to having a series of units neatly filed away in tubs and
cabinets that they can pull out at a moment’s notice. When they make a general plan for
the following year, they look at lesson plans in those units and mark off the number of
days for each unit on their calendar. They know what books and videos to check out
ahead of time, and what worksheets to send to be photocopied. I know teachers do this
because I have strived to be like the teachers who have these finished units tucked away
and waiting. I write down my lesson plans and keep track of how long each activity and
lesson really took my class. The next year, if I am lucky enough to be teaching the same
units, I pull them out and reuse them. Until just recently, I would have said that my
goal was to have a complete series of units like this; units that I was pleased with
because they were full of quality activities, lessons, and assessments that had worked
well. I was not unwilling to make some additions or changes here or there, but for the
most part, these units would be set. I would, in a sense, be done with most lesson
planning and curriculum development.
There is a major assumption grounded in this practice. The assumption surfaced
when a friend, who is a retired teacher, said to me that he had disliked how certain
things he had planned for his classes became institutionalized. He felt pressured to do
the same things every year, while he wanted to be designing things that had the
potential to be even better. A light went on in my head! By assuming that I can pull the
same unit out of my filing cabinet each year for any given topic, I am assuming that my
students are the same from year to year. I am assuming that they have the same skills,
the same abilities, and the same interests. I am assuming that the way I taught the unit
the first time will be the best way to teach the unit again. I am assuming that I could not
develop anything better, even though I have gained more experience.
Where did this assumption come from? Why do so many teachers strive for the
goal of a “finished” curriculum? I believe there are several factors leading to this
common assumption. First, as a teacher, there is never enough time in the day for all the
whole-class teaching, planning, correcting papers, working with students individually,
phone calls, and meetings that should occur. If teachers can save time on a time-
consuming area like lesson planning and curriculum development, then they have more
time for everything else. Also, if a teacher invests many hours in planning a good unit,
then she wants to be able to use it more than once. Teachers are currently under a great
deal of pressure to raise test scores and follow district-mandated curricula. Losing
control over their creativity has caused some teachers to “accommodate to the pressures
they themselves are under from external mandates by choosing instructional processes
that they think will lighten their workload” (Short, 1990, p.203). Additionally, in most
schools there is not an emphasis on reflecting on one’s own teaching in order to create
ever-improving curriculum. Although staff development often focuses on improving
teachers’ practices, teachers do not usually have time in those workshops to think about

2. what they have done in the past, only what new things they can use in the future.
Lastly, although it seems rather obvious that schools should be “student-centered,”
idiosyncratic children often are not the focus of curriculum development.
Personally, I think I came to my assumption from watching other teachers who I
believed to be “good teachers” and from my own experiences as a student. I remember
friends who were older than I am and my younger brother doing many of the same
projects in their classes that I did in mine. Many of my teachers were known for the
assignments they gave out, so they could not have changed very much each year. By the
time I became a teacher, I saw the same type of thing in my peers. The fourth grade
teachers always had a metric Olympics after the measurement unit, and I knew a
teacher who could start making copies in June for what she would do in the next
September. I thought I wanted to be like that. I was motivated by the time-saving
aspect, too. I was striving to contain my teaching job into something approximating a
forty-hour work week. I found that I got much closer to that goal in my second year of
teaching algebra and pre-algebra because much of my curriculum was set. I had written
all the lessons my first year and only made revisions in the second year. I did add a few
projects and change things that had not gone well, but overall, I did vastly less
planning. At that middle school, I met a teacher who was much more dynamic with her
lesson planning in a math-science block class, and although I knew Sydney was a very
effective teacher, it seemed like so much more work. Now I see it as a different kind of
work, and what I didn’t realize at that time was that Sydney was reaching all of her
students much more often than I was. Even though I used cooperative learning and
believed heartily in my students, I was often guilty of creating a teacher-centered
classroom, not a student-centered one. “A student-centered classroom is a place where
students are encouraged to explore their own interests, and to view school not as the
imposition of an alien agenda, but as an organized means to articulate their own”
(Levine, 1995, p. 55).
Students should be the first consideration when teachers plan curriculum, and
since students are changing all the time, it makes sense that lessons need to be dynamic
also. Instead of striving to make “finished” units, teachers should be setting the goal of
planning lessons based on students’ abilities, questions, interests, and current events.
Our assumption would then shift to the idea that it is not possible to create a quality
learning experience for students without having specific students in mind. Steven Levy,
a Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, states in his book Starting from Scratch (1990) that
he tries to find the genius in every child, “the essence of who he or she really is” (p. 4).
Levy works on “shaping the learning environment to enable each child to manifest the
genius that he or she brought to the classroom” (1990, p. 4). Also, we should set a goal
for knowing more about what our students really learn from the lessons we plan. As
Carol R. Rodgers notes, “Once students begin to reveal the truth about their experience
as learners, it is difficult for a teacher to pretend that learning is happening when it is
not” (2002, p. 233). We should make a commitment to take responsibility for our own
professional development as teachers who are continually trying to improve our
teaching for the sake of our students’ learning (Zeichner & Liston, 1996).

3. Inquiry-based learning and reflecting on one’s own teaching can help teachers
accomplish the goal of creating dynamic, emergent curriculum units. There are a wide
variety of meanings implied with the phrase “inquiry learning,” so let me explain the
definition that I will use here. To me, inquiry-based learning is learning that starts with
an authentic question, whether generated by the students, the teacher, or a text. The
goal of inquiry-based learning is for students to actively generate explanations and
provide evidence for the answers to the question. Often looking for answers to the first
question leads to many more valid and interesting questions that are worth studying.
Using a process of inquiry forces a teacher’s lessons to be dynamic because one
must allow for unexpected ideas and questions. It is impossible to fully predict where
the inquiry will lead, although the teacher can (and should) have goals for the unit.
“Robust and fruitful questions” (National Research Council, 2000, p. 24) generate
motivation for students; they want to find the answers to these type of questions. The
questions can be in any subject area, as long as they allow for real study and a range of
responses. The questions lead to activities so that students can create experiences from
which to learn. These activities usually have students working together so that they can
co-construct meaning from what they are doing. This incorporates Vygotsky’s idea of
the zone of proximal development, which implies that all learning is collaborative
(Wells, 2000, p. 57). Halliday notes that talking and writing about activities is essential;
“language is the essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience
becomes knowledge” (cited in Wells, 2000, emphasis in original). A teacher can still plan
for activities, although she may be planning quite close to the day of the lesson, rather
than months in advance. But she needs to be flexible so that the activities can be
adapted to serve the questions being asked. In an ideal situation, especially with older
students, the students can design some of the activities that they believe will further
their goal of answering their own questions. To show what they have learned, students
can be assessed based on the quality of their explanations in writing, projects, or
discussions.
Ideally, the teacher becomes a “co-inquirer” in the process so that a community
of collaboration and inquiry permeates the classroom (Wells, 2000). The teacher’s job
changes from delivering fixed information to helping students refine their questions,
providing support for seeking out the answers, and challenging students to provide
evidence for what they have come to know. These tasks require being focused on the
moment in the classroom, but does not require planning time. The teacher does not
need to have all the answers, just some ideas of how to find them. In this way, a teacher
becomes an agent in helping students learn to learn, one of Dewey’s primary goals for
curriculum (Gill, 1993). Inquiry-based learning can help a teacher create more emergent
curriculum units by allowing him or her to lay out a framework for a unit, with specific
learning goals, and then working collaboratively with the students to drive and create
what happens within that unit. It can never be exactly the same twice, even if some of
the activities and lessons are the same, because the students are pulling from their own
experiences and moving forward based, at least partially, on what they are motivated to
learn.

4. Although reflecting on one’s own teaching and teaching using an inquiry-based
approach may not seem connected at first glance, when I looked closer at the two topics
I found them inextricably linked. The Education Development Center uses the phrase
“diagnostic teacher” to refer to the concept of a teacher who is constantly assessing and
observing what is happening in his or her classroom, with the intent of selecting the
best practices and designing curriculum for the students (Soloman, 1999). “Diagnostic
teachers…actively assess students’ understandings, misunderstandings, interests, and
skills in the light of teaching goals” (Soloman, 1999, p. xvii). In inquiry-based learning,
these assessments have to be occurring all of the time in order to keep the learning
moving forward productively. “It is as much a part of teachers’ professional
responsibilities to review classroom happenings and try to learn from that experience, as
it is to plan thoroughly, organize carefully and strive to interact thoughtfully and
sensitively with children in the classroom” (Hart, 2000, p. 7, emphasis in original). A
diagnostic teacher looks at students’ needs and curriculum goals before constructing
teacher practices (Soloman & Morocco, 1999), which is ideally the same in inquiry-based
learning.
Reflecting on one’s teaching is really more about reflecting on the students’
learning. It should take the focus off of the teacher and onto the students. As Rodgers
(2002) states, this type of reflecting requires the ability to observe carefully and think
critically about students, before taking action on the new understanding that emerges.
One way that teachers can reflect is by asking students specific questions about their
own learning. Asking questions like, “What do you think you’ve really learned?” and
“How do you know you’ve learned it?” give a teacher incredible insight into his or her
students. Rodgers (2002) points out that it is important to help students learn to
distinguish between what they learned, what was taught, and what they did. Once a
teacher knows what has really been learned, then he or she can make other decisions.
Perhaps the students learned the content in the teacher’s goals and answered their own
questions about the topic. Perhaps they are lacking some important knowledge, and the
teacher can then adjust his or her strategies and focus further student investigations on
that goal. This is only possible if a teacher stops assuming what his or her students
know. Teachers can then “differentiate their teaching from their students’
learning…[and] become more sensitive to the fact that good teaching is a response to
students’ learning rather than the cause of students’ learning” (Rodgers, 2002, p. 250).
Teachers can create their own daily professional development by utilizing
inquiry-based learning and reflection. Teaching is always hard, time-consuming work,
but it can become more joyous by letting students in on the construction process. Our
students are unique individuals and our teaching should reflect that. If we use the same
materials each time we teach a unit, we are discounting our students’ life histories and
experiences. Think of how much richer and more effective learning is when it links to
something we already know. I am not advocating dumping everything out of a
teacher’s file cabinet. I am not planning on doing that with my own library of lessons
and units. But, I am planning on revising the starting point for many of my units and on
finding ways to let my students’ questions drive the journey of learning. I will find out
more of what my students already know, so that we can move forward from there. I

5. will continue to create my own curriculum, rather than relying on packaged curriculum
based on someone’s idea of a few basic types of students, but now I will let my students
in on the planning. It is unlikely that all of my teaching will be inquiry-based and
reflective, especially at first, but now that my assumptions have shifted, I can’t go back
to creating curriculum that I can pull out and use “as is.” I want my students to feel the
power of authentic learning, where knowledge is constructed out of a desire to know
something.
References
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Hart, S. (2000) Thinking through Teaching: A framework for enhancing participation and
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60). New York: New Press.
Levy, S. (1996). Starting from Scratch: one classroom builds its own curriculum. Portsmouth,
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National Research Council. (2000). Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards: A
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231-246). New York: Teachers College Press.
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