“Students are showing poor academic progress! (Whatever that means). “Students are behind!” “Students are not showing good academic achievement!” These are things that I hear all the time in education. What I find even more disturbing is how teachers and school districts propose they fix poor student achievement. I have heard it said that focusing on academics is the cure for poor academic achievement. WHAT!?! How does that make any sense? The solution to poor academic achievement is NOT focusing on more academics. If you want to fix student academic achievement, we need to detach and see the bigger picture!
Fixing academics with academics is like putting out a fire with a different color fire, or fixing a broken waterline by pushing more water through it. Sounds ridiculous, right?!? Yet this is exactly what is happening and has been happening in education for decades. For example, a school district sees a drop in student math achievement scores. They determine that to fix the problem, they will get a new math curriculum and spend hours of teachers’ time training them on how to use the curriculum. This is fixing academics with academics. Here’s another example. Students need help with vocabulary, so the fix is to focus on specific terminology from the reading curriculum. Again, this is fixing academics with academics.
Curriculum companies make money by promising better academic achievement if their material is used to fidelity. This is fixing academics with academics. What one curriculum teaches is the same as their competitor but with more up-to-date pictures and colors in their books. What students need to learn has stayed the same. The standards remain the same. The purpose of content standards is to guide what a children need to know or understand by the end of a specific grade.
Poor academic achievement cannot be fixed with more academics. Throwing new curricula at teachers or focusing on more specific content will not fix the issue. What was once a problem will always be a problem until the issue is addressed from a different angle. Here’s an example: A river starts to overflow its banks and floods nearby towns. The quick fix is to sandbag the surrounding areas and try not to have as much water overflow into the city. After the water recedes, the town returns to normal with minor damages. The city repairs the flood damage and keeps going until the river floods again. The sandbags were a little fix for a more significant issue. What needs to happen is the city needs to either reinforce the banks of the river or redirect the river altogether. The problem won’t go away until it is addressed from a different angle.
To fix academic problems, we need to detach from the problem and get a bigger picture. Education has evolved rapidly in the last three years. Solving academic achievement problems hasn’t changed in decades. Instead of thinking outside the box, we want to stick with what we have either been told to do or what is easiest. Last I checked, whenever we choose to fix a problem using an easy solution, the problem doesn’t go away. It only gets patched until it becomes a problem again. Throwing more academia at bad academic achievement will never fix the problem. It will only repair the problem until it becomes a problem again, or something else will suffer because we will get tunnel-visioned on one issue.
Fixing poor academic achievement starts with reflection. We must ask, “Why are students not performing well?” Again, the content has stayed the same. If the content remains the same, teachers need to change. This doesn’t mean teachers pile on more content. Teachers must reflect on their pedagogy and determine what isn’t working. A student will only do as well as the teacher who teaches the class. This might sting a bit, but if students struggle, it is more likely a teaching problem than a content problem. The focus needs to be on pedagogy rather than content.
I mentioned earlier that education has changed drastically in the last 3 or 4 years. However, how content is taught hasn’t changed for decades. Teachers are still teaching traditional learning styles when the world has moved far beyond conventional ones. With more technology, collaborative working environments, creativity and problem-solving, and personal responsibility needed in the real world, classrooms must start adjusting to the skills students need to succeed beyond the classroom. One method that focuses on students’ skills to succeed is Project Based Learning. The content stays the same, but how students learn is exceptionally different.
In my last blog post, I discussed the key to academic success. Teachers are so focused on academics that they miss the opportunity to prepare students for success through a winning mindset. If we do not focus on the mindset of learning, learning doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how much content you throw at students; they will continue to struggle and underperform without the right mindset. However, students will begin to create a winning mindset by teaching with fidelity the importance of discipline, responsibility, the value of failure, and what real learning looks like. Will every student create this winning mindset? No, but most will, and there will be a change in students’ ability and focus in the classroom. Better academic achievement will follow when teachers focus on teaching a winning mindset.
To address poor academic achievement, we must stop doing what we always do. We need to stop using academics to fix academics. Different types of curriculum won’t fix the problem. We must start looking at pedagogy and addressing how we approach the content. What students need to know and understand per grade level has stayed the same. However, something that should have changed, but has yet to, is the way teachers approach the content. Reflection and reassessment of pedagogy is the first step down the right path. Beyond that, we must focus on building a winning mindset in learning. We need to teach the qualities and characteristics required for high academic achievement.
Welcome To The Classroom 
I read your article in Education Matters and saw you have this blog. I am very interested in your point of view on curriculum. I would like to learn more about PBL. Could you comment on research you did to develop the PBL curriculum you are using with your students?
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Hello, Brooke.
It is good to meet you, and thank you for the comment. Let me start by sharing a really great place to go for PBL – (https://www.pblworks.org/). This site is full of great information, ideas, and collaboration. This is where I got my start, and I have been building on it ever since. The biggest thing to understand about PBL is that it is 20% teacher and 80% students. There is teaching, but it is mostly focused on guiding students rather than speaking to students. Another aspect of PBL is you should start at the end. For example, ask yourself what you want students know, and work backwards from there on how you will get them to the final product. Finally, my favorite part of PBL is that it is student choice. There is more than one way to solve a problem. In PBL, students get to collaborate with each other and decide how to solve any given problem. The problems I give them are standards based, but more importantly, focus on real-world connections.
As for curriculum, I have seen nothing good come from districts pouring tens of thousands of dollars into an academic curriculum in hopes that it will fix student academic performance. In reality, curriculum has nothing to do with student performance. It’s actually a money pit. Someone once looked at education and figured out a way to make money off of education by creating a “curriculum” that they said would boost academic performance, raise the academic level of low performing students, etc. In reality, curriculum has become a crutch for teaching. Instead of focusing on the standards and how best to teach those standards to students, curriculum has created lazy or overworked educators; all the while some giant curriculum company profits at the expense of frustrated and overworked teachers.
What actually works in the classroom is the same thing that we have been doing for centuries. Practice, practice, practice. I love the phrase, “The more you do it, the better you get!” I teach this mindset to my students, and not only does it work in the classroom, it works with everything in life. Instead of focusing on a curriculum that jumps around and gives very little time to practice and rarely reviews concepts, I focus on the standards and give students ample amount of opportunities to practice content all while reviewing content and combining standards to create a more holistic learning environment; another thing that PBL provides learners.
I hope this answers your question. Please feel free to ask any more questions or share any of your thoughts.
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