Today’s post is the second in a series highlighting not what schools should do more of but, instead, what they should do less.

‘Work Deeply’

Jo Boaler is the Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Education (Mathematics) at Stanford University, co-founder of youcubed, and Struggly, and the author of Mathish: Finding Creativity, Diversity & Meaning in Mathematics (2024), published by Harper Collins:

All teachers know that when they are required to cover too much content, they cannot spend time engaging students in important work—inviting students to explore, use their own ideas, and investigate in depth. It is often in these deep investigations that real learning happens, and students come to love their subject, as they get to ask and answer their own questions and develop curiosity. But how do teachers find time for such work when there is so much content to teach?

Teaching can be overwhelming, and there is no question that teachers are overworked and exhausted. Justin Reich proposes that the key to improving teachers’ work lives and their students’ learning is subtraction—working out what can be taken off teachers’ plates. I agree. In my work helping the state of California recommend ways teachers could cut back during the pandemic years, for its digital learning initiative, I paid careful attention to this recommendation from the National Research Council:

Superficial coverage of all topics in a subject area must be replaced with in-depth coverage of fewer topics that allows key concepts in the discipline to be understood. The goal of coverage need not be abandoned entirely, of course. But there must be a sufficient number of cases of in-depth study to allow students to grasp the defining concepts in specific domains within a discipline.

(Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000)

The need to have students focus on the most important ideas in each grade, in depth, led to teams in both mathematics and English working to rearrange all the content in the common core standards into “big ideas” in math and “critical areas” in English. The proposal is that if teachers ensure that, for each of about eight critical ideas in each grade, students get opportunities to work deeply, making connections, and investigating ideas, they will have a solid foundation for everything else they learn.

Each of the big ideas is illustrated with teaching examples and recommendations for providing students with meaningful digital experiences. In mathematics, these were incorporated into the California Mathematics Framework that was adopted in 2023.

When teachers focus on big ideas, taught through rich tasks, they find that students learn many of the ideas set out in standards in each task. This is how the approach allows teachers to teach less while teaching more.

In my own studies of effective schools and teachers, I have found that those who bring about the highest and most equitable achievement for students are those who focus their teaching on big ideas not small content standards.

In one lesson, I watched a 4th grade teacher invite students to investigate how many pennies there could be after describing various groupings of the coins. The students listened to the instructions, then moved to different parts of the room to investigate, with some of them sitting on the floor, some sitting at tables, moving counters and cubes they had chosen to use. The young children were fully engaged in their explorations for nearly an hour, building on each other’s thinking while considering the ways the numbers could be grouped. They were working on a big idea, Factors and Area models, with seven different standards met during the lesson. Importantly, the teacher gave the students opportunities to use their own agency—asking their own questions, choosing their own manipulatives and seating, and sharing their ideas.

Teachers who have moved toward teaching in these deeper ways—teaching less to teach more, share that they are happier and more fulfilled, and so are their students. Some of them have seen their students’ state test scores rise significantly. I have found that once teachers see the ways students respond to deeper tasks, with greater interest and motivation, they never go back.

Addition by Subtraction

Chandra Shaw has more than 25 years of experience in education, as a teacher, reading specialist, instructional coach, and now a literacy consultant at one of her state’s regional service centers. Chandra is a TEDx speaker and amateur YouTuber:

In “The Power of Doing Less in Schools,” Justin Reich states, “When the system isn’t working, and the people in the system are exhausted and overwhelmed, you can’t fix those problems by adding more things to the system and making it more complicated.”

Truer words have never been written. However, this describes what happens in schools on a daily basis. Overzealous administrators “volunteer” their staff for pilot programs and mandate the same convoluted curriculum and professional development sessions for every staff member so that everyone is “on the same page.” All of this is done without ever giving consideration to what needs to be subtracted from stakeholders’ proverbial plates before any of these new initiatives can be effectively implemented.

So, realistically, what should schools do less of in order to accomplish more?

They can start by streamlining the curriculum and personalizing teacher professional development opportunities.

If you haven’t taken a look at district curriculum documents in the last decade, consider yourself lucky because the documents for a single unit within a grading period for a single subject could be upwards of 100 pages long and filled with dozens of standards, essential questions, performance assessments (both formative and summative), critical vocabulary, and lesson-planning tools for already busy, overwhelmed teachers to wade through and create their detailed lesson plans, which are due weeks in advance. How we don’t see the absurdity of these documents that often contain multiple hyperlinks to various other digital resources that are meant to help but usually just cause resource overload is beyond common sense.

A solution to this problem would be for districts to take a page out of Mike Schmoker’s book, Focus Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning, and focus exclusively on implementing “what is essential.” And surely, ALL 70 pages of one unit of the English/language arts and reading curriculum document, or ELAR, I recently reviewed are NOT all “essential.”

The truth is that many of the standards for ELAR do not need isolated instruction as most curriculum documents lay out. In fact, in Focus, Schmoker posits that due to the recursive nature of ELAR, some can be ignored completely (Schmoker, 2018 p. 45).

Even in subjects such as math and science, where certain prerequisite skills build on others, we know that other high-achieving countries teach fewer than half of the standards we teach here in the United States. Some, like Japan and China, have only a third (Schmoker, 2018 p. 47). By coming together to determine and prioritize what is truly essential in the content areas, schools could provide a curriculum that could be meaningfully taught within a school year.

Doing less in the area of professional development would mean schools prioritizing high-impact professional development opportunities that directly support teachers’ instructional practices and student learning outcomes, rather than overwhelming them with numerous mandatory one-size-fits-all workshops that many feel are not relevant to their current teaching assignments or the specific students they serve. Schools should consider offering more personalized and job-related PD opportunities tailored to individual teacher needs and interests and creating a professional learning environment where collaboration and peer support among teachers is highly valued.

For example, some of the most beneficial professional development I’ve ever experienced was being allowed time to observe other teachers’ classroom instruction and review student work samples for success criteria. This allowed me to compare samples of my own students’ work with that of their peers and consider teaching differences that might have accounted for any discrepancies in student mastery. This costs far less than paying a consultant to come out to deliver one day of professional development. For the price of one sub for the day, several teachers can grow and learn in “real time” by seeing strategies in action with the same students they, too, serve. What could be more valuable than that?

Unfortunately, as mentioned in “The Power of Doing Less in Schools,” most education decisionmakers try to make things better by looking for things to add before they look for elements to subtract (Reich, 2022). However, by teaching fewer essential standards more deeply and individualizing professional development for educators, schools could create the changes so many claim they want to see.

‘Do Less’

Michele Caracappa is a former teacher, principal, chief academic officer, and nonprofit leader. As the founder of Lead Learning, she partners with school and system leaders to enhance and transform systems:

A few weeks into the school year, hours after students had been dismissed, I found Stephanie* at the back of her classroom amid a pile of books, lesson plans, and curriculum guides. At the time, I was a new principal, and Stephanie was a new teacher, trying to find her way amid a growing sense of overwhelm.

As Stephanie poured over her plans, Post-it-ing the questions she planned to ask, preparing charts, and organizing materials, she shared a worry: “I can’t sustain this.” Her preparation was leaving her exhausted. And worse, despite her efforts, she was feeling frazzled when standing before her class, struggling to keep straight the finer points of each lesson objective while responding in the moment to the array of student responses, questions, and concerns.

My advice to her? Do less. Forget the perfect plan or pristine chart. Instead, try radical simplification. Focus relentlessly on the most important aspects of preparation and be OK with letting go of the things that require time and energy but don’t add value to the quality of instruction.

As educators find themselves in a similar spot as Stephanie this school year, here are some ways that teachers—and the leaders who support them—can strengthen their plans to include what’s most essential while shedding what’s not serving them or their students.

Prioritize your own intellectual preparation

Teachers’ preparation time is often consumed by studying standards, objectives, questions, and activities associated with designing or internalizing a lesson plan. Yet, some of the most important planning work happens before a question or task is ever crafted or posed—the intellectual work of making meaning of the text for yourself.

When Stephanie asked me how she might streamline her planning, I suggested she begin by focusing her attention on deeply reading the texts she would read with her students, holding off for a moment on the questions associated with them. For now, the most important questions would be ones she would generate through her own sense-making. By prioritizing her own study of the text—and investing in her own understanding—Stephanie felt better prepared and more confident when leading her students in discussion and analysis.

Ask fewer, well-chosen questions

So often in our lessons, we pepper students with a myriad of questions, creating patterns of talk that ping-pong between student and teacher. Not only does this cause teacher talk to predominate, it limits opportunities for students to build off one another’s ideas and engage more deeply in the discussion. Solving this starts with planning. By planning to ask fewer questions with greater intentionality, we increase the space for student discussion and thinking. Doing so can both enhance our plans and create more airtime for students to grapple with the most important ideas in a text.

Pare down the quantity of strategies

Graphic organizers, strategy charts, mini-lessons, and more: Often, our lessons become overstuffed with good intentions, but more is not always more. A recent study by Peng et al. reinforces this point. The researchers found that more strategy instruction did not necessarily lead to larger increases in reading comprehension. Instead, the authors found that three key strategies (main idea, text structure, and retell) had the greatest positive impact on comprehension when taught together and that the positive effects were strongest when paired with background-knowledge instruction. A key takeaway for classroom practice: Rather than planning to teach an ever-growing catalog of strategies, focus on what’s most important and do it while consistently building and activating background knowledge.

How school leaders can help

When giving feedback to teachers, school leaders can resist the urge to add more to teachers’ plates and, instead, support them in figuring out what they can subtract. By investing in their own intellectual preparation, asking fewer questions with greater intentionality, and paring down the quantity of strategies in favor of what’s most impactful, teachers really can do more with less. And both they and their students can reap the benefits.

*The name Stephanie is a pseudonym.

Thanks to Jo, Chandra, and Michele for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

In The Power of Doing Less in Schools, Justin Reich suggests that for schools to do better, they should do less. What are things related to communications, curriculum, rules, and/or other areas you think can be “subtracted” from what teachers, principals, and/or schools as institutions do now?

In Part One, Darlshawn (Shawn) Patterson, Alison J. Mello, and Keisha Rembert shared their suggestions.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

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