This week, the Thomas Fordham Institute published a report on the quality of materials from three popular curriculum-sharing websites. “The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What’s Online Any Good?” came to conclusions that the majority of the materials reviewed are of “mediocre” quality or “probably not worth using”, and that “the majority of materials are...weakly aligned with the standards to which they claim alignment.”
Here at Fishtank Learning, little of what we read surprised us. Every day, thousands of teachers find our online curriculum website through a Google search. So far this school year, searches for 7th and 8th grade math remained the most popular, followed closely by “Of Mice and Men lesson plans”, “Fahrenheit 451 lesson plans”, and “The Crucible lesson plans”. The appetite for supplemental materials from high school English teachers, which was the focus of the Fordham report, is clearly evident in these search trends.
We also know that the online marketplace for teacher resources can be overwhelmingly broad and fragmented, and independent verification of quality can be hard to come by, particularly when the materials on offer are cheap or free. Teachers will often need to invest extraordinary amounts of time searching out and vetting supplemental materials, and according to the report, what they are finding likely isn’t serving them or their students well.
The report does point to a possible root cause for this behavior, which is that high school English teachers are rarely provided a core curriculum, and so the job of curriculum design is added to their already lengthy to-do lists. With so many other demands on a teacher’s time, it’s natural for them to seek out resources that will serve their students without having to create everything from scratch.
Or perhaps the inverse occurs, and a teacher is provided with a shiny new core curriculum, but it is highly scripted, straight jacketing an experienced teacher who doesn’t need such prescribed language. This is another road that leads to Google, as the teacher tries to find a solution that provides her with content, but doesn’t dictate style.
Should teachers have rigorous, carefully sequenced, standards aligned curriculum that is engaging for their students, and the support to use it? Absolutely. But this isn’t happening in schools across America and it’s likely that teachers everywhere will continue to seek out content on the internet for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, we are glad to be one of the few high-quality products out there waiting at the end of a teacher’s Google search, fulfilling the clear need for easily accessible resources.
Over the past year, we have gone through the process of having our curriculum reviewed by EdReports because we want teachers who discover our site to feel confident about the content they have found. We are proud to be one of very few OERs to receive EdReports’ stamp of approval for quality and alignment.
We have built a sizable user base (over 500,000 teachers visited Fishtank last year) by offering teachers high-quality instructional materials that are easy to access and use in their classroom. And we are now seeing their enthusiasm for Fishtank bubble up into teacher-driven school and district adoptions.
Until every teacher has access to the curriculum materials they need, we remain committed to being a high-quality resource that individual teachers—as well as schools and districts—can adopt and adapt to fit their needs.
Claire Kaplan is Executive Director of Match Export. Prior to joining Match, Ms. Kaplan was a Vice President at the National Center on Time and Learning where she led the organization's knowledge management and dissemination work and developed materials and tools to support effective school redesign. She has produced numerous reports and videos on effective school practices. Ms. Kaplan holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.