The New Relationship Between Digital Content and Curriculum

What’s involved in moving to well-aligned, articulated and accessible instruction for all students.

In recent years, political, social and technological forces have converged to disrupt education in ways large and small, good and bad. The rise of the assessment culture, the impact of social media on school leadership and the changing demographics of American students, to name a few forces, have dramatically reshaped education since I began my K-12 career 31 years ago.

The single greatest disruption to impact public education since I first stepped into the classroom has been the transition from static print textbooks to dynamic digital content as the primary instructional resource for teaching and learning. This shift has engendered a host of questions for educators: What is the relationship between digital content and curriculum? Does the development of curriculum change when digital content is the core instructional resource? What is digital content’s impact on teaching and learning?

These are just a few of the many questions I am now helping school systems nationwide answer in my role at Discovery Education.

Distinguishing Differences

Before these questions can be addressed, however, educators should examine the difference between digital content and digital curriculum.

High-quality digital content is aligned to current standards, specifically developed for diverse student audiences and curated by experts for ease of access. Exposure to such digital content can improve the vocabulary of young learners as well as break down barriers to learning for all students.

In addition, such content offers students multiple pathways to understanding. Students can elect to have text read aloud or change the Lexiles of text, or even switch the language of the text. Finally, high-quality digital content deploys assets, such as virtual reality experiences, an information graphic or a favorite video clip that make students want to read a passage, analyze data, solve a problem or discuss a topic to learn more.

When I work with school systems to help them create up-to-date digital learning environments, I often hear educators say they would like to replace their current curriculum with digital content. My immediate response is that to create a well-aligned, articulated, guaranteed and viable curriculum with quality digital content at the core, schools will need to put additional supports in place.

Three Measures

Three key considerations for creating a digitally powered curriculum are:

Pacing guides remain critical to alignment and articulation.

Sometimes, as educators, we struggle with the successful implementation of a good idea. And when the implementation goes awry, we abandon the good idea instead of addressing the implementation issues.

Such is the case with pacing guides. These came into being to aid curriculum design and provide articulation support through pacing materials and resources aligned to standards. In turn, this would ensure all students have the opportunity to learn the entire curriculum. Remember the social studies class where the teacher spent a semester on the Civil War? Or the math classes that never reached the last unit in geometry? Face it, we all know some middle school teachers who can tell which elementary school their students came from based on what they know and can do.

Pacing guides (the operative word being guide) never were meant to relegate teachers to a script or remove creativity from instruction. They were designed to ensure alignment and articulation within and across a school system, and they still are a critical part of a curriculum. In both my roles as supervisor of curriculum in the Quakertown, Pa., Community School District and assistant superintendent for curriculum in the Boyertown, Pa., Area School District, the development of pacing guides was met with some skepticism because of these factors. However, once they were established, teachers felt relieved that the content of the curriculum was in place and they could focus on ensuring all students learned and met the standards.

Given the flexibility of high-quality digital content, pacing guides can and should be adjusted as circumstances warrant. Furthermore, we can and should share exemplars of “teaching the curriculum” through the establishment of shared libraries of powerful and innovative lessons. These libraries can be linked to pacing guides, thereby promoting teacher collaboration, as well as the calibration and coordination of learning, both vertically and horizontally.

Digital textbooks can help all students access the curriculum.

Digital textbooks with high-quality content offer countless ways to ensure the curriculum outlined in pacing guides is guaranteed. By guaranteed, I mean that all students in a school system, regardless of their teacher or school, have access to the same content, knowledge and skills.

Digital textbooks, when created with this premise in mind, provide textual supports, such as read-aloud or Lexile-changing features or multimodal resources and tools that enable all students to access information regardless of their interests, learning needs or learning style. These kinds of accessibility features are key factors to consider when designing and developing a digital curriculum. They should be at the top of the list for administrators when selecting and reviewing digital resources.

In many school districts, digital content textbooks have become critical components of the curriculum. School leaders understand the many instructional benefits of using these types of resources for teaching and learning, such as the digital textbook’s ability to help teachers differentiate and personalize instruction and their effectiveness in engaging students, enhancing collaboration and empowering students to create their own content.

Because high-quality digital content textbooks can play such a critical role in transforming teaching and learning, the hard and fast rule that the “textbook is not your curriculum” is becoming blurrier, especially because these resources have more to offer in the way of guaranteeing that all students have access to the curriculum.

Integrate the role of technology and curriculum.

Recently, while working with the curriculum and professional learning staff of a large district, I helped plan the rollout of several professional learning sessions as well as job-embedded instructional supports. Ultimately, we wanted the professional learning opportunities to drive changes in math instruction through the use of digital content and best-practice pedagogy. Unfortunately, several days prior to the implementation, we learned the technology department, without informing the curriculum department, had discontinued the license of the district’s digital content.

The curriculum vertical in many schools falls under a single administrator while the technology vertical falls under another. One of the first administrative changes I instituted when I became the assistant superintendent in Boyertown was the integration of the technology and curriculum functions. This ensured technology decisions were based on how they affected and supported the curriculum. If we bought iPads, we first examined the curricular impact. If we purchased digital content, the technology department collaborated with the curriculum leads to determine the most effective rollout. Following this integration, technology no longer was seen as separate from teaching and learning.

A Digital Environment

When paired with sustained, job-embedded professional development, high-quality digital content can be a formidable catalyst to transform teaching and learning. However, to maximize the value of digital content in students’ learning and growth, educators need to effectively align, articulate and guarantee access to the curriculum.

Addressing the three considerations described here will put schools firmly on the road to creating a modern curriculum that serves students effectively in today’s digital learning environment.