Student-Centered Instruction: Debate on Focusing on Curriculum or Relationship-Building During the First Days of School

As the countdown to the first days of school began, educators debated which comes first: curriculum or relationship-building? While many educators agreed on the importance of building trust with students, there were differing opinions on when curriculum should be woven in. However, many educators expressed the value of incorporating instruction and relationship-building together.

  • “When I see every single minute of school accounted for and taken up by a laundry list of curriculum…I think about my own school experience and the things I remember as times when I learned the most and just loved school….” —Early Education Teacher in Washington
    • “In 3rd grade we listened to an old radio show every day and colored a matching character sheet (an early podcast lol), in 5th we were a model city with fridge boxes around our desks as our businesses in our classroom and played.” —Early Education Teacher in Washington
      • “I just get bummed thinking about how we’re moving to everything being highly teacher directed with every minute filled with often carefully scripted curriculum and the magic I had in school as a student when that wasn’t the focus.” —Early Education Teacher in Washington
    • “Was just having this conversation last week. I literally don’t remember ANYTHING about 6th grade. No memory of it. So really how important is it that we micromanage a list of standards for 12 year olds?” —High School Social Studies Teacher in Iowa
    • “It’s virtually impossible for scripted curricula to provide opportunities for deeper, student-centered learning.” —Instructional Coach in Virginia
  • “It’s not that boxed curriculum is all bad. In fact, it can support new teachers in understanding how to teach. The problem is when boxed curriculum is weaponized against teachers, asking them to use it with ‘fidelity’ instead of responding to the needs of teachers.” —Educator in Illinois 
  • “I know educators mean well when they say curriculum can wait but relationships come first at the beginning of the year, but I disagree. Curriculum AND relationships start together on day one, because that’s how it should be every day beginning to end.” —Humanities Educator in California
    • “To be clear, I also believe in circuitous routes to learning! (Curriculum after all just means course or track in Latin.) I’m just critical of the notion that curriculum is something to be “put off” for later rather than whatever essential skills, concepts, ideas you lead with.” —Humanities Educator in California
      • “As some examples, with my history classes I always started with the image of a wave. I explained that we can study history are moments or movements, introduced my story and how historical and personal moments and movements shaped my life. Then I invited students to share theirs.” —Humanities Educator in California
      • “When we came back from remote learning and I taught eighth grade English Language Arts, on Day 1 I shared the etymology of ‘real talk’ as a Black Bay Area term and asked them to share their ‘real talk’ on post-its, inviting their honesty of how they felt returning to school.” —Humanities Educator in California
      • “In Health class, we did an exercise where I asked them to walk around the room to different post-its and post questions they had about different dimensions of Health class, and I covered what we’d be able to answer within the scope of our semester together.” —Humanities Educator in California
      • “There are some fabulous examples in response to my first tweet where teachers share amazing, layered activities and lessons they integrate relationship building and conceptual building within the content area. That’s all I mean!!” —Humanities Educator in California
    • “You can incorporate Number Talks, science experiments. read alouds, and writing as you model routines and build relationships starting on day one.” —Assistant Principal in Nevada
    • “I agree. Last year our superintendent requested we spend 3 days on getting to know you things. Mid morning day 2 students were over it. No one wants to do 6 ice breaker activities each day, for multiple days.” —High School ELA Teacher in Oklahoma 
    • “Yeah. It’s a fully unnecessary binary. Both are needed. It is THROUGH culturally sustaining and relevant curriculum that relationships can be built…” —Educator in Florida
    • “I don’t do much out of the adopted curricula but…everything I plan is practicing something while building community (ie cutting and gluing skills, checking pencil grips, speaking and listening and on and on.)” —Early Education Teacher in Washington 
    • “Right????? Trust and relationships in a classroom require a good curriculum and a return on students’ investment of time and energy with interest/engagement and a belief that they’re learning something!” —History Teacher in California
    • “I think you’re confusing standards/curriculum with pacing. For example, in younger grades, speaking in a complete sentence is a learning target. You can be achieving standards while building relationships. However, my curriculum dictates that on day one, we review addition.” —Elementary Teacher in California
    • “This has always been my philosophy…I embed relationship building in so many of my assignments…if I want my students to take risks and do hard things, they need to trust their classmates and me. They also need to understand that we can build a relationship through curriculum.” —Teacher, N/A
    • “I agree – for me part of building relationships is showing kids that we’re going to do work every day because I care about their learning. But that also means I can spread out the ice breakers and other community building activities throughout the year.” —High School Math Teacher in Oregon
  • “Spend the first two weeks building relationships, with a little curriculum thrown in. Over time, increase the amount of curriculum. You’ll love the results.” —Educator in California