Why Principals Need Realistic Pacing Guides

There's a difference between thinking your pacing guide isn't very good and thinking it's a bad idea to have one in the first place.

Over on X, the satirical account Sage on the Stage, which I enjoy, says our curriculum and teaching calendar all come from the central office, have to cover a specific topic every day, but they give no days to reteach a topic.

nor is there any room at the end of the quarter if there's a weather day or 25% attendance before a break.

Okay, so here's the thing.

If the calendar is not designed well, if it does not have the right amount of time in the right places, that's something that needs to be fixed.

What we shouldn't do though is throw out the whole idea of a pacing guide because when you do that, you leave it up to every single individual in the district to determine what's going to get taught in which course.

And that's how you have students come in with widely varying gaps in their background knowledge.

We've got to make sure that every kid who takes the same class is exposed to the same content so that when they reach the next class, the teacher knows these kids have been taught this material.

And when people are allowed to just jump off at any point and say, well, I've taught enough for the year.

I need to slow down.

then kids don't get what they need to get.

And what we're doing here is we're trading better mastery of topics earlier in the year for no exposure at all to topics later in the year.

There is a reason you have a scope and sequence.

There is a reason you have a curriculum calendar and it may not be reasonable.

Maybe it's not.

I don't know if your curriculum calendar is doable.

I think there is a lot of indication that standards cover too much, but it is what it is.

We've got to cover what we've got to cover.

And this idea that we need to like constantly slow down and reteach and revisit and spend extra time on stuff.

Is that really worth not getting to some stuff at all?

And is it worth just the individual kind of chaos that we have when everybody gets to decide that on their own?

So I come down pretty firmly on the side of get everybody through the same material.

Make sure that every kid who has taken, say, ninth grade English has learned the same things, has covered the same material.

No, they're not all going to reach the same level of mastery, but we don't have time to just say, hey, let's just skip that entire unit because I don't really think I can stick with the curriculum calendar.

The curriculum calendar should be realistic.

It should be something that most people can accomplish, but it should also be something that moves things along so that we get to what we need to get to.

Let me know what you think.