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Teachers as Curriculum Designers: Inviting

Teachers into the Productive Struggle

Christine P. Trinter & Hilary E. Hughes

To cite this article: Christine P. Trinter & Hilary E. Hughes (2021) Teachers as Curriculum
Designers: Inviting Teachers into the Productive Struggle, RMLE Online, 44:3, 1-16, DOI:
10.1080/19404476.2021.1878417

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RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3

2021 ● Volume 44 ● Number 3 ISSN 1940-4476

Teachers as Curriculum Designers: Inviting Teachers into the Productive

Struggle

Christine P. Trinter
University of Notre Dame, Institute for Educational Initiatives, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA, ctrinter@nd.edu

Hilary E. Hughes
University of Georgia, Department of Educational Theory and Practice, Athens, Georgia, USA

Abstract middle grades students if they are the ones

This exploratory, embedded single study examined
the experiences of middle grades teacher design
teams over 10 months as they were immersed in the
development of interdisciplinary curriculum units
using a backward design framework. The teachers
were supported by a researcher-practitioner
partnership and situated in a middle level school
structure that valued teachers’ engagement with
curriculum design. Most notably, we found that the
teachers experienced productive struggle
throughout their design process and, as a result,
shifted their pedagogical design capacity from
adapting or offloading to improvising their
curriculum. These findings are particularly
significant to middle grades education because of
the importance of curricular learning experiences
for young adolescents that are challenging,
exploratory, integrative, and diverse. Teachers can
better create these kinds of experiences for their
designing those experiences with their particular
students in mind.
Keywords: curriculum design, middle grades, UbD,
qualitative
Introduction
Academic curriculum is a topic of debate that has
been consistently examined and reformed
throughout the history of education in the United
States (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992; Labaree, 1996;
Pinar, 2012). Curriculum reflects the knowledge
deemed important for students to learn in school, and
curriculum undergoes changes to reflect societal
values (Kliebard, 1982; Pinar, 2012). Some scholars
have suggested that curriculum is not simply the
knowledge for which children and youth are
responsible, but it also includes the instructional

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© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. 1
 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
methods employed by educators (Cal & Thompson,
2014; Clandinin & Connelly, 1992; Gujarati, 2011).
According to Egan (1978), for example,
“Curriculum inquiry is educational inquiry; both
properly address the what and how questions
together” (p. 70).
Few would argue against the importance of
rigorous, content-rich, and meaningful student
learning experiences; the bridging of curriculum
and instruction is critical for creating these types of
experiences. In the middle grades particularly,
scholars suggest that curriculum should be
“challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse,
from both the students’ and the teachers’
perspectives” (Bishop & Harrison, 2021, p. 32);
and it should open up possibilities for students to
“learn about matters of personal, social, moral, and
ethical significance” (p. 32). To create opportunities
for middle grades students to engage in these kinds
of learning experiences, teachers need to be
intimately involved in designing the curriculum and
instruction their students are experiencing.
The purpose of this study was to document the
experiences of six middle grades teachers who engaged
in a 10-month curriculum design collaborative with
support from two teacher education researchers with
curriculum design experience. We draw on theoretical
perspectives from pedagogical design capacity (PDC)
(Brown, 2009) and productive struggle (Hiebert &
Grouws, 2007) to describe how middle grades teachers
experienced designing and implementing their own
interdisciplinary curriculum units using a backward
design framework. Our study was framed by the
question: What are teacher teams’ experiences when
designing and implementing interdisciplinary units
using a backward design framework? Our findings
suggest that if middle level schools aim to prepare
students as collaborators, critical thinkers, and socially
concerned citizens, as scholars suggest (Bishop &
Harrison, 2021; Jackson & Davis, 2000), curriculum
design should involve the very teachers who are
responsible for cultivating these qualities.
Background
The concept of productive struggle is central to our
understanding of teacher-led curriculum design.
Widely used to describe and understand student
learning in mathematics classrooms (Hiebert &
Grouws, 2007), its meaning has a long history rooted
in learning theories centered on engaging a learner in
confusion or doubt (Dewey, 1910) or leveraging the
2 © 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
power of cognitive dissonance for decision making
and problem solving (Festinger, 1957). Given the
inherent challenge of designing curriculum, we
attended to the curriculum design process in this
study as an authentic problem-solving situation. In
this section, we offer a conceptualization of teachers
as curriculum designers and describe the
Understanding by Design (UbD) (Wiggins &
McTighe, 2005) framework that guided our work
with the curriculum design teams.
Teachers as Curriculum Designers
Research exploring teachers’ involvement in
curriculum design cites a lack of design expertise
among teachers (Bakah, Voogt, & Pieters, 2012;
Gerrard & Farrell, 2014; Handelzalts, 2009; Havnes,
2009; Huizinga, Handelzalts, Nieveen, & Voogt,
2014; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008), with particular
gaps in pedagogical content knowledge and curricular
consistency expertise (Huizinga et al., 2014). While
some teachers embrace roles as co-designers or
editors of curriculum and textbooks, others refrain
from making any modifications out of “respect for the
expertise of the textbook authors” (Even & Olsher,
2014, p. 346). These findings suggest that many
teachers do not feel they have the competence to
design meaningful curriculum.
An approach that has seen increasing appeal in
professional learning spaces are teacher design teams,
which often take the form of professional learning
communities (DuFour, 2004a,b) or communities of
practice (Vangrieken, Meredith, Packer, & Kyndt,
2017; Velthius, Fisser, & Pieters, 2015) in which
teachers work collectively toward improved instruction
and student learning. In their review of teacher
communities, Vangrieken et al. (2017) cited the most
common objectives, which center on collaboration
among teachers regarding planning lessons, discussing
practical challenges, increasing content knowledge,
sharing resources, conducting research, and providing
feedback on instruction. Ronfeldt, Farmer, McQueen,
and Grissom (2015) showed a positive relationship
between teachers working in instructional teams and
student achievement. Binkhorst, Handelzalts,
Poortman, and van Joolingen (2015) studied teacher
design teams and described them as collaboratively
analyzing, designing, implementing, and evaluating
shared curriculum. Teacher design teams are a part of
the collective leadership in the school, meaning
participants are responsible for contributing to the
leadership involved in curriculum design (Binkhorst,
Poortman, McKenney, & van Joolingen, 2018).
 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
As part of a teacher design team, teachers become
curriculum designers. Huizinga et al. (2014) found
that teacher design teams benefitted from facilitators
who provided feedback and guidance to the groups of
teachers throughout the design process (Voogt et al.,
2011). Teachers working in these teams reflected on
their professional growth as a result of participating
in curriculum design (Voogt et al., 2011) and reported
an increase in self-efficacy on account of
participating on the team (Velthius et al., 2015).
Researchers noted successful teacher design teams
included (a) participating teachers who begin with an
interest in the curriculum (Binkhorst et al., 2015), (b)
clear goals for the team at the onset of the project,
and (c) evaluation of the curriculum design during
classroom implementation (Voogt et al., 2011).
Recently, Tronsmo and Nerland (2018) studied
teachers’ curriculum development processes and
suggested that because of the complex and creative
nature inherent in curriculum development, teachers
need sufficient time, space, and resources to share
responsibility and ownership for curriculum design.
Understanding by Design
The purpose of this study was to document the
experiences of the six middle grades teachers who
engaged in a 10-month curriculum design
collaborative (August 2015 to May 2016) with
support from two teacher education researchers with
curriculum design experience. For the purposes of
this article, we focused specifically on the teachers’
experiences designing the curriculum because of the
dearth of empirical research documenting this
process. We relied on the UbD curriculum design
framework (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) because of
our collective success using it in our secondary and
university teaching and with in-service teachers
nationwide over the past two decades.
UbD (also called backward design) offers a “planning
process and structure to guide curriculum,
assessment, and instruction” (McTighe & Wiggins,
2012, p. 1). Wiggins and McTighe (2005) suggested
that curriculum “shapes content into a plan for
conducting effective and engaging teaching and
learning” (p. 6). Additionally, Clandinin and
Connelly (1992) viewed the teacher as an “integral
part of the curricular process . . . in which teacher,
learners, subject matter, and milieu are dynamic
interactions” (p. 392). Taking up these perspectives,
we too see curriculum as more than a list of topics or
standards, a textbook, or a pacing guide and instead
© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
position it as a comprehensive and dynamic teaching
and learning plan. Backward curriculum design takes
place in three stages (Kelting-Gibson, 2005; McTighe
& Wiggins, 2012; Murray, McDonald, & York, 2006;
Stiler, 2009). In the first stage the designer identifies
the intended outcome of the lesson or unit. Following
this, the designer decides how students will
demonstrate that they learned the objective(s). The
final stage involves designing the learning
experiences that align with the goals and assessment.
While there is limited empirical research on the use
of backward curriculum design in schools,
researchers have noted its use in designing
experiential learning in mathematics (Davidovitch,
Yavich, & Keller, 2014), in science (Hendrickson,
2006), and in online course development (Murray
et al., 2006). An analysis of traditionally designed
lesson plans compared against backward designed
plans showed that teachers using backward design
rated higher on their knowledge of (a) resources,
students, and content; (b) goals of instruction; (c)
coherent design of the lesson; and (d) student
assessment (Kelting-Gibson, 2005). When compared
with traditional methods of planning, backward
design is a more time-consuming process (Bigelow,
Weseley, & Opsahi, 2009; Britton & Johannes, 2003)
in which the teacher takes an active role in
differentiating between what students are expected to
understand and what they need to know (Childre,
Sands, & Pope, 2009). Graff (2011) explored
teachers’ experiences using a backward design model
for curriculum development and found that teachers
using this framework expressed increased self-
efficacy in their preparation for planning and
instruction and their ability to evaluate materials
supplied to them by their schools.
Two studies explored student achievement associated
with using a backward design model and found different
results. Purnell (2007) noted an increase in students’
academic achievement and interest after participation in
three weeks of lessons using a backward design
framework, while Stiler (2009) reported no evidence of
increased student achievement. Purnell examined the
experiences of middle grades students (Years 5 to 9) in
Queensland over a three- to four-week fieldwork
experience. Purnell compared student achievement
results in two sets of students—one group that
experienced UbD-designed coursework and one group
that did not. The students who experienced the UbD
coursework showed an increase in student achievement,
especially in geography, and this increase continued
from grade 9 into grade 10.
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 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
Stiler’s (2009) participants included twenty pre-
service teachers who were tasked with designing
a service-learning unit over the course of a four-week
period using the UbD framework. These students
were taught the UbD framework during an 80-minute
class meeting. The pre-service teachers’ lessons were
then scored on a rubric which served to evaluate the
teachers’ knowledge and ability to plan a lesson on
seven criteria, including meeting community needs,
improving the quality of life of those served, and
using new knowledge and skills in a real-life setting.
Stiler found that the pre-service teachers scored low
on all seven categories and hypothesized that this was
due, in part, to the novice nature of his participants,
suggesting a follow up study that includes veteran
teachers. We would add here that the limited amount
of time the pre-service teachers were provided (one
80-minute class meeting) to learn the UbD
framework could have also contributed to the low
rubric scores.
Bigelow et al. (2009) conducted a multi-year
qualitative project with a small group of teachers who
used backward design to create multicultural
curriculum units. The researchers were particularly
interested in teacher engagement and found while
some teachers enjoyed creating the units because they
felt their lessons had greater depth, other teachers
disliked backward design due to the amount of time
involved and the unfamiliar format.
Theoretical Perspectives
Given the paucity of research on teachers as
curriculum designers, coupled with the small amount
of empirical evidence surrounding the UbD
framework, we were particularly interested in
documenting teachers’ lived experiences in both of
these spaces. To do this we drew on two theoretical
perspectives in the design and analysis of this
research: PDC (Brown, 2009) and productive struggle
(Hiebert & Grouws, 2007). PDC attends to the level
of autonomy teachers’ embrace when designing
curriculum and productive struggle prioritizes the
importance of a learner grappling with the
sensemaking process in order to gain understanding.
These two theoretical perspectives resonated with our
intentions when designing this study, and we relied
on both while crafting each component of the study’s
intervention and data collection. Furthermore, we also
drew on these perspectives as coding frameworks
during data analysis, as we anticipated that teachers
would experience productive struggle while enacting
PDC.
4 © 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
Pedagogical Design Capacity
PDC describes the interaction between teachers and
curricular resources with particular attention paid to the
action of teachers’ noticing, and hence decision making,
about curriculum and instruction (Brown, 2009).
Acknowledging the importance of material resources,
PDC focuses on teachers’ capabilities to recognize and
use critical features of these resources to design goal
oriented, standards-based curriculum. Brown (2009)
situates teaching as a design practice and describes the
ways instructional plans transpire as offloading,
adapting, and improvising. These three ways of
interacting with and designing curriculum attend to the
interplay between teachers and resources and create
a continuum of interaction within curriculum design.
When offloading, teachers remain fidelitous to the
written curriculum, and in doing so, disengage from the
cognitive load of designing teaching and learning
experiences. Adapting curriculum engages teachers in
modifying classroom-ready curriculum to meet their
students’ learning needs. Improvising is on the opposite
end of offloading, in that teachers have complete
autonomy in the design process. In order to be/become
curriculum designers, we believe teachers benefit from
a curriculum design framework when developing their
own curriculum, as well as committed time and support.
In keeping with this theoretical frame, our intervention
centered on the opportunity for teachers to develop
curriculum using a backward design framework and our
analysis included codes specifically looking for
teachers’ enactment of PDC.
Productive Struggle
Designing curriculum is not inconsequential, and
much like problem solving, places the teacher in the
middle of a muck. We liken curriculum design to
problem solving, in that both of these activities call
upon one’s inventive faculties to craft a solution. As
Hiebert and Grouws (2007) note, cognitive theorists
have argued that struggle is a necessary component
to deep understanding, particularly when problem
solving (Brownell & Sims, 1946; Festinger, 1957;
Hatano, 1988; Vygotsky, 1978). According to
Hiebert and Grouws (2007), struggle happens when
solving problems that are within our reach and then
grappling with key ideas and concepts that are
“comprehensible but not yet well formed” (p. 387).
In their work on productive struggle in the field of
mathematics education, Hiebert and Grouws (2007)
called upon Dewey’s (1910, 1926) assertion that
struggle is an integral part of developing deep
understanding, while also drawing from theories
such as Hatano’s (1988) cognitive incongruity and
 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance to
describe the ways learners used the process of
struggle to facilitate learning.
For the purposes of this study, we conceptualize the
teacher employing the curriculum designer role as the
problem solver working to resolve a curriculum
design problem. Similar to problem solving, then,
designing curriculum calls upon the teacher to engage
in a productive struggle. Designing curriculum places
teachers in a problem-solving situation in which the
solution and associated strategies are within reach
and engagement in the design process results in
deeper understanding of the curriculum. While the
struggle that teachers may experience when learning
to design their own curriculum might not feel
productive in the moment—because they are learning
to unpack standards in ways they might not be used
to, while they are simultaneously engaging deeply
with content to create meaningful learning
experiences for students, all while checking for
cohesiveness and alignment across and within lessons
—the struggle is productive because the end result is
the teacher having a deeper understanding of the
content, and thus, creating more meaningful learning
experiences for students. In other words, just as we
want students to grapple with subject matter in an
effort to gain a deeper conceptual understanding and
be able to transfer knowledge to other areas of their
lives (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), teachers benefit
from the productive struggle associated with the
curriculum design process, because they too have to
grapple with the subject matter in an effort to gain
a deeper conceptual understanding and then transfer
that understanding to exploratory, challenging,
integrative, and diverse curriculum and instruction.
Similar to a teacher guiding students in problem
solving, in this study we guided teacher learning
through the design process. Moreover, as noted in our
data analysis section, we coded our data with an eye
toward teachers’ experiences of productive struggle.
Methods
We used exploratory embedded single case study
methods to answer the research question: What are
teacher teams’ experiences when designing
interdisciplinary units using a backward design
framework? As stated above, in this article we will
focus on the design experience. Case study methods
were useful for this research, because case studies
allow researchers to understand how
“organizational or environmental context has an
impact on or influences social processes . . .
© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
organizational behavior, and everyday practices and
their meaning” (Hartley, 2004, p. 325). In this
study we were interested in understanding the how
the environmental context of the school in which
the teachers taught (i.e., student population, class
scheduling, administrative support, state and district
mandates) influenced the teacher teams’
experiences of designing their own curriculum units
through the lenses of PDC and productive struggle.
More specifically, embedded single case study
methods allowed us to engage with multiple levels
of data collection and analysis (Stake, 1995; Yin,
2018).
Background of the Study
Over the course of this 10-month study
(August 2015 – May 2016), we worked with six
middle grades teachers (grades 7 and 8) designing
interdisciplinary curriculum units using a backward
design framework. The teachers participated in a two-
and-a-half day professional learning collaborative
that we purposefully held off their school campus in
which they were introduced to the UbD curriculum
design framework and began conceptualizing their
curriculum units. Following the collaborative, each
team met bi-weekly between October and February to
plan one interdisciplinary unit of study, which they
implemented in March.
Participants and Site Context
This study took place in a middle level school in the
southeast in which 92% of the students qualify for
free or reduced lunch prices. Like most schools in the
United States, educational decisions at this school
were impacted by state mandates, such as the state
assessment system, which is a comprehensive
summative assessment that measures how well
students learn knowledge and skills outlined in the
state-adopted content standards in ELA, mathematics,
science, and social studies. Students in grades 3
through 8 in this state took an end-of-grade
assessment in ELA and mathematics, while students
in grades 5 and 8 were also assessed in science and
social studies. The results of these tests were linked to
teacher evaluations, which impacted whether high
poverty schools such as this one received Race to the
Top incentives instituted by the Obama
Administration in 2009. At the time of our study,
fifty percent of our participating teacher’s evaluations
were based on students’ standardized test scores. Not
surprisingly, these evaluations placed pressure on
teachers to teach to the test (Booher-Jennings, 2015),
which can often result in disconnected, activity driven
curriculum (Crocco & Costigan, 2006).
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 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
Tschannen-Moran (2009) noted that, as a result of
these pressures, school reform efforts often take one
of two organizational structures: a “movement toward
greater standardization of work processes, such as
‘teacher-proofing’ the curriculum . . . [or] the move
toward professional development and coaching as
coordinating mechanisms” (p. 220). The principal
was in her third year in the position and expressed
a proclivity toward the latter. She shared her interest
in interdisciplinary curriculum (e.g., Bishop &
Harrison, 2021; Jackson & Davis, 2000) and was
amenable to providing the necessary support for this
process. Specifically, the principal protected teachers’
planning time, which allowed them to co-plan units,
and she supported an alternative bell schedule for the
teacher participants’ classes when they implemented
their units.
All faculty in the school (N = 30) were invited to
participate in the project, and six teachers accepted
the invitation. We based our decision to invite all
teachers to participate on Binkhorst et al.’s (2015)
research citing characteristics of successful teacher
design teams. Teachers who chose to participate in
our study already taught in teams of two, with one
teacher responsible for social studies and
mathematics and the other responsible for ELA and
science. In addition to the two teams, one special
education teacher and one science teacher
participated in this study (See Table 1). Within the
single site were two teacher design teams and
embedded within each team were six additional
subunits.
Data Collection and Sources
Over the course of 10 months, we collected data that
included audio-recorded pre-and post-interviews and
Table 1
Teacher Design Teams
Teacher* Subject Area Grade
Paul Mathematics/Social Studies
Jennifer Science/ELA
7th
Jacob Special Education
Natalie Science
Rebecca Science/ELA
Sam Mathematics/Social Studies 8th
*All names are pseudonyms.
6 © 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
video-recorded bi-weekly curriculum planning
meetings. All teachers engaged in video or audio
recorded interviews and focus groups, which took
place in August prior to the start of unit planning, and
again in the spring following the implementation of
the curriculum units. The semi-structured interviews
lasted 40–60 minutes and focused on the teachers’
conceptualization of curriculum, experiences with
curriculum design, and beliefs about their subject
matter. Researchers took field notes during pre-
interviews and met to review field notes and audio-
recordings after each interview.
The participating teachers and university researchers
worked in a curriculum design collaborative for two
and a half days prior to the beginning of school.
Each day of the design collaborative was video-
recorded, and the researchers and teachers engaged in
an audio-recorded focus group at the end of the
collaborative to explore the teachers’ experiences. On
a bi-weekly basis, the principal protected the time of
each team to support their continued work. The
researchers joined each team’s planning meeting,
took field notes and audio-recorded each meeting.
The researchers met each week to discuss field notes
and audio-recorded planning meetings as initial data
collection and analysis ensued. The teachers designed
their units using Google Docs, which were shared
among teams and researchers. The researchers video-
recorded every day of unit implementation. All data
were labeled and organized in a case study database
shared among the research team.
Data Analysis
Both the design and the analysis for this study were
framed by theoretical concepts from PDC and
productive struggle. We used both an inductive and
deductive coding approach by integrating theory-
driven codes from PDC and productive struggle, as
well as data-driven codes derived from our research
question (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2018). We searched for
patterns, insights, or concepts that emerged across the
data (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2018) and relied on reflexive
research memos as an analytic strategy throughout
the data collection and analysis. Once initial patterns
and themes were identified, we continued analyzing
the data, juxtaposing theory-driven themes with data-
driven themes to identify new/existing themes that
represented the complexities of this real-world
schooling context (Yin, 2018).
To develop a coding scheme, each researcher used
open, inductive coding on the transcribed interview
data (i.e., individual pre-and-post interviews and
 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
post-project focus group interviews) and took field
notes on both the video-recorded two-and-a-half-day
collaborative and the video-recorded bi-weekly
planning meetings. We then coded those field notes.
Our codes were influenced by our theoretical
framework, PDC and productive struggle, which
helped us identify how teacher teams experienced
designing their curriculum. We then discussed this
initial phase of open coding, identifying common
codes and indicators for these common codes which
we organized into a table. This initial categorical
aggregation phase (Yin, 2018) resulted in a suite of
codes during the teachers’ design process, such as
frustration, content knowledge, and activity-centered
design.
In the second phase of analysis we used analytic
induction (Ragin, 1994) to group initial codes into
larger themes. Developing larger themes involved an
interrogation of our initial analysis. During this
interrogation, we looked for confirming or
disconfirming evidence of our initial suite of singular
codes and interpretation of events, and we considered
the greater context within which these codes were
situated. For example, we noticed while teachers
voiced frustration about lack of time, resources, and
understanding of the curriculum design process
throughout the project, they simultaneously talked
about the passion they had for teaching and the
passion they each had for their subject matter during
the designing of their units—one did not exist without
the other. Because productive struggle was important
to our framework, we recognized that this sense of
struggle coupled with teachers’ passion had the
potential to result in productivity. This paradox,
together with our theoretical framework, led us to
group codes into separate themes of productivity and
struggle.
In generating these larger themes, we discovered
that the productive struggle paradox occurred not
only within each teacher’s individual case, but also
over time for all the participants. For this reason,
we engaged in a third phase of analysis and
examined our data chronologically by listing our
initial set of codes and indicators for each teacher
and team over a timeline. Examining the data in
this way revealed, not surprisingly, teachers and
teams expressed confusion and frustration when
faced with this new way of designing curriculum.
As time progressed and teachers and teams
continued to grapple in their curriculum design
collaborative, they expressed feelings of clarity and
success.
© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
While we looked for instances of PDC in our first
level of coding, once we began grouping codes into
themes of productivity and struggle, we again
examined these themes against our theories of PDC.
To do this, we analyzed our two levels of coding
(initial codes and the larger productivity and struggle
themes) for varying levels of PDC over the course of
the project. We found that when the project began,
each team’s PDC seemed to be closer in line with
adapting curriculum and, over time, each team felt
more comfortable improvising curriculum lessons, as
described in our findings.
Findings
When you have scatter plots in mathematics . . .
you look for associations. That’s kind of how it
feels when you do a regular unit. There isn’t an
association between the blips of information that
we are feeding our students. We can see that
association. We know that it exists. It’s a strong
association at times, but having this backwards
design, being able to have it become a theme, and
constantly hit that theme, is creating a line of best
fit for that scatter plot, which is linear and is going
to capture the trend. It’s gonna capture the strength
of that association. (Sam)
Teachers who participated in this study worked in two
grade-level teams to develop interdisciplinary
standards-based curriculum units, each centered on
social issues. The seventh-grade unit addressed
a global issue—access to clean water and organism
dependence—and the eighth-grade unit explored
issues of race, identity, and equity in the local
community and in the United States. Units took
a student-centered, interdisciplinary approach, and
each unit included an authentic summative
performance assessment.
Our analysis indicated that because this approach was
unlike the activity-oriented teaching or textbook
curriculum models most teachers were accustomed to
adapting or offloading (Brown, 2009), they
experienced constant struggles when designing their
curriculum units, but those struggles ended up being
productive because of the overall success teachers
experienced from design to implementation. For the
most part, the struggles the teachers experienced
seemed to manifest as they moved between and away
from adapting curriculum lessons and improvising
their lessons (Brown, 2009). In other words, when
teachers talked about their lesson design during their
pre-interviews and the two-and-a-half-day
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collaborative, their PDC seemed more aligned with
delivering the content from the mandated textbooks
and/or adapting various lessons they were given by
instructional coaches.
As the teams spent more time together each week
designing their curriculum units, they experienced
multiple struggles and stuck points, fits and starts of
inspiration and frustration. But those struggles
continued to create opportunities for the teachers to
delve more deeply into their content mastery and to
discuss the purposes of what, why, and how they
were teaching the content and how they thought their
particular student population might take up these new
learning experiences. Overall, teachers expressed that
this goal-oriented, backward design model gave them
the tools they needed to design focused, coherent
curriculum units that enhanced their instruction and
students’ engagement in the lessons.
For clarity, we grouped the challenges and
affordances teachers experienced while engaging in
the unit design process under the subheadings Initial
Struggle and Transition from Struggle to Productivity.
However, as stated above, for every challenge there
was always an inherent affordance entangled with
that challenge, as is the nature of productive struggle.
Despite our participants’ struggle, by the end of the
project all teachers agreed on the value of identifying
clear learning goals for curriculum design, which
validated the productive nature of their struggle.
Initial Struggle
As we explored teachers’ PDC to improvise (Brown,
2009) and draw from multiple resources in designing
interdisciplinary units, we observed their struggles
when they attempted to shift from offloading or
adapting activity-oriented lessons to conceptually-
oriented, improvisational planning and
implementation. Often with traditional curriculum
planning, the focus of design begins with the activity
or a coverage of the material instead of what the
students ultimately need to know and understand
(Andrews, 2008; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). We
refer to this as an activity-oriented planning approach.
As Sam noted in the opening quote of this section,
“There isn’t an association between the blips of
information that we are feeding our students,” and
this often results in a disconnected set of learning
experiences rather than a cohesive system of learning.
Throughout September and October, the teacher
design teams continued the work they began during
the two-day collaborative, developing their units’
8 © 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
clear learning goals. The teacher design teams used
Google Docs to write their goals, which allowed us to
iteratively provide feedback specifically focused on
the alignment between and among the standards,
knowledge, skills, and understandings. We
recognized early on that our feedback related to
writing clear learning goals needed to be very specific
to effect change. Below is an example of the explicit
feedback we provided to teachers in which we aimed
at stretching their thinking about the purpose and
nature of learning goals.
8th Grade Teacher Design Team’s Learning Goal:
SS8H7b. Analyze how rights were denied to African-
Americans through Jim Crow laws, Plessy
v. Ferguson, disenfranchisement, and racial violence.
● Jim Crow Laws, Plessy v. Ferguson, and
disenfranchisement were all examples of
institutional racism that was meant to disempower
black people.
Researchers’ Feedback:
If we now know what Jim Crow was, and we have
analyzed how Jim Crow denied rights to African
American people, then what is the bigger picture
we want kids to ‘get’ from this story? Isn’t it
bigger than disempowering? It’s dehumanizing;
it’s chopping people’s legs out from under them.
When this happens the structure of a society is
broken down and it affects everyone—not just the
people who are oppressed. It also hurts the
oppressors. So how can you get at that bigger
idea?
We found that this transition in thinking (starting with
the end in mind) challenged teachers to face their
conceptions of a clear learning goal, an end product,
the alignment of curriculum, and curricular cohesion
because they were conditioned to an activity-oriented
way of lesson design. Jennifer and Natalie’s veteran
teaching status—30 and 22—years, respectively,
influenced their perceptions of a backward design
approach. While they too were challenged by the act
of unpacking standards to create learning goals and
crafting a meaningful and rich performance
assessment, they also reflected on a time, prior to
standardized testing, when they felt more fully
engaged with their curricula. During her pre-project
interview, Natalie speculated why she believed lesson
planning practices had since changed.
 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
I think it’s [teacher-led curriculum design]
probably not been encouraged lately due to the
high stakes testing. As a result, I think teachers are
afraid to veer off the path that’s been charted for
them. If they go the path that’s been charted for
them, they know that they’re gonna be OK. But if
they try to do something different, it’s uncharted
territory, it’s unknown. It might be better; it might
be worse. We don’t really know.
In describing the process she was currently using to
design her lessons, Natalie said:
I would look at the standards and then I’d look at
activities in a unit that I might like to try with the
students that would help them understand the
skills and concepts. Um . . . often I’d work with
other teachers and we’d try to collaborate
somewhat. I thought it was really effective.
As Natalie noted, her lesson planning centered on
finding activities. During these first few months of
our study, we found ourselves continually re-focusing
the teachers’ attention toward the unit learning goals
and end product. Each time the teams veered off
course and began planning activities, we would
inquire, “What are your learning goals? How will this
activity inform the end product? What is the big idea?
This questioning sometimes caused teacher to be
frustrated because the learning goals and/or end
products were not fully developed. Despite the
frustration, participants did eventually see the
importance in establishing these final outcomes prior
to planning the learning experiences. During the post-
unit interview, Rebecca noted, “I think that’s because
when we sat down the first time and started trying to
think through it, it was hard because we couldn’t
come up with that final thing [product].”
Like Natalie, Sam commented:
My worry coming into the second day [of the
collaborative] was, it’s not activity based, wait
what? That’s where my brain is if I’m going to
create an activity that combines these things from
this content, and then that’s all going to build
toward the main goal.
Interestingly, Sam held this view throughout the
professional learning collaborative. As evidenced in
his conversations and body language during our two
and a half days together, he felt frustrated. More than
© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
once, Sam pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his
head, tightening the strings to only reveal his eyes.
More than once during our ten months with him, Sam
explained that he was accustomed to designing
learning activities based only on the content topic
without detailing the knowledge, skills, and
understandings associated with the standard or topic.
Much like Rebecca and Sam, Team Clean Water (the
self-chosen name of the 7th grade team) struggled
with focusing on standards and clear learning goals.
Because the teachers were not accustomed to this
kind of curriculum design, it was not common
practice for them to grapple with unpacking the
standards. This, in turn, made it difficult for them to
align standards, assessments, and learning
experiences or to recognize the amount of knowledge,
skills, and understandings to include in a unit. During
the post-unit interview with Team Clean Water, Jacob
reflected:
I have never ever thought twice about standards.
Standards were something I just had to throw onto
whatever I was making, because I have never had
the time to look at them. This was the first time
I actually looked at standards, took them apart,
analyzed what we could do with them—what they
need, what their value is—and actually create
something, a lesson plan around it. That was the
first time I’ve ever done that outside of college.
Paul then added:
I think one of the things that we struggled with as we
were developing this was the idea of, what do we
want the kids to know? . . . We’ve got the standards
and the KUDs that we developed, and the practice of
going back to those just to see if all the things that we
have aligned with them is not something that we get
time to do often enough. So it is not a natural
practice; it’s not second nature. I think that is one of
the challenges we experienced, because we would
have all of these great ideas and we would say,
“That’s a great idea – does it fit [the learning
outcomes/standards]?”
By late October, the learning goals were solidified.
The teacher design teams turned their attention
toward developing performance assessments, and in
doing so they recognized the added challenge of
creating parameters for their end products and
aligning them to standards and learning goals.
Historically, some of the teachers relied on the end of
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 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
unit tests that were already prepared for their students
and accompanied their curriculum materials. As Paul
noted, “It took a while to set that [final project] out
there for us, as opposed to knowing there is a test
with this information on it.”
The teachers’ struggle with the backward design
framework was also evident during their common
planning time. As noted above, Sam was particularly
frustrated and challenged by using the backward
design framework throughout the project.
Approximately one month into the project during the
eighth-grade team’s civil rights unit planning session,
Sam lamented his frustrations about feeling the need
to explain himself to us when we came to their team
planning meetings:
I feel like I just unpack it naturally . . . I almost
feel like I have to show you [the researchers] what
I’m doing this week just to say this is what the
standards gave me; this is how I approach it just to
show you I do unpack. I do have an idea in mind
of what I want my students to know and
understand . . . I guess I do what I feel like I am
supposed to do—unpacking it . . . When we make
our calendar, we are trying to knock out what our
unit will look like over the four weeks . . . I feel
like I’m in between grounds. I don’t feel like I’m
doing too much work in the KUD [know,
understand, do] part. I could be more specific
there when I’m talking about Jim Crow and what
I want them to learn.
As the conversation ensued among Sam, his co-
teacher, and the research team, it became clear that
Sam focused his energy on creating engaging
activities and then designed assessments to measure
student success on those activities. This was also
evident in the team’s initial unit plan for the project.
The unit plan detailed a list of activities aligned with
the state standards without clear indication for the
kinds of knowledge, understanding, and skills that
students needed to acquire. By November, the eighth-
grade teacher-team’s thinking pivoted from planning
classroom activities to planning learning experiences
centered on clear learning goals, and their initial
struggle morphed into productive, rich unit planning
experiences discussed below.
Transition from Struggle to Productivity
One of the characteristics of the UbD framework is
that it provides teachers with the tools necessary to
craft meaningful learning experiences for their students
while, at the same time, engages teachers in practice-
10
based, professional learning centered on student
learning needs, content, and pedagogy. As previously
reported, teachers felt challenged by many aspects of
the design process and, from a learning theory
perspective (Hiebert & Grouws, 2007), the outcomes
of those challenges resulted in new knowledge and
more appreciation for the art and skill of teaching.
Taking up this backward design approach, the teachers
used the standards as they were intended to be used—
to guide teachers’ thought processes without restricting
their ownership or creativity. Once the struggle of re-
framing their approaches to curriculum design
subsided, teachers noted the affordances of using
a backward design approach and recognized the
difference between the two methods.
Sam and Rebecca had a particularly transformative
experience from the initiation of the project to the
end. In analyzing the unit artifacts, interviews, and
video-recorded common planning times between
teachers, we found that Sam moved from activity-
oriented adaptive planning to recognizing the power
in carefully unpacking standards and designing
cohesive learning experiences based on clear learning
goals—more of an improvisational approach. In his
post-unit interview, Sam explained:
That sort of thematic approach, I appreciated it
because instead of feeling like I had to squeeze in
a couple things from the standard . . . three
seemingly random pieces of information that you
need to know—is much easier as we are designing it
to find purpose within the sub-standards that we
were teaching. Being able to pick out, determining
why I was teaching something, and how that
interlaced itself amongst the other standards, that
was important for me and for the kids to grasp: why
they were learning about what they were learning.
Not surprisingly, each of the teachers’ thinking
around planning shifted at different times over the life
of the project, with most of the teachers recognizing
the value in backward design after cementing their
learning goals. Once teachers’ perspectives on the
usefulness of standards for identifying these learning
goals shifted, they were better able to craft
a summative unit assessment. Their final products
were designed to align with the standards and
provided a roadmap for teachers to develop
purposeful learning experiences for their students.
Consequently, crafting the summative assessments
was another contributing factor to the productivity
© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
of teachers’ success when designing cohesive units.
In the post-unit interview, for example, Rebecca and
Sam talked about how the service learning project
they constructed as the culminating performance
task for the unit brought everything together for
them. Sam then remarked on how this way of
approaching curriculum design changed everything
for him and for his students.
I feel like once you’ve seen it, once you’ve felt it,
it would make our approach to planning future
units like this much more streamlined. There is
something larger, something deeper that the
students can continue to think about. That was
different. That was special.
Rebecca then added:
That’s the whole point of backward design, that you
have the end in mind. Once that happens, everything
kind of flushes itself out more clearly and you have
more of a path to follow . . . That steam-powered the
rest of the unit for us because we were able to see
what we wanted them to accomplish.
Early in the planning process, the teacher design
teams were challenged by coordinating the timing of
the learning goals for four different content areas into
one unit of study. Paul, for example, was flummoxed
by the thought of veering away from the textbook
driven mathematics program that he typically used
and, as a result, eliminated mathematics standards
from Team Clean Water’s final unit. Despite this
omission, video recordings from the unit
implementation coupled with teachers’ interviews
portrayed students’ ambitious and well received
learning experiences in science, social studies, and
ELA. Students expressed disappointment, for
example, when the bell rang and they were forced to
stop working on their projects and go to their next
class; moreover, they chose to continue working on
their projects outside of class and during other
classes. The teacher design team believed that this
motivation was due in part to the “low floor-high
ceiling” opportunities that challenged all of the
learners in their classrooms and motivated students to
reach beyond the minimum standard. Jennifer stated,
“The students who hadn’t produced anything all year
long worked on this project.” Paul added, “And
produced voluminous amounts.” This evidence of
student engagement contributed to the teachers’ sense
of productivity and success as demonstrated in their
decision to use this unit again, in addition to three
© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
more units they would design in this same way the
following school year.
The productive struggle teachers experienced in unit
planning as a team challenged them to think
differently about the pedagogy and content within
their units and within each lesson. In doing so, they
began thinking like curriculum designers who could
better improvise their lesson design (i.e., PDC) by
considering the overarching, long-term goals of the
learning experiences and how these goals created
a pathway for connection-making within and between
the content. These moments illustrated how the
struggle teachers may have experienced in particular
moments eventually allowed something productive to
manifest—one never taking place without the other.
Discussion
This study examined the experiences of teachers in
design teams who developed interdisciplinary
curriculum units while they were supported by
a researcher-practitioner partnership and situated
within a school structure that valued teachers’
engagement with curriculum design. We found that
teachers experienced productive struggle throughout
the design process and demonstrated a shift in their
PDC from adapting or offloading to improvising their
curriculum. These findings are particularly significant
to middle grades education, because curricular
learning experiences for young adolescents that are
challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse
(Bishop & Harrison, 2021) are not possible if
teachers are only expected to adapt or offload
curriculum that someone else designed without
particular students and contexts in mind.
Productive Struggle
There were clear links between teachers’ struggles
and their curricular engagement to the extent that the
teachers’ persistence was due, in part, to the
opportunity for self- and team-motivated professional
learning. This learning included curriculum design
expertise which called upon content and pedagogical
knowledge and was supported by the UbD curriculum
framework.
Huizinga et al.’s (2014) findings illustrated three
guidelines for supporting the successful execution of
the curriculum design process among teacher design
teams. Support should (a) be offered “just-in-time”;
(b) focus on developing teachers’ curriculum design
expertise, pedagogical content knowledge, and
curriculum consistency expertise; and (c) offer
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 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
curricular frameworks and guidelines. We found that
the teacher design teams persisted through their
struggles and were productive because they attended
all planning meetings and received just-in-time
support offered through a professional learning
collaborative that proactively exposed teachers to the
UbD framework.
As noted by Hiebert and Grouws (2007), “struggle
results in restructuring one’s mental connections in
more powerful ways” (p. 388). Teachers participated
in professional learning experiences that challenged
them to restructure and develop their cognitive
frameworks related to curriculum design through the
development of new pedagogical approaches and the
acquisition of deeper content knowledge specifically
related to interdisciplinary content. It is important to
note that while designing interdisciplinary curriculum
units was new to most of our participants and added
repeated moments of struggle throughout their design
process, the teachers’ satisfaction with their end
products and watching their students thrive during
their units beautifully illustrated the importance of
teacher-designed curriculum for young adolescents.
As Bishop and Harrison (2021) remind us:
Expecting students to grapple with and master
advanced concepts and skills requires middle grades
teachers to stretch themselves well beyond
“covering material.” School administrators therefore
ensure that teachers have sufficient time and support
to both deepen their knowledge of content and
pedagogy and design challenging learning
opportunities. Using their professional judgment and
in consultation with students, teachers guide the
selection of ideas and concepts for in-depth study. To
help these issues come alive, teachers invite students
to examine values, assumptions, basic principles,
and alternative points of view, addressing why
things happen as well as how. Students learn skills
and concepts in context as they become explorers,
thinkers, and communicators. (p. 29)
Our study also supported Huizinga et al.’s (2014)
third recommendation, to the extent that the design
teams appreciated resource support such as the UbD
framework, curriculum design templates, and
curriculum evaluation measures. Moreover, we
recognized the tools’ importance for organizing the
vast amount of information used by teachers over the
course of their 10-month experience.
As Graff (2011) observed, these three areas of
support help teachers persist through their struggle
12
with curriculum design. Teachers need to engage in
productive struggle to experience their own “aha”
moments and stuck places if we expect their students
to persevere through their own struggles when
learning.
Unfortunately, many middle level schools are not
structured in ways that promote or enable the
productive struggle of teachers. As Hoy and
Sweetland (2001) noted, “Like it or not, schools are
bureaucracies—they are structures with hierarchies,
divisions of labor, impersonality, objective standards,
technical competence and rules and regulations” (p.
296). Within the framework we propose here, it is
critical that teachers are empowered and supported by
their administration and districts to make decisions
about student learning, including designing
curriculum that focuses “not only on what students
may need later in life; [but that also] integrates
students’ histories to help them see how they can use
what they are learning in the here and now” (Bishop
& Harrison, 2021, p. 30). This enabling school
structure is only possible with trust between teachers
and administration, whereby teachers have the
opportunity to experiment with curriculum design and
learn from their mistakes. This kind of structure has
been shown to promote both individual and
organizational learning (Hoy & Sweetland, 2001) and
more sustainability within school structures (DuFour,
2004b).
Implications for Policy and Practice
The findings from this study have implications for
policymakers, school leaders, and middle grades
teachers interested in exploring teacher-led
curriculum design as a construct of teacher
professionalism. This study suggests that involving
teachers in curriculum design efforts is not without
challenges, though the challenges are outweighed by
the benefits to teachers, students, and the school’s
professional community. Middle level school leaders
are invited to reconsider the working structures
within their schools, paying particular attention to
logistical and philosophical frameworks. Logistically,
middle grades teachers need protected time to work in
teams on creative curriculum planning, and they need
on-going support by way of guiding standards and
additional curriculum expectations. The current study
was conducted in middle grades classrooms in
a school in which the administration considered
interdisciplinary curriculum as critical to young
adolescents’ learning; however, teaching
© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
interdisciplinary curriculum units was not a common
practice throughout the school. It is important to note
that these findings can be taken up in any middle
school/system willing to reconsider what is working
and what is not in their particular school (i.e., class/
bell schedules, protected teacher planning time,
professional autonomy with curriculum design).
With that said, this study also speaks to the importance
of policymakers and school administrators whose
educational philosophies value teacher
professionalism. In practice, teacher teams were
trusted to align their curriculum design to standards,
meet student learning needs and interests, and maintain
the integrity of the subject matter while designing
interdisciplinary units situated within an authentic
context. Indeed, when making legislative decisions,
policymakers are faced with the monumental challenge
of balancing the benefits and costs associated with
mandates designed to measure student achievement.
These findings suggest that school decisions should
include supports necessary for teachers and schools/
administrators to allow teachers greater involvement in
curriculum design. For example, how might state
legislation promote teachers as integral voices in the
decision making around school start times, bell
schedules, and number of course preparations, which
all have direct implications on the time teachers have
to dedicate to learning about and designing their own
curriculum? Middle level schools are interconnected
systems in which each connecting node influences the
other, with student learning as the nucleus of the
system. Given middle grades teachers’ integral role in
student learning, it is not surprising that their
involvement in school policy would provide a much-
needed perspective.
As policy leaders, administrators, and educators alike
learned during the recent COVID-19 schooling crisis
(Hughes & Jones, 2020a, 2020b), our education
system is more malleable than we construct it to be. It
simply takes changing the system and examining the
results of those changes over time. In general, policy
leaders interested in school change should include
educators and education researchers in policy
decisions that impact high poverty schools, such as
the amount of time and money committed to
standardized testing. In this way, at least some of the
time allocated to “preparing students” for those tests,
as well as some of the millions of dollars allocated to
purchasing and grading those tests, could be
redirected to teacher-chosen professional learning
time and resources that support teacher-led
curriculum design.
© 2021 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
More specifically, middle level school leaders
interested in teacher led curriculum design can
engender a school community that empowers
teachers as leaders who contribute to organizational
learning. Because middle grades philosophy already
purports the importance of young adolescents
learning in teams and engaging with an
interdisciplinary curriculum that is challenging,
exploratory, and diverse, teachers need to be
entrusted with the time and resources to pursue
these philosophical goals. Even more, middle
grades teachers interested in engaging in
curriculum design benefit from collaboration with
one another and open and continuous
communication with administration. Middle grades
teachers taking on the role of curriculum designer
should expect to feel challenged, invigorated, and
gain a deeper understanding of the content they are
teaching by going through the process of unpacking
standards and aligning those standards with
meaningful learning experiences. Deliberating with
colleagues and sharing these challenges collectively
are ways to transition from struggle to productive
struggle.
Limitations and Future Research
The purpose of this study was to document how the
environmental context of the middle school in
which the teachers taught (i.e., student population,
class scheduling, administrative support, state and
district mandates) influenced the teacher teams’
experiences of designing their own interdisciplinary
curriculum units through the lenses of PDC and
productive struggle. While we feel this goal was
met, we also acknowledge several limitations to the
investigation, such as scale and the relationship
between teachers’ involvement in curriculum and
student learning. Because this was an exploratory
investigation and because of our particular research
question, we did not collect diagnostic student
assessment data, as that will be collected in the
longitudinal study. Qualitative methods were
appropriate for making sense of the complex nature
of interactions in this study, but this particular
approach does not lend itself to generalizing
findings—nor should it. Furthermore, because the
participants in this study taught in the same middle
school, the singular site may have provoked similar
experiences among participants. Multi-site studies
would provide a platform for cross-case analysis
and purposeful sampling of participants who have
access to a variety of resources and/or work in
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 RMLE Online—Volume 44, No. 3
settings with different levels of administrative
support. Again, these limitations will be addressed
in the future longitudinal study. Future research
should investigate teacher-designed curriculum as
a vehicle for student engagement and teacher self-
efficacy through the lens of teacher
professionalism. Further, middle grades research
would greatly benefit from an investigation of the
influence of these constructs on student
achievement.
Conclusion
Ten months working with the six teacher-participants
clearly illustrated to us that teaching and learning can be
incredibly powerful and meaningful when teachers are
provided time, support, and professional autonomy to
design curriculum that is based on their students’
interests, a deep knowledge of the content, and
a thoughtful unpacking of mandated standards. We were
reminded over and over during this work that, at its core,
teaching is indeed a complex and nuanced entanglement
of art and skill; a craft, if you will, that calls on
practitioners to constantly engage in productive struggle.
In conclusion, we argue that teacher professionalism,
by way of curriculum design, is one tangible way to
enact middle grades philosophy regarding the kinds of
curricular experiences young adolescents should have
in successful middle schools (Bishop & Harrison,
2021; Jackson & Davis, 2000). Empowering teachers
and providing them the time and resources to be fully
involved in their curriculum design honor the expertise
as a trusted professionals and may help them design
more meaningful, contextual learning experiences that
will interest and inspire their students.
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