ARTICLE IN PRESS

Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014– 2026

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Teaching and Teacher Education

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate

Learning from curriculum materials: Scaffolds for new teachers?$

Pam Grossman a,, Clarissa Thompson b,1
a
School of Education, Stanford University, 485 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
b
Department of Secondary and Middle Education, University of Maine at Farmington, 186 High Street, Farmington, ME 04938, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o abstract

Article history: This article explores how beginning teachers use and learn from curriculum materials. As
Received 5 December 2006 part of a longitudinal study of beginning English teachers who teach in the Pacific
Received in revised form Northwest of the United States, the researchers tracked teachers’ responses to and use of
19 February 2008
materials over time, and how these materials shaped their classroom practice. The
Accepted 6 May 2008
authors found that the teachers spent an enormous amount of time searching out
curriculum materials for their classes and that the curriculum materials they encountered
Keywords: did, indeed, powerfully shape their ideas about teaching language arts as well as their
Beginning teachers
classroom practice. Based on their findings, the authors propose a trajectory for the
Curriculum materials
teachers’ use of the curriculum materials. New teachers begin by sticking close to the
Learning to teach
materials they have at hand. Then, over time, as they learn more about both students and
curriculum, they adapt and adjust their use of the materials. The authors argue that new
and aspiring teachers need opportunities to analyze and critique curriculum materials,
beginning during teacher education and continuing in the company of their more
experienced colleagues.
& 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
A curriculum is more for teachers than it is for pupils. If
it cannot change, move, perturb, inform teachers, it
will have no effect on those whom they teach. It must
be first and foremost a curriculum for teachers. If it has
any effect on pupils, it will have it by virtue of having
had an effect on teachers (Bruner, 1977).
$
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting
of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, April
2002. We would like to thank Sheila Valencia, Kate Evans, Susan Martin,
and Nancy Place who were our collaborators and colleagues on the larger
research project. We would also like to thank Janine Remillard and
George Hillocks for their helpful responses to earlier versions of this
paper. This work was funded by the Center for English Learning and
Achievement at the University of Albany, through the Office of
Educational Research and Improvement.
 Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 650 723 0791.
E-mail addresses: pamg@stanford.edu (P. Grossman),
clarissa.thompson@maine.edu (C. Thompson).
1
Tel.: +1 207 778 7192.
Near the end of her first year of teaching, Nancy, a high
school English teacher, was asked if she could have
anything she wanted, what would it be. She replied
quickly, without equivocation, with one word—‘‘curricu-
lum’’. A few moments later, she elaborated on her desire,
saying that without ‘‘materials that would interest [my
students], and not knowing what materials would interest
them or what we have available that I could use that
would interest them—that would pull them in, I feel lost.’’
Nancy’s plaintive quotation speaks to one of the critical
issues facing beginning teachers—finding resources to
support instruction. As a novice, Nancy had not yet
developed the pedagogical content knowledge that would
help her have a good understanding of ‘‘what would
interest her students.’’ Perhaps more importantly, as a
novice, she had not yet learned what types of curricular
materials are available to her, materials that could in fact
help her develop knowledge about the teaching of English.
For new teachers, at the beginning of their careers with
much still to learn, curriculum materials might play a
pivotal role in helping them develop their practice. But

0742-051X/$ - see front matter & 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.tate.2008.05.002
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P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026
what do new teachers encounter with regard to curricu-
lum when they enter their classrooms?
In this paper, we examine how three beginning
secondary English teachers responded to and used
curriculum materials in their early years of teaching. We
are particularly interested in how the different curriculum
materials they encountered afforded opportunities for
learning about teaching the language arts. We explore the
following questions:
 How do these new English teachers perceive and use
available curriculum materials for teaching the lan-
guage arts? How does their use of curriculum materials
change over time?
 What opportunities for teacher learning are embedded
in the curriculum materials new teachers encounter?
How are features of the curriculum materials related to
these opportunities for learning?
1.1. Teachers and curriculum
Curriculum materials in the United States can take a
wide variety of forms. Under the umbrella of curriculum
materials we include: curriculum frameworks or state
standards (which generally specify what students should
be learning); curricular programs, including those that
focus either on a full year of instruction or on a shorter
period of time or on a single unit (e.g. the College Board’s
Pacesetter programmes, Slavin’s CIRC; Open Court); text-
books, including trade books and class sets of books;
teacher-created materials; and other resources, such as
professional publications that focus on curriculum and
instruction (e.g. Shakespeare Set Free, a book focused on
teaching Shakespeare through performance and Writing
without Teachers (Elbow, 1998)).
Curriculum serves not just students; curricular materi-
als also provide potential learning opportunities for the
adults who teach them (Ball & Cohen, 1996; Davis &
Krajcik, 2005). Yet teachers, and teacher educators, have
long had an ambivalent relationship with prepared
curriculum materials, including textbooks. Teachers have
long been dependent on textbooks to help guide their
instruction (Freeman & Porter, 1989; Sosniak & Perlman,
1990; Stodolsky, 1989; Woodward & Elliott, 1990). Yet
researchers have found that textbooks are not necessarily
of high quality and can limit, rather than support,
teachers’ learning and developing professionalism (Ball
& Feiman-Nemser, 1988; Woodward & Elliott, 1990). In
their work on beginning teachers, Ball and Feiman-
Nemser found that in both teacher education programs
they studied, the professors disparaged the quality of
textbooks and discouraged beginning elementary teachers
from using them. Instead they encouraged students to
create their own materials from scratch. Yet, once these
preservice teachers were in classrooms, various policies or
mandates necessitated the use of textbooks. Not surpris-
ingly, the researchers found these novices ill-equipped to
use textbooks; after all, most of their exposure to them
had involved developing critiques, rather than considering
how to adapt them for wise classroom use. Ball and
2015
Feiman-Nemser conclude that textbooks could contribute
to the development of subject matter knowledge for
novice teachers who do not have comprehensive knowl-
edge about certain topics necessary for teaching. Further-
more, the researchers hypothesize that textbooks could
serve as a scaffold, helping novice teachers ‘‘learn to think
pedagogically about particular content’’ (Ball & Feiman-
Nemser, 1988, p. 421).
Remillard (2000) studied two elementary teachers and
the relationship between their use of a reform-oriented
math textbook and what they learned and how they
taught mathematics. She concluded that the textbook—
and the teachers’ use of it—did offer them a variety of
opportunities for learning. At the same time, though, she
concludes that for the pedagogical change that would
support true reform of mathematics instruction, text-
books, such as the one she observed teachers using, need
to do more than just set out activities for students to do
and terrain for teachers to cover. She argues that as well as
being written for students, textbooks need to be written
with teachers in mind. In particular, textbook authors
need to be more explicit about reasons and purposes for
certain content or activities, and to provide opportunities
for teachers to engage in decision-making, giving them
space to play out some of the introduced possibilities on
their own.
Ball and Cohen (1996) note the uneven role curriculum
materials have historically played in teachers’ practice and
argue for a new vision of the design and use of such
materials. As Remillard (2000) does, they point out the
important role curriculum materials could play in teacher
learning and the need to integrate such materials into
professional development programs so as to increase
teachers’ engagement with and learning from the materi-
als. Like Bruner before them, Ball and Cohen argue that
curriculum materials should be designed as much for
teachers as for students and should be used as a site for
teacher learning.
Davis and Krajcik (2005) take a similar position,
referring to such curriculum materials as ‘‘educative.’’
They set out what they call ‘‘high level guidelines,’’ which
indicate that educative curriculum materials should help
teachers anticipate student thinking and consider how to
relate units throughout the year, among other things. They
also create a set of ‘‘design heuristics,’’ which fall into the
arenas of subject matter knowledge and pedagogical
content knowledge. In their design heuristics they suggest
what the materials should provide for teachers, how the
materials can help teachers understand the recommenda-
tions, and how teachers can use the materials in their
teaching. Davis and Krajcik also discuss inherent tensions
in the design of educative curriculum materials, such as
determining the right amount of guidance or prescription
and designing materials for different audiences, e.g., new
teachers versus experienced teachers.
More recent research on teachers and curriculum takes
two different directions, looking broadly at teachers’
general experiences with the curriculum materials they
encounter (or the lack of materials they find when they
enter the classroom) as well as more specifically at what
they might learn from their use of curriculum materials.
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In a study of new teachers in Massachusetts (Kauffman, different settings, and how they make sense of the
Johnson, Kardos, Liu, & Peske, 2002), researchers inter- discontinuities among settings.
viewed 50 new teachers—at all levels and in all subject From the perspective of sociocultural theory, learning
areas—and found that these new teachers identified involves tool-mediated action; we believe that the
curriculum as one of their central concerns. The authors curriculum materials that teachers encounter represent
suggest that while these teachers sense the importance of important tools for learning to teach. Embedded within
curriculum and are hungry for curricular guidance, they these materials are conceptions of what it means to teach
often find little to help them; they end up overwhelmed reading and writing, as well as practical tools to use in
by their responsibilities in terms of creating quality classrooms. Our analysis tries to surface these embedded
curricular materials to use with their students. These conceptions of the subject matter and what it means to
researchers conclude that one of the central problems teach it, as well as the kinds of strategies and guidance for
facing new teachers is finding curricular resources and teaching language arts included in the materials.
materials to help them with their work. Our focus is on how teachers engage with and use
Given the increasing reliance on prescribed curriculum these materials in the process of learning to teach.
programs and materials, including textbooks and pacing Teachers’ use of these tools will vary, depending upon
plans that prescribe the pace at which teachers must their own beliefs and values, their knowledge of the
‘‘cover’’ the curriculum, the significance of curriculum subject, and the contexts in which they teach, just as how
materials in shaping both teachers’ practice and learning they use the materials will help determine what they
has heightened as well. Researchers need to attend to the learn from them (Johnson, Smagorinsky, Thompson, & Fry,
kinds of curriculum materials novice teachers encounter 2003). Teachers’ knowledge of their subject (Hashweh,
when they enter the classroom, and how they use these 1987), as well as beliefs about teaching more generally
materials in their practice. While a number of authors (Richardson, Anders, Tidwell, & Lloyd, 1991) will affect
argue for the need for curricular materials that are how teachers respond to and use the curricula available to
educative for teachers, as well as students, relatively little them, even as their beliefs about teaching are shaped by
research actually examines what teachers might learn district policy (Grossman & Thompson, 2002; Spillane &
from the curriculum materials they encounter. Our study Jennings, 1997). Our analyses have tried to take account of
attempts to chart this territory, in part by developing a the differences among individuals in their beliefs and in
framework for analyzing the features of curriculum their teaching contexts that help account for the different
materials and their embedded opportunities for learning ways in which they used, and learned from, curriculum
(Table 1). materials.
Because we were interested in curriculum materials as
tools for teacher learning, we developed a framework for
2. Theoretical framework thinking about the characteristics and features of different
kinds of curricula. This framework included the scope,
This study draws on sociocultural theory (Cole, 1996; comprehensiveness, flexibility, and support for teacher
Wertsch, 1981) to frame the research. As outlined in our learning of the curriculum materials.
conceptual framework (Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valen- Because the subject matter of English/language arts is
cia, 1999), we have focused on the different activity broad, encompassing a number of different areas (e.g.,
settings in which beginning teachers learn to teach, and reading/literature, writing, speaking/listening, drama,
how teachers acquire conceptual and practical tools for journalism, and visual media), we considered what areas
teaching language arts. Given this framework, we are of the subject matter the curriculum materials addressed.
interested in what teachers encounter and learn in For example, materials might focus only on writing or they
might include attention to both reading and writing. As
Table 1 teaching itself is such a complex practice, we were also
Study participants interested in ways that new teachers learn about and
master the myriad tasks involved in teaching, including
Nancy Allison Bill
planning, enacting particular pedagogies, and assessing
Taught 10th and 11th Taught 7th grade in Taught 10th and 12th student learning. Some materials might provide ideas for
grade in a suburban a suburban school grade in a suburban classroom activities but provide little guidance in how to
school district district school district assess what students learned from the activities, while
others might include resources for both instruction and
 Used the multi-  Used the multi-  Used the multi-
paragraph essay paragraph paragraph essay assessment. Curriculum materials also fall along a
unit essay unit unit continuum, from more prescriptive, specifying exactly
 Had a list of novels  Had a list of  Had a list of novels what should be taught, to more flexible, offering guidance
available novels available available and ideas about what and how to teach, but leaving many
 State curriculum  State and  State and district
of the instructional decisions up to the individual teacher.
frameworks district curriculum
curriculum frameworks We were interested in where on this continuum particular
frameworks  Pacesetter English curriculum materials fell and how the flexibility of the
 Teacher-created materials affected teachers’ engagement with the materi-
units
als. Finally, because of our interest in how new teachers’
knowledge about teaching language arts grows and
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P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026 2017

Table 2
Features of curriculum materials

Scope Comprehensiveness Flexibility Support for teacher learning

Definition The number of aspects of the
language arts addressed by the
curriculum materials
Analysis What aspects of the broad
questions territory of the language arts
are included in the curriculum
materials? Do the materials
focus on a narrow slice of
language arts (e.g., writing)? Do
they tackle more territory (e.g.
literature, writing, speaking
and listening)?
The number of aspects of
instruction addressed by the
curriculum materials and the
resources included within the
curriculum materials
Do the materials focus only on
what to teach? Do they also
include information about how
to teach the content or how to
assess student learning? Are
opportunities for professional
development provided?
How the materials are designed
to be used
Do the materials require
teachers to use them as they
were written? Can teachers
adapt and change the materials
depending on their needs and
contexts?
How much and in what ways
the materials engage teachers
in tasks that contribute to the
development of knowledge
about teaching and the subject
matter at hand
Are the materials addressed to
teachers as well as students?
Do the materials include
questions that ask teachers to
figure things out for
themselves? Do the materials
include opportunities for
teachers to make their own
decisions about how to use or
what to do with the materials?
Do the materials provide
teachers with just the topics or
general content? Or, do they
also include lesson plans,
activities, worksheets?

develops over time—the trajectory they experience as
they go through their first few years of teaching—we
wondered what kind of support for teacher learning might
be built into particular curriculum materials. These
varying questions and concerns led us to identify four
dimensions of curriculum materials: scope of materials
with regard to content, comprehensiveness of materials with
regard to instruction, flexibility of materials with regard to
use, and support for teacher learning. In Table 2, we define
and elaborate on these dimensions.
The broader the scope of the materials, the more likely
there are to be opportunities for beginning teachers to
learn how to integrate the different components of the
language arts. Materials that are more comprehensive in
nature may provide more opportunities for teachers to
learn not only what to teach, but how to teach the
material. Materials that provide for some flexibility in
how they are implemented may also provide more
opportunities for teachers to actually interact with the
curriculum and make decisions about how best to use the
materials to support student learning. The flexibility of
materials may also result in greater variation in instruc-
tion. While beginning teachers may or may not take the
opportunities offered by the materials, and while some
teachers might learn from any curriculum with which
they’re presented, we argue that the characteristics of the
curriculum materials themselves matter to teacher learn-
ing.
Our analyses focused on how the curriculum materials
represented the language arts and embodied opportu-
nities for learning about teaching the language arts. As
part of this analysis, we coded materials with regard to the
features of scope, comprehensiveness, and flexibility, as
well as for potential opportunities for teachers to learn
about subject matter, about teaching the subject matter,
or about teaching more generally. For example, some of
the materials actually defined literary terms and gave
examples; we coded this as a potential opportunity to
learn about the subject matter. The same materials might
also provide ways of thinking about how to teach this
concept or term to students, which we coded as an
opportunity to learn about teaching the subject matter.
Finally, some materials introduced instructional activities
such as the jig-saw or formats for group discussion that
were not inherently tied to the subject matter. We coded
these as opportunities to learn more generally about
teaching.
3. Description of study
The analysis presented in this paper comes from a
larger longitudinal study, conducted in the Pacific North-
west of the United States, of beginning teachers as they
made the transition from their teacher education program
to their first 3 years of teaching. Our decision to follow the
teachers for several years came from an interest in seeing
if and how they appropriated tools from their teacher
education course work over time, and how the process of
learning to teach was affected by aspects of their school
and district contexts, including availability of professional
development activities, support from colleagues, and
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2018 P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026
curricular and instructional policies. In particular, we
wanted to follow them beyond just their first year of
teaching, as the first 3 years of teaching are seen as a
critical learning period for new teachers. The larger study
followed 10 beginning elementary and secondary English/
language arts teachers. Our data consist of individual and
group interviews, classroom observations, and documents
from both the teachers’ classrooms and their districts.
During the 4 years of the study, we observed and
interviewed the teachers regularly throughout the school
year. We observed the teachers at three points throughout
the year: near the beginning, in the middle, and near the
end of the year.2 Each time we observed, we focused on
two different classes that the teacher was teaching (e.g.,
one class of 9th grade English and one creative writing
class). Our first visit of the year was a 1-day visit, whereas
the second and third observations spanned 2 days of
instruction for each of the two classes that we were
following. During observations, we took extensive field
notes and collected copies of any curriculum materials or
resources the teacher was using. Prior to each observation,
we spoke with the teacher about what we would be
observing, asking questions about what the class had been
doing prior to our visit, what the teacher had planned for
the days we would be observing, and what their goals
were. Following the observations, we conducted post-
observation interviews with the teachers, during which
we asked questions about what we had seen and the
teachers’ thinking behind what they had done; we asked
questions about the resources we saw the teachers using
and where they had acquired those resources, or where
their ideas for what they were doing had come from.
In addition to these classroom observations and the
related interviews, we also interviewed the teachers
independently of these observations. Again, we conducted
these in the beginning, middle, and at the end of the year.
While these interviews certainly focused on the classroom
experiences of these teachers, we also stepped back from
the classroom to some degree during these interviews,
asking questions about what was happening at the school
and district level, and what role the state reform played in
their work as teachers. When we met with our teacher
participants, we asked broader and more reflective
questions about what they had learned over the course
of the year, and questions based on themes or topics that
we had seen recurring in either the observations or our
interviews.
We conducted group interviews on a yearly basis,
bringing all of the participants together to talk about their
experiences. Again, as with the individual interviews, the
group interviews ranged in focus, from more general
discussion about how things were going and what the
teachers were doing in their classrooms, to specific tasks
that we designed to elicit their thinking about certain
issues. For example, in one of the tasks, teachers were
asked to bring in samples of curriculum materials they
2
During the time that they were student teaching, our three
observations were spread across their student teaching semester, rather
than a full year.
had encountered in their schools and to talk about them
with the group. In another group task, teachers were
asked to rank order the usefulness of various materials
they had mentioned in interviews and to talk about their
rankings. The group interviews were both audio- and
video-taped.
Data analysis was an iterative process. All the inter-
views were audio-taped and transcribed verbatim. We
also summarized each interview and observation for all
participants in this study and wrote accompanying
detailed analytic memos. We engaged in extensive
analyses of the individual teachers and then conducted
cross-case analyses, looking for both commonalities and
differences among the teachers with regard to their uses
of curriculum materials. Our analysis focused on how
teachers made sense of and used a variety of curriculum
materials in their classrooms, and what teachers reported
learning from the materials. We also analyzed observa-
tional data for evidence of teachers’ learning about subject
matter or about teaching the subject matter. Finally, we
analyzed the curriculum materials according to the
framework described above.
We focus simultaneously here on three secondary
teachers and their use of a variety of curriculum materials,
with a specific focus on their use of two sets of curriculum
materials. Three factors led to our focus on these three
teachers in particular. First, all three of these teachers
taught locally for at least 2 years, allowing us to follow
their practice across these crucial beginning years. Second,
packaged curriculum materials played a significant role in
the classroom practice of these teachers during their first
few years of teaching. Third, all three of these teachers
encountered and made use of one set of materials in
particular, Jane Schaffer’s ‘‘Teaching the Multi-paragraph
Essay’’ unit. One of our participants used the second set of
materials that we chose for analysis, the College Board’s
‘‘Pacesetter English’’ curriculum. As researchers, we were
interested in looking at new teachers and their engage-
ment with and learning from curriculum materials in
general. However, the fact that three of our participants
used the same set of materials made it particularly
interesting to look specifically at that set of materials
and the ways they interacted with it.
As noted above, we chose these two sets of materials
for analysis in part because they were central to the
teachers’ practice but also because they represented a
contrast in scope and orientation towards the subject
matter and were therefore a strategic site for analysis of
what teachers could learn from curriculum materials
about the subject matter and teaching the subject matter.
Jane Schaffer’s ‘‘Teaching the Multi-paragraph Essay’’ is a
unit plan designed to teach students how to write a basic
five-paragraph essay. The unit is intended to span nine
weeks and focuses primarily on writing and, in particular,
writing within one specific genre. By our definitions, the
materials are of rather limited scope. However, the
materials came with a complete set of lesson plans for
this unit, samples of student work, handouts and work-
sheets for students, and guidelines for how to adapt the
unit. In this sense, the materials were comprehensive with
regard to instruction and designed for somewhat flexible
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P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026
use. Pacesetter English, in contrast, focuses on many
aspects of the English/Language Arts (writing, reading,
speaking ,listening, etc.), rather than just writing; we
defined these materials as broader in scope. Also, the
Pacesetter materials cover a full school year, and are
comprised of five discrete units. The curriculum comes
with ideas for teaching the central concepts (e.g. voice,
perspective), as well as suggestions for specific texts for
each unit. The curriculum also has a well-developed set of
performance assessments, complete with rubrics; tea-
chers who adopt this curriculum also participate in a
national professional development institute and have
access to other teachers using this curriculum. In these
ways, Pacesetter English was even more comprehensive
than the Jane Schaffer unit plan.
We first describe briefly the individual teachers
included in this study and then turn to the cross-case
themes.
4. The teachers
We begin by introducing the teachers and their
backgrounds, including their shared experience during
teacher education. During their teacher education pro-
gram (a graduate-level program at a large university in the
Northwest United States), all three teachers took a 20-
week long language arts methods sequence that focused
on both the teaching of writing and the teaching of
literature. While the students created their own curricu-
lum materials during their teacher education course work,
including lesson and unit plans, they neither examined
nor had opportunities to critique or evaluate published
curriculum materials. All three of these teachers inter-
nalized the broad principles that ran through their teacher
education program. For example, they felt strongly about
the importance of meaningful assessments, being clear
about one’s goals and objectives, scaffolding student
learning and providing a constructivist learning environ-
ment. At the same time, they felt that one of the weak
aspects in their program had been their subject-specific
preparation for teaching. While they had been introduced
to some general ideas regarding the teaching of writing,
for example, they did not necessarily feel they had been
prepared to put these ideas into practice. As one teacher
commented: ‘‘writing process theory was too much
learning about and not enough learning how to imple-
ment.’’ Referring back to her teacher education course
work, Nancy, one of our focal teachers, claimed, ‘‘No one
has ever taught me how to teach essay writing, every
Methods class wasn’t very good.’’ (See Grossman et al.,
2000 for more detail on what teachers learned about
teaching writing.)
Nancy had an undergraduate degree in English, a
minor in psychology, and was hired to teach both of those
subjects when she took her first job. She felt that writing,
rather than literature was her strength in the teaching of
English/language arts and one of her goals for students
was that they not be afraid to try writing, that they feel
comfortable ‘‘getting it down on paper so that they have
something to work with.’’ Of these three new teachers,
2019
Nancy was the most anxious about and concerned with
curriculum and curriculum materials. Despite her dis-
trict’s emphasis on curriculum, she felt that there was a
real lack of available curricular support at her school, and
said that she was quite ‘‘overwhelmed and not quite sure
where to start.’’ Although she originally resisted adopting
the unit on the multi-paragraph essay in her classroom,
she ultimately began to rely on it.
Allison was originally a journalism major, but even-
tually switched to English. She had a plethora of materials
available to her and she took advantage of a variety of
resources around her (e.g., other teachers, the bookroom,
published and teacher-created materials, on-line re-
sources). She enjoyed developing curricular units for her
7th graders, but also relied on the multi-paragraph essay
unit for teaching writing. During the years we observed
her teach, Allison used this unit each year, with some
modifications.
Bill entered teaching as a second career and, unlike
Allison and Nancy, his undergraduate degree was not in
English but in anthropology. Bill had encountered the Jane
Schaffer ‘‘Teaching the Multi-paragraph Essay’’ unit during
his student teaching experience, and had used it with his
9th grade curriculum. Once he began full-time teaching,
he no longer taught 9th grade, however, he still referred to
and spoke highly of the multi-paragraph essay unit
materials. Like Nancy, Bill did not seem to have all that
many resources available to him for teaching his sopho-
more English class, but he was also assigned to teach the
Pacesetter curriculum for seniors, a curriculum that
provided him with multiple resources for teaching.
The table below provides a brief overview for the three
teachers, noting in particular the range of curriculum
materials that were available to them.
We turn now to an analysis of the experiences of the
three teachers, Nancy, Allison, and Bill, as they began their
first year of teaching.
5. Finding and using tools for teaching
As was true of the study of new teachers in Massachu-
setts described by Susan Moore Johnson and her collea-
gues, the teachers in our study were avid consumers of
curriculum materials. They actively sought out materials
from other teachers, from libraries, and from the internet.
On many occasions Nancy commented on the lack of
curriculum available to her, ‘‘I would beg borrow and steal
materials from other teachers. ‘Hey, this is the theme
we’re working on, what literature do you have that reflects
that theme?’’’ The teachers also sought materials that
could give them concrete guidance on how to teach
material to students. Nancy complained, ‘‘I would reach a
point where I find something and I was just so exhausted
by trying to find something that once I found something I
thought, ok, now what do I do with this.’’
The curriculum materials these beginning teachers
used in their first years of teaching seemed to have a
profound effect on how they thought about and taught the
subject matter. Even when they were aware of some of the
limitations of particular curriculum materials, their need
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2020 P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026
for concrete guidance often overcame their reservations.
Once they found materials, they were reluctant to part
with them and, in some cases, used them repeatedly.
The curriculum materials were also sources of learning
for these beginning teachers. We observed them using the
materials to develop ideas for how to organize and teach
literature and writing, as well as gleaning specific
strategies for teaching English. Teachers followed a
particular trajectory in their use of the curriculum
materials. They began by sticking closely to the materials
they had at hand. Then, over time, as they learned more
about both students and curriculum, they began to adapt
and adjust what they did, and their use of the materials
opened up, as they became more willing to play with and
take liberties with the materials.
However, as we explore below, while all of the teachers
learned something from their use of curriculum materials,
their learning remained very much within the imprint of
the original materials. Just as in following someone else’s
footprints on the beach, another walker might impose a
different shape or size to the footprint while following the
path originally charted, so these teachers tended to tinker
with the details of the curriculum materials, while
remaining faithful to the original imprint and direction
of the materials.
5.1. The power of early encounters with curriculum
materials
The curriculum materials first encountered by these
secondary teachers were particularly powerful in shaping
their ideas about teaching language arts as well as their
classroom practice. All of the teachers in our study spent an
enormous amount of time searching out curriculum
materials for their classes. When they found materials that
solved the pressing problem of what to teach, they quickly
latched on to them. The lucky ones worked in supportive
departments, where teachers shared their materials; the
less lucky ones floundered, seizing upon materials that
would help them solve the problem of what to teach. The
more comprehensive the materials, with respect to addres-
sing both what to teach and how to teach it, the more they
solved the problems these beginning teachers faced.
All three of the teachers encountered the multi-
paragraph essay unit early on in their careers, and for all
three, this set of curriculum materials became an indis-
pensable part of their teaching. Bill first encountered the
writing unit during his student teaching experience. The
district hired Jane Schaffer to do a staff development day
with teachers, and Bill and his colleagues were ‘‘hook, line,
and sinker taken’’ with Jane Schaffer and her approach to
the teaching of writing. The district subsequently adopted
the multi-paragraph essay unit for teaching writing at the
9th grade level, the grade level at which Bill did his
student teaching. After graduation, Bill was hired by this
same district but since he no longer taught 9th grade, he
was no longer required to teach the writing unit. He
continued to be enthusiastic about the curriculum,
however, and aspects of this approach continued to be a
part of his practice.
Bill passed along the multi-paragraph essay unit
materials to his peers during the teacher education
program and, for Allison, the unit became a mainstay of
her teaching practice. During the 3 years that we observed
her, she used the unit at least four different times. Her
initial use of the unit occurred in one of her student
teaching assignments, when she had to find something to
teach immediately; the unit plan, with its comprehensive
set of materials and day-to-day lesson plans, solved that
problem for her. Even though the unit was developed for
high school contexts, she decided to try to adapt it for her
middle school students.
I knew that immediately I had to start teaching
something and so it was something that was prepack-
aged, something I didn’t need to do all that much
preparation for. I mean I did, but I didn’t have to create
it from scratch, and so I figured I want to try this, I
want to play around with this and see if I can make it
work for middle school kidsy
Allison continued to use the materials in her first 3 years
of teaching middle school.
Nancy initially resisted using the multi-paragraph
essay unit, arguing that while ‘‘the other teachers teaching
English tend to use Jane Schaffer’s write-by-numbers
technique, my philosophy is that no one writes that way.’’
However, in her first year, with few curricular materials to
draw on, she struggled with how to teach writing to her
students. ‘‘It would be nice if the English department as a
whole had a set curriculum so you knew what you were
supposed to be teaching.’’ As the year progressed and
Nancy continued to flounder, her initial resistance to the
multi-paragraph essay unit materials waned, and she
ultimately decided that they would be useful for her
students.
Although she initially used the materials in her 10th
grade writing class, she also found herself drawing on
them in her 11th grade American literature class.
I’m still not comfortable because there is no curricu-
lum for American Lit. I’m making it up as I go along and
realize that these kids don’t have a lot of the writing
skills that they need. We’re going to start focusing on
writing in the context of literature so we will start
doing a little focus on some of the Jane Schaffer
elements. Yesterday was topic sentence.
Because Nancy was so unsure of what to do in her
American literature classes and because these materials
provide such clear direction and explicit day-to-day plans,
they helped solve Nancy’s problem of what to teach not
only in 10th grade, but in her American literature class as
well.
Although our primary focus here is on the multi-
paragraph essay unit, Jane Schaffer Publications also
produces curriculum materials for novels. As previously
noted, in her 11th grade American Literature class, Nancy
drew on the multi-paragraph essay unit materials she had
been using in her 10th grade class. In a school that
designated only what novels were to be taught at a
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P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026
particular grade level, Nancy struggled with how to teach
the specified novels.
I’m still not very good at teaching novels. How do you
balance discussion, vocabulary, guiding questionsyI
have all these questions about these different novels
and I’ve had no real training in ityso the only thing
that I have as far as how to teach these novels is I get
these Jane Schaffer packets from [a colleague]. ‘Oh, I
have a Jane Schaffer packet on The Scarlet Letter or I
have one on Huck Finn, see what you can do with it.’’’
The Jane Schaffer curriculum materials on particular
novels solved her problem of how to teach. The compre-
hensiveness of the materials gave Nancy a set of tools in
the form of concrete activities she could use in her
classroom. The materials also provided her with a
structure for how to teach writing, a structure she began
to use in other classes as well.
While all of our participants had access to and used the
Jane Schaffer materials, only Bill had the opportunity to
use another significant set of curriculum materials: the
Pacesetter program for 12th grade English. The compre-
hensiveness of this program, as well as the fact that it was
quite congruent with Bill’s own visions for teaching and
learning, meant that it provided tremendous support for
Bill as a first year teacher.
I think that a lot of the Pacesetter philosophy was the
philosophy that I came out of the teacher ed program
with, in terms of how to approach material. That it’s
not book, test, book, test, book, test, chapter, test, unit,
test, final. That students have to experience text to
understand it and do it in a number of different ways
and from different approaches and that’s a lot of what
Pacesetter is about. But [having Pacesetter] certainly
didn’t hurt. They gave me a nice hefty bag of tricks. The
balls that I’m juggling look really good. They’re quality
balls that I’m juggling, you know.
Bill happily used the ideas, materials, and texts that
Pacesetter provided, in large part because the curriculum
made sense to him in terms of what he had learned in
teacher education. In addition, as was true of the multi-
paragraph essay unit, the materials provided him with a
clear sense of what to do with his students, on both a
short- and long-term basis. While Pacesetter offers
teachers opportunities to substitute texts, Bill stayed
quite close to the original recommendations in his first
year of teaching.
Having the Pacesetter materials as a resource allowed
Bill to put his ideas into practice. While his vision for
those classroom practices came originally, in part, from
his teacher education experience, it was his access to
Pacesetter that helped him make his vision of classroom
practices into a reality. For example, when talking about
the assessment used in Pacesetter, Bill referred to the
instructor of his assessment course, a person whom he
very much respected. ‘‘Erin Baker would love the assess-
ments, they’re wholly authentic.’’
2021
5.2. Learning from curriculum materials
In all of these instances, the new teachers grew quite
attached to the curriculum materials they used in their
first year of teaching and tended to adhere relatively
closely to the curriculum materials their first time
through. For example, prepared materials provided Allison
with the ideas for particular lessons and how to teach
them. In doing literature circles, she photocopied the roles
for students out of the Harvey Daniels book on literature
circles and used them verbatim as worksheets for
students. In the multi-paragraph essay unit, she copied
and used the peer review sheets and other handouts for
students exactly as written. Similarly, Bill remained quite
faithful to the Pacesetter curriculum, as originally de-
signed. As he commented to us, ‘‘It’s like going for a test-
drive in someone else’s car.’’ He taught the recommended
texts for a unit, even when he did not particularly care for
them, and despite the designers’ explicit charge to
teachers to substitute texts at their discretion.
Curriculum materials provided all three teachers with
opportunities for trying out new ideas and learning new
pedagogical strategies. Both Allison and Bill used curricu-
lum materials to figure out how to teach particular topics
or skills. In this sense, the materials serve as a source for
new ideas and scaffold for teacher learning. Furthermore,
the materials often gave these new teachers confidence
about teaching particular topics or skills they hadn’t
taught before. For example, Allison taught a unit on
Midsummer Night’s Dream to 7th graders, a unit designed
around the suggested activities and lessons contained in
Shakespeare Set Free, a resource book for teachers on
teaching Shakespeare through performance. Her confi-
dence in tackling Shakespeare with 7th graders was
largely due to the support the Shakespeare Set Free
materials provided. Because she did not have to create
everything from scratch, the prepared materials freed
Allison to experiment more, something she was already
inclined to do.
Similarly, Bill appreciated the support the Pacesetter
curriculum provided—particularly instructional guidan-
ce—and was able to experiment with different classroom
activities. Pacesetter defines ‘‘text’’ broadly and en-
courages the use of multiple types of texts. In particular,
film is one type of text that the curriculum materials
discuss and advocate the use of. Bill talks about his
understanding of film as text. ‘‘The film is as rich a
medium as a book is or a short story is. The writer has
different tools. The director has different tools that they
use, a writer would use an adjective in describing a
character, a director might use a light bulb or a mise-en-
scene which is everything you see in the frame.’’ Bill
acquired this language and way of thinking about
how reading a written work and reading a film are
comparable from his use of the Pacesetter resources.
Working with these curriculum materials expanded his
thinking and understanding of how to look at and think
about ‘‘texts’’.
Bill also benefited from the extensive set of assess-
ments that accompany the curriculum. His own beliefs
about assessment both predisposed him to like Pacesetter,
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2022 P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026
and his use of the curriculum reinforced his beliefs about
the value of authentic assessments. The materials pro-
vided a scaffold for his initial use of classroom assess-
ments; they allowed him to build on what he had learned
in teacher education and gave him the support he needed
to actually enact the types of assessments he had learned
about in his course work. As was true of his use of the rest
of the curriculum, Bill generally used the assessment tools
exactly as they were designed, even though the curricu-
lum suggests modifying them for particular classes.
But the assessments are not mine, the assessments
belong to Pacesetter, and I can do other assessments as
I see fit, but they provide the rubrics-if it was bad, I
wouldn’t do it, but they’ve been so good.
While all of the teachers in our study appreciated the
assessment course they had taken in teacher education
and identified it as one of the most valuable classes they
had taken, only Bill actually implemented the kinds of
authentic assessments they had studied. As Bill himself
acknowledged, he used the Pacesetter materials to do so.
Bill’s comment, that ‘‘they provide the rubrics,’’ suggests
again the value of more comprehensive materials for new
teachers. Without these pre-designed assessments, it is
hard to imagine Bill creating this range of assessments on
his own during this first year of teaching. At the same
time, the materials shaped Bill’s practice in important
ways.
While much of this learning could be categorized as
the development of pedagogical content knowledge—-
knowledge of how to teach the content—there is also
evidence that the curriculum materials influenced tea-
chers’ understanding of some of the concepts and content
they were responsible for teaching. For example, Nancy
talks about learning a clear definition of a ‘‘thesis
statement’’ from the Jane Schaffer materials, a definition
she could use with students. As Nancy told the group:
[JS] saved me when it comes to thesis statementsyI
was having a heck of a time teaching the thesis
statementyand now I can say, o.k. this is a good
thesis statement because she gave me the language I
needed to be able to articulate to students, and now
kids can say, it’s written right into my rubricya
phenomenal thesis statement has a subject and an
opinion on a very sophisticated levelyand then I can
break it down, I have the language and the tools to do
that.’’
As an experienced writer and English major, Nancy
undoubtedly knew how to write thesis statements for
her own papers, but she may not have needed an explicit
definition. Yet as a novice teacher working with students
who are still novices in the arena of writing, having ready
access to definitions can make an important contribution
to her teaching. In fact, all three teachers appreciated
having definitions available that they could then use with
students to describe the elements of an essay. The shared
vocabulary for talking about essays became one of the
tools that proved most useful to the new teachers.
In March of Nancy’s first year of teaching, we observed
her on a day when her students were at the rough draft
stage of writing an essay. While students worked in the
computer lab on their essays, Nancy circulated about the
room doing one-on-one conferences with them about
their essays. Nancy and a student had the following
exchange.
Nancy: The first area of concern is commentary.
Remember, it’s not a summary of the quote.
Student: It explains ity?
Nancy: It explains it, tells me why it’s important y You
just said the same thing twice. Really what you’re
talking about is the long journey and its importance.
Here Nancy used the Jane Schaffer term ‘‘commentary’’
(which she then defined as ‘‘explaining’’ and ‘‘telling why
the quotation is important’’) to try to help the student
develop her idea further, to move beyond simple sum-
mary of the quotation. The term and the definition have
become tools that Nancy employed when trying to help
students develop their writing. In her view, they give her a
specific way to direct students’ attention to the necessary
next steps in their writing.
On the other hand, this focus on the Jane Schaffer
terminology and the more structural elements of the
essay meant that Nancy did not engage in conversation
with this student about what the quotation might actually
mean to her and what her thoughts were about the
quotation, a conversation that might have helped the
student develop her own thinking about what ideas she
was trying to explore in her essay. Indeed, the new
teachers’ learning was very much shaped by the materials.
None of the teachers learned a definition of the essay that
might be described more fluidly, as the unfolding of a set
of ideas, or as an excursion into an author’s thinking.
Instead the teachers, and their students, learned a
definition of the school-based genre of the five-paragraph
essay, a genre that focuses more on form than on content.
In the end, both students’ and teachers’ opportunity to
learn a perspective on writing that focuses on developing
a set of ideas for a particular audience might be limited by
this attention to form over substance.
5.3. Building on and adapting curriculum materials
After teachers used a set of curriculum materials once,
they began to adapt the materials to fit their own
contexts. In their prior work with curriculum materials,
the teachers were learning more instructional possibili-
ties, the array of ways to teach something. As they became
more experienced, the teachers began to adapt the
materials to create their own way of teaching of the
subject matter, using the curriculum materials as a
scaffold that they then built on.
In her second year of teaching, Allison described
tailoring the peer revision worksheets from the Jane
Schaffer materials to focus her students’ attention on
more specific elements of the writing.
The essay unit, I cut out a couple of thingsyI took
some stuff out. I changed the peer revision. I did that
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P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026
much differently. I made a new worksheet that had
specific things that I wanted them to look for,
questions that they had to ask themselves as they
were reading the essay and then questions that they
had to answer and comments that they had to give
their partner. Like specific things that they were
looking foryStrong verbs, dead words like ‘‘nice,’’
‘‘bad,’’ ‘‘good.’’ Fragments and run-ons. So that there
were some specific things that they were looking for
as opposed to just looking at it holistically. (Int. 12/98,
p. 18–19)
Based on her experiences the previous year, Allison
designed a new worksheet to guide the peer revision
process.
Nancy also borrowed ideas from curriculum materials
and used them in new ways. For example, she developed
what she calls a ‘‘fill in the blank essay’’ for her students,
an idea she took from the multi-paragraph essay materi-
als. ‘‘I got that from Jane Schaffer. She has them outline
their essays in that form and I just expanded upon the
form as she had because she would do it for a paragraph
and I did it for a whole essay.’’ Nancy also created an
extensive set of worksheets for her students to walk them
through this assignment; while she used the multi-
paragraph essay unit as a model, she created these
worksheets herself. Nancy also borrowed the idea of
providing students with thesis statements, which they
could choose to prove right or wrong, for another student
writing assignment.
Well, the assignment actually came out of something
that I got out of a Jane Schaffer book, where instead of
saying okay, here’s a question, write a thesis, write a
paper on it, what she does is she gives basicallyya
couple of different thesis statements and says choose
one of the following and prove it right or wrongySo
basically in some form she’s giving them the thesis. So I
took and I structured [this assignment] in a similar
manner, well, the same manner, where I gave them
three different statements about the book and I said
choose one of the statements and prove it correct or
incorrect. And that’s the basis of their paper.
In this instance, Nancy used the curriculum materials as a
model for creating writing assignments for her students.
Just as Nancy and Allison adapted materials the second
time they used them, Bill also made changes to the
Pacesetter curriculum, based on his first year experiences.
In a group interview, he announced that ‘‘Pacesetter is my
starting pointybut my Pacesetter moves as I move.’’ One
important occasion where this happened surrounds an
assessment (i.e., an essay) that is part of one of the
Pacesetter units.
Actually I changed it a little bit this year. [He describes
the trouble his students had reading a Baldwin essay.]
So I came up with some different strategies of having
them read it. They broke up in groups of 2 or 3. They
explored single paragraphs at a time, reading the
paragraph and then discussing what it was about, so
they would have a more solid sense as they moved
2023
through ity. I think it was [more successful] also
because they knew what the assessment was. I had
more success with that than last year, letting them
know what the assessment is at the beginning of the
unit, so they’re working towards it, so they have some
sense of a purpose. It’s not like, here’s an assess-
ment—do it.
So what I did in this particular case, they were writing
this essay, so I broke the essay up for them in three
distinct parts: the event, the reflection on the event,
and its larger significance.
In this instance, Bill applied what he knew about
scaffolding student learning to this particular assignment.
By breaking both the reading and writing into more
manageable chunks, he was able to support students’
comprehension of the passage and their ability to write an
essay of their own. This example represents how Bill was
able to bring what he already knew about teaching to this
curriculum in order to tailor it more effectively to his
students. When he decided that it was working well, he
went to the Pacesetter bulletin board and shared what he
had been doing and why it had been so effective, thus
leaving his own mark on the curriculum materials, and
enabling other teachers to learn from his experience.
6. Limitations to curriculum materials
Curriculum materials play an important role for
beginning teachers, by providing them with tools for
instruction and not forcing them to reinvent the wheel
each time they teach something new. By trying out
instructional approaches suggested by the curriculum
materials, such as writing a thesis statement or peer
editing, the teachers had opportunities to experiment and
to learn from their experimentation. However, what they
learned depended heavily on the nature of the curriculum
materials and the opportunities for learning embedded
within the materials.
All three teachers appropriated approaches to teaching
essay writing from the multi-paragraph essay unit
materials. Yet how they used the materials, and the
opportunities for student learning that followed, were
sometimes problematic. They did not critique the materi-
als ahead of time or to try to tailor them for their
particular needs and purposes; this led to a number of
missed opportunities for both teacher and student learn-
ing. The limitations of curriculum materials, if not
addressed by teachers, thus become limitations in what
students are able to learn from the enacted curriculum.
As noted above, in her efforts to adapt materials from
‘‘Teaching the Multi-paragraph Essay’’ for her own con-
text, Allison created a new guide sheet for peer feedback
that was indeed more specific. Yet just like the model
guide sheet included in the packet, the revised guide sheet
did not focus students’ attention on issues related to
content or meaning. In fact, there is little in the unit plan
as written that would focus teachers’ attention upon
content. The unit focuses almost entirely upon the form of
the essay, rather than on meaning, presenting a forma-
lized, and formulaic, approach to writing. In revising the
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2024 P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026
peer revision worksheets, Allison did not think deeply
about the kinds of revision strategies that are most useful
for students, the different demands of particular genres of
writing, or how to teach towards these. Her revised
guidesheet, like the initial one provided in the curriculum,
asked students to attend to surface features of their essays
rather than engaging in substantive revision. The multi-
paragraph essay unit served the immediate purpose of
helping Allison get started with the basics of teaching
writing, but never provided her with any opportunities to
consider what it means to teach writing in a way that
attends to students’ purposes for writing and their ideas.
In a similar attempt to adapt the multi-paragraph essay
unit materials for her own purposes, Nancy also ran into
the limitations inherent in the materials. As described
above, the materials do in some sense help Nancy learn
about writing assignments and how to construct them,
but, in the instance where she decides to create thesis
statements for her students (having seen something
similar in the materials), the materials do not simulta-
neously provide a framework for Nancy to think about the
trade-offs involved with providing students with ready-
made thesis statements. The materials teach Nancy how
to set up a procedure for helping students complete a
paper rather than a process for helping them think though
the issues in a literary text and then engage in writing
about those issues. While the provision of a thesis
statement provides a form of scaffolding for less experi-
enced writers, the materials do not help Nancy think
through how to engage students in developing their own
ideas about literature as part of the writing process.
Somewhat ironically, Nancy began as an outspoken
critic of the unit, for some of these very reasons. Early on
in our study, she commented:
The older teachersytend to use Jane Schaffer’s write
by number technique, where they do a paragraph
consists of a topic sentence and they write a topic
sentence till they turn blue and then it consists of a
chunk, and a chunk is one point of fact or a concrete
detail to two points of commentary and you do that,
three chunks, and then a concluding sentence, and
there’s your paragraphyit’s like filling in the blanks
yMy philosophy is that no one writes that way. The
way you’re going to become a good writer is to just do
it-writing is not something that you can necessarily
teach, writing is something that you do and then work
with from there.
Many composition scholars would echo Nancy’s original
critique (cf. Elbow, 1998; Wiley, 2000). But her critique,
alone, does not help her solve the problem of how to teach
students to write. The usefulness of the multi-paragraph
essay unit in solving Nancy’s immediate concerns out-
weighs some of what Nancy knows about writing. Having
adopted this approach to teaching the essay, how will
Nancy learn to teach writing in ways that respect the
centrality of ideas? How will both Nancy and her students
outgrow this formula and move beyond the limitations
imposed by adherence to the five-paragraph essay?
In their work, Johnson et al. (2003) explore a similar
dilemma facing another first year teacher. Faced with
pressure from many external forces (e.g., state assess-
ments, high school district standards, departmental
colleagues), the beginning teacher whose practice they
analyze spends a great deal of time teaching her students
the five-paragraph essay and having them practice using
it. Given the pressure to teach such essays, curriculum
materials that provide novice teachers with materials for
teaching the five-paragraph essay may prove irresistible,
even when new teachers understand the limitations of
such an approach.
On the surface, the Pacesetter materials do not seem to
have the same limitations as those we point to in the Jane
Schaffer unit. The materials embody a different concep-
tion of language arts instruction, one that focuses more on
meaning and the inter-textual nature of reading (cf.
Scholes, 1998, 1995). Yet these materials also pose
potential problems to the novice teacher. Like Nancy, Bill
is so taken with the materials and their apparent success
that he is not really prompted to critique them. In spite of
the fact that Pacesetter does encourage teacher revision or
adaptation, Bill chooses not to take this route, in some
instances. Although he does play with the shape and
structure of one of the assessments, in other cases, when
given the opportunity to experiment, he does not. For
example, Bill does not choose to experiment with the texts
he uses, even though the materials encourage this. It is
almost as though the materials are so appealing that he
does not feel any need to adapt them for his particular
students. For Bill, who comes to the profession with an
academic background in Anthropology, rather than Eng-
lish and Literature, this may be especially problematic.
Because his knowledge of the field of literature is slightly
less deep, materials that might help him broaden his
knowledge base of what it means to teach English and
what materials are available for teaching English might
really contribute to his growth as a teacher. But, nothing in
the materials prompts or pushes him to do this sort of
work. So, in the end, his ability to learn from, to use the
materials as scaffolds to further refine and deepen his own
practice, is limited. There is a risk then, also, in materials
that are too comprehensive, that do too much for the
teacher, and do not leave them the motivation to think
critically and subsequently build on and move beyond the
materials, simultaneously deepening their own profes-
sional knowledge.
7. Implications
As Nancy’s original comments suggest, new teachers
are hungry for curriculum—and the guidance it can
provide. High quality, comprehensive curriculum materi-
als can serve as a valuable resource for beginning teachers.
Such materials both solve the immediate problem of what
to teach and provide instructional activities that support
student learning in a content area. In a broad and
somewhat vaguely defined area such as English, well-
designed curriculum materials can also help beginning
teachers understand how the various components of
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026
language arts are connected, and how to turn a vision into
daily lesson plans.
More comprehensive materials, which include more
facets of instruction (e.g. content, instructional ap-
proaches, assessment, etc.) are both more useful to new
teachers and may also provide more learning opportu-
nities. By using the Pacesetter curriculum, Bill not only
learned about how to organize content around broad
themes, he was introduced to both instructional and
assessment strategies that he was able to try out in his
classroom. In Deborah Ball’s descriptions of her encoun-
ters with the Science Curriculum Improvement Study
(SCIC) (Lampert & Ball, 1998), she describes how the
curriculum directed her to engage students in particular
kinds of experiments and then asks open-ended ques-
tions. As she describes:
The teacher’s guide offered me questions to ask and
provided glimpses of what students were likely to say.
It was ‘‘scripted.’’ The scripts offered me handholds for
what I could say and helped me develop new ways of
being in the role of teacher. The guide’s specific
questions helped me find new ways to talk about
mathematics with students (Lampert & Ball, 1998).
The prompts for questions provided her with a window
into students’ thinking that if she had controlled the
discussion more tightly, or not held a discussion at all, she
might not have had. By specifying not just content but
instructional approach, the curriculum provided opportu-
nities to learn about students’ thinking. Math curricula
that ask teachers to teach with problems and then engage
students in discussion around those problems provide
opportunities to learn about students’ mathematical
thinking. However, what teachers are actually able to
glean from these discussions again will depend upon their
own understandings of children and of subject matter. At
the same time, in solving the immediate problems of new
teachers, comprehensive materials may be difficult to
relinquish once teachers have adjusted to them, as was
the case with both Nancy and Allison and their use of the
multi-paragraph essay materials. As noted in Nancy’s case,
the curriculum materials begin to influence teachers’
beliefs about language arts instruction, as well as their
classroom practices.
As our analysis suggests, the curriculum materials
teachers encounter early in their careers can leave a
powerful imprint for classroom practice. In part because
of their immediate needs, new teachers initially may latch
on to curriculum materials uncritically. Even teachers
such as Nancy, who are initially skeptical of an instruc-
tional approach embedded within curricular materials,
may end up adopting these approaches to solve their
problems of what and how to teach. And because
secondary teacher education spends relatively little time
on analyzing and adapting existing curriculum materials,
novice teachers may not know how to adapt materials to
better fit their understandings of how to teach language
arts.
The combination of a lack of exposure to and analysis
of prepared curriculum materials during teacher educa-
2025
tion and the overwhelming nature of the first year of
teaching may make it difficult for teachers to adopt a
more critical stance in their first year of teaching. But no
curriculum is perfect, and new teachers need help
developing a more critical stance if they are to be able
to overcome the inevitable limitations of any curriculum
materials. As our analysis suggests, without guidance, new
teachers may adapt existing curriculum materials without
necessarily addressing problems, whether major or minor,
in the representation of content.
New teachers need opportunities to analyze and
critique curriculum materials in their early years, in the
company of more experienced colleagues. Such curricular
conversations become opportunities for teachers to
deepen their own understanding of the subject matter.
An analysis of the Teaching the Multi-paragraph Essay
unit, for example, could become an opportunity to
examine its assumptions about writing, and the tensions
between a focus on form and structure and an emphasis
on ideas in the teaching of writing (Grossman et al., 2000;
Johnson et al., 2003; Wiley, 2000). Such conversations
during preservice education could provide opportunities
to examine both strengths and limitations in Schaffer’s
approach. Similarly, conversations about a curriculum like
Pacesetter could help teachers understand the underlying
principles of the curricula, as well as its relationship to
other capstone programs such as the 12th grade Interna-
tional Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement curricula,
and the different agendas or issues its creators were trying
to address when they developed the program (cf. Scholes,
1995). Conversations around the curriculum and about
some of the adaptations teachers may need or want to
make can help them think through facets of the subject
matter, as well as the consequences of instructional
decisions for student learning. The goal of conversations
around curriculum materials is not to make teachers
technicians, but to help them understand that curriculum
materials are professional tools, tools that when used
thoughtfully and well can help them with their job. At the
same time, they can begin to understand the political and
historical characteristics of these tools.
If new teachers indeed follow a trajectory in their use
of curriculum materials in the early years of teaching, it
makes sense to build early professional development
opportunities around curricular materials. While oppor-
tunities for professional learning are embedded in all
curriculum materials, new teachers may have neither the
time nor the subject matter background to inquire into the
materials on their own. Such opportunities to learn from
and about curriculum materials should rightfully begin
during teacher education. While the design of individual
curricular units, a common assignment in teacher educa-
tion, is a wonderful way to develop pedagogical thinking
and curricular understanding, teacher educators may
unwittingly rob students of the opportunity to learn more
about the curricular materials they are more likely to be
using in their first years of teaching. Even when such
materials provide problematic representations of the
subject matter, they become the grist for discussions of
ways of adapting or supplementing the materials and, as
such, can serve as valuable scaffolds for teacher learning.
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
2026 P. Grossman, C. Thompson / Teaching and Teacher Education 24 (2008) 2014–2026
Future research could investigate a wider range of
curriculum materials and how different features of these
materials affect teacher learning. In the United States,
there exists a myriad of different curricular materials,
which differ by state, district, and even school, which
makes curriculum-embedded opportunities for teacher
learning a diffuse problem. In countries with a national
curriculum, research might look at how features of these
national curricula affect opportunities for teacher learn-
ing. In some countries, the curricula could be described as
more comprehensive, such as the National Curriculum in
the United Kingdom, which includes the content teachers
will be expected to teach, benchmarks for student learn-
ing, assessments at different stages, as well as approaches
for teaching content (see for example, www.ncaction.or-
g.uk/subjects/english/index.htm). In contrast, other coun-
tries may have national curricula that are less compre-
hensive in terms of instruction and narrower in scope.
While research efforts have tried to connect differences in
national curricula to student achievement, relatively few
efforts have been made to investigate the relationship
between the features of national curricula and teacher
learning.
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