That’s the shift worth working toward. Not a looser curriculum, but a more transparent one. One where students understand the story well enough to have a stake in how it unfolds.
A few years ago, I was working with a curriculum team mid-unit when a student’s question stopped the room. It wasn’t off-topic exactly — it was too on-topic. It cut straight to the heart of what the unit was supposedly about and exposed the fact that the curriculum, as written, didn’t have room for it.
The teacher handled it beautifully in the moment. But afterward, she said something that stuck with me: “I had to set it aside because there was no space for it.”
That’s the tension Riane Eisler names in Tomorrow’s Children when she describes the need for education to prepare students for a “contingent universe” — one where outcomes aren’t predetermined and where students are invited to be conscious participants in shaping what comes next. Her argument isn’t for an unstructured classroom. It’s for a curriculum that treats the future as genuinely open, rather than a story that’s already been written.
If we believe that — and I do — then our curriculum can’t be a rigid script. It needs breathing room. Space for what I think of as the emergent narrative: the question a student raises that reframes the whole unit, the local issue that makes an abstract concept suddenly urgent, the connection no one planned for.
In practice, this means building structures that honor co-creation without abandoning coherence. The Pitch-to-Pitch Model does this well. Students know the story they’re inside — the essential questions, the arc of the unit — but they also have moments where they can make a pitch: propose an investigation, suggest a different angle, take the inquiry somewhere personal. They’re not just following the map. They’re helping to draw it.
The storyboard makes this possible, because when the big picture is visible and accessible, students can see where there’s room to contribute. They can move from compliance — doing what’s asked — to genuine discovery.
That’s the shift worth working toward. Not a looser curriculum, but a more transparent one. One where students understand the story well enough to have a stake in how it unfolds. If you’re ready to start that conversation, reach out. I’d love to think through it with you.
A few questions worth sitting with:
- Where in your current curriculum do students have genuine agency — not just choice, but real influence over the direction of the learning?
- What would it look like to build in one structured “pitch moment” per unit, where students could propose a direction, an inquiry, or a product?
- Think about a time a student asked a question that you had to set aside because there wasn’t room for it. What would have needed to be different for you to say yes?
