A student-facing curriculum document isn’t just a format choice. It’s a signal: this learning experience was designed with you in mind.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a question Riane Eisler asks in Tomorrow’s Children — a book I keep returning to because it refuses to let curriculum off the hook.
She’s not writing about lesson design or pacing guides. She’s writing about something bigger: what it means for students to actually be partners in learning, not recipients of it. She distinguishes between two fundamentally different approaches to education — one built on control and compliance, the other on partnership and co-creation. And at the heart of her argument is a simple but unsettling question: are we teaching children to fit into a predetermined story, or are we inviting them to help write it?
That word — partners — is doing a lot of work. Because partnership implies that students have a stake in the story. It implies they aren’t just receiving information; they are inside the experience, navigating it, shaping it.
This is exactly why I believe curriculum needs a storyline.
When we storyboard a course, we aren’t just sequencing topics. We’re identifying what students will grapple with, what questions will pull them forward, what challenges they’ll have to work through to get somewhere meaningful. We’re casting them as the protagonist rather than the audience. That shift changes everything — the language we use, the decisions we make about what to include, the way a unit opens and closes.
A student-facing curriculum document isn’t just a format choice. It’s a signal: this learning experience was designed with you in mind.
If your curriculum is still written primarily for teachers and administrators — full of standards language and coverage lists — it may be doing a great job of documenting what you’re required to teach. But it isn’t yet inviting students into the adventure.
That’s where the work begins. And it’s some of my favorite work to do alongside teams. Whether through a workshop, a virtual strategy session, or an ongoing consulting partnership, I love helping schools make that shift — from curriculum as documentation to curriculum as invitation. If this resonates, I’d love to connect.