Why Doesn’t Curriculum Improve Faster? (And what we can learn about curriculum from evolution)

In a previous post, I mentioned that the Teachur platform can facilitate curricular evolution. Let me elaborate on that a bit here.

Education is different from what it was a generation ago. But not terribly so. One reason is that there really is no incentive for professors to improve their teaching materials. They don’t get any bonus or recognition for a course with particularly high quality materials. There is no place in their tenure application that could directly assess this. The closest they get would be indirectly through a student evaluation — but the student wouldn’t have a frame of reference to compare.

There are 3 necessary and sufficient conditions for evolution by natural selection:

Variation in characters in a reproducing population. That is, individuals in a reproducing population must differ.

Heredity — so like resembles like, or the offspring resemble parents, or the differences or the variation in individuals can be passed on to their offspring. The differences must be heritable. So it can’t be lipstick color, or pierced ears.

Variation of fitness, That is, the heritable trait is better fitted, or adapted to the environment. Or the heritable trait provides a competitive edge. So the likelihood increases that they produce proportionally more offspring.

Of course, it’s not a perfect analogy, but I think it is telling to look at curriculum through the lens of evolution.

If we look at Variation in characters, we can see that there can be wide variation in curriculum in any given field, because professors have a lot of leeway, and, for the most part, there really isn’t a lot of scrutiny, especially after the first time a course is taught.

Heredity: For the most part, courses resemble the courses that were taught at the institution previously. When a professor is going to teach a new course, she’ll often first be directed to the syllabus from the last time the course was taught. Or she’ll teach how she learned in related undergraduate and graduate courses.

So, for curriculum, we have met the first two conditions of evolution: variation in individual courses in a reproducing population, and the new courses resemble the prior courses, whether from the previous teacher who taught, or from the teacher’s experience learning the material. What we don’t really have is variation in fitness, or competition — getting handed a syllabus, or teaching what you were taught, or even googling syllabi online is not the kind of competition where the strongest instructional materials rise to the top over time. What gets taught is not based on the most fit for the subject matter, but based on convenience, habit, or tradition.

I also like the analogy of evolution because one of the fears people express when we talk about curricular materials competing is that the curriculum becomes homogenous. But evolution provides a model for refinement, diversity and fitness and adaptation for lots of different environments. We think the same thing can hold for curriculum. Curriculum will evolve and improve as different objectives, assessments, and learning materials compete. And lots of different curricula can thrive as they are adapted to different environments, rather than just adopted out of convenience.

But there hasn’t been a platform for curricular objectives, assessments, and learning materials to compete. There have just been lots of different platforms with their own materials, but no competition. A teacher may access a syllabus at a conference or online, but in order to compete, we need more than that. Like a system where students and teachers can rate materials, and where we can learn through assessments which materials are the most effective and efficient.

What do you think? Does this analogy work? Or is it missing an important piece? Please let me know in the comments. Or connect with me on Twitter, My site, LinkedIn, or reach me at: ben@teachur.co.