Every teacher knows the “Sunday Scaries,” when the week ahead looms, and the lessons are not ready. For years, that was the rhythm of my professional life, and of many of my colleagues’ livesthree to five hours of weekend planning, every week, not because we weren’t skilled or dedicated, but because our materials weren’t built to carry their share of the load.
I teach 912 social studies at Garden City High School in western Kansas. Our district faces challenges that will be familiar to many administrators: a rural setting where teacher recruitment draws from across the country, a student population that includes significant numbers of English language learners and students requiring specialized instruction, and the perpetual tension between what rigorous instruction demands and what any finite school day can hold.
I also serve as a PLC lead, where I sit at the intersection of curriculum, teacher practice, and student outcomes every day. It is one of its most consequential decisionsone that shows up in teacher retention, PLC effectiveness, and student achievement.
In Kansas, where the state Department of Education has made high-quality instructional materials a cornerstone of its school improvement model, currently focused on ELA, math, and science, the question of what those principles look like in social studies is one our field urgently needs to answer.
The wrong calland what it cost us
Years before I moved to the high school, our secondary team faced a curriculum readoption decision. They chose a platform that looked polished, what I call “bling and glam,” that lands well in an adoption committee meeting, but once teachers were in classrooms with it, the infrastructure wasn’t there. Usability and embedded teacher support were largely absent.
Teachers who had relocated to Garden City were spending their off-hours building what a well-designed program should have provided. The planning burden got worse.
When I moved to the high school in 2021 and had access to a platform we had previously passed over, the contrast was immediate.
A flashy interface is not a curriculum. What teachers and students need is something coherent, scaffolded, and standards-aligneddesigned to give educators time back. This is the foundation of what high-quality instructional materials are supposed to deliver.
When teachers don’t have enough time
Research on high-quality instructional materials consistently shows that well-designed materials reduce the planning burden on teachers in ways that compound over time and improve student outcomes.
In a district like ours, recruiting nationally because local pipelines can’t meet demand, time poverty compounds fast. When lessons are planned, standards are mapped, and resources are ready, teachers can invest their energy in the work that requires a human being in the room.
This only works if the curriculum serves every kind of teacher. A curriculum flexible enough to accommodate all of them without sacrificing coherence is the only kind worth adopting.
A Shared Foundation Enables PLCs
Having the same curriculum and actually using it are not the same thing. When teachers work from heavily adapted materials, PLCs become logistics sessions.
High-quality frameworks treat implementation support as inseparable from material quality, and our experience confirms it. Once our secondary team was properly trained on a shared platform, teachers who had been running parallel versions of the same course finally had productive conversations about differentiation, where students were stuck, and what the work showed. We stopped comparing lesson plans and started examining outcomes.
Every student is a new researcher
I call my students new researchers. They are learning how to ask questions, evaluate sources, weigh evidence, and connect the past to the present. N
ew discoveries, ongoing global events, and shifting interpretations mean the curriculum has to evolve continuously, and when changes are flagged transparently, connecting history to current events becomes something the curriculum supports rather than something teachers manufacture alone.
Our state competencies require students to work from multiple sources. When vetted, grade-appropriate resources are already built into the curriculum; the significant time teachers would spend curating from the open internet goes back to the actual work of critical thinking.
Student dignity is the other half of this. Before built-in differentiation, serving diverse learners meant visible sorting, the “yellow paper, blue paper, green paper” approach, where every student could see who received which version.
Social studies can’t wait
For our social studies adoption, we returned to the Teacher’s Curriculum Institute, a core curriculum our district had used for nearly two decades.
Kansas has done important work making high-quality instructional materials a pillar of school improvement. Social studies isn’t formally in that framework yet, but the principles are identical, and the stakes are just as high.
We learned the cost of getting it wrong. We learned that when the curriculum is the right fit, teachers stop compensating for it and start doing the work they came into the classroom to do. The students in Garden City who are becoming researcherslearning to read history as something alive and always unfoldingare the outcome of that decision.
The image above was created with AI.
