“Teachers are the best people to design and decide curriculum.”

While that may sometimes be true, the vast majority of teachers in America were trained in colleges of education like mine that never once broached the topic of cognitive overload. Most trained us in teaching methods that “felt good“ but lacked serious research to support their effectiveness. These programs all but dismissed the importance of phonics, spelling, and explicit vocabulary instruction. They never mention the words retrieval or long-term memory, while encouraging us to be “guides on the side”, facilitating learning rather than content experts providing clear instruction.

So, while some teachers have taken it upon themselves to delve into the research and discover what cognitive science says about how students learn and apply that when teaching in their classrooms, the majority of teachers are still unaware.

Yes, classroom teachers spend the most time with their students, but that alone does not qualify them to design or decide the curriculum their students are taught. That’s an uncomfortable truth that needs to be said.