At the UFT’s invitation, a group of city teachers has been gathering to develop recommendations for better curriculum implementation in the new year.

After teachers struggled throughout the fall with late, missing or inappropriate curricula that were billed as aligning with Common Core Learning Standards but were rife with problems, it became clear that the Department of Education needed to make major changes.

UFT Vice President for Education Catalina Fortino said the task force, which has met twice so far, agreed on three main points: 1. new curriculum must be quality-tested by classroom teachers rather than textbook publishers; 2. there must be support and flexibility in how curriculum is introduced; and 3. it must be tailored to meet varying student needs.

The teachers were not impressed with any of the materials that publishers have produced so far.

“There is really nothing out there of good quality,” said Judith Glazer, the chapter leader and a lead math teacher at IS 125 in Woodside and a member of the task force. DOE-sanctioned curricula by commercial publishers such as Pearson PLC are just recycled versions of older curricula, she claimed.

Instead, the teachers said, they need curricula that meet students where they are and teach the skills they are missing. The new materials “don’t speak to our current students,” noted Glazer. “We need a transition curriculum.”

She and others on the task force said lessons need to be broken down as they are often too long for a 45-minute teaching period and do not scaffold learning. They must also be adapted for students with disabilities, gifted and honors students, and English language learners.

Brian Campbell, a history teacher at Grover Cleveland HS in Ridgewood, said flexibility was a key theme of the conversations, especially among teachers who were working with scripted curricula that didn’t meet their students’ needs. For high school teachers, he said, the lack of structured, Common Core-aligned curricula was a larger problem. In high schools, he said, Regents-preparation curricula do not reflect Common Core skills.

But he said the most important part of the meetings was simply the shared conversation among educators from different schools.

“Our opinions were heard and respected,” Campbell said.