The Curriculum Isn’t (Necessarily) the Problem. Our Definition of Fidelity Is.

By Kate Roberts and Maggie Beattie Roberts, authors of Unboxing the Curriculum

It’s year two of the adoption. Maybe year three. The curriculum was chosen carefully – committees, vendor demos, alignment to standards, a board presentation with slides. The PD happened. The boxes arrived. Walkthroughs show that teachers are using the materials. And yet here you are, somewhere between your weekly leadership meeting and an 11pm email, looking at scores that haven’t moved the way you thought they would, listening to teachers who are frustrated in ways you can’t quite address, and noticing that someone on your team has started using the word fidelity in a tone that’s making everyone tense.

The answer that often follows is steady and familiar: the curriculum works. The problem must be implementation. Push harder. Monitor more closely. Tighten expectations around fidelity. Provide more training.

You know in your gut this isn’t quite right. You also know that anything goes isn’t the answer either. You’ve seen what happens when classrooms run as islands, each with its own expectations and lessons, where students spend their energy figuring out how to do school instead of learning. So, you’re stuck between two answers that both feel wrong, and the conversation has nowhere to go.

In our upcoming book, Unboxing the Curriculum, we suggest that the conversation is stuck because the word fidelity is doing too much. And until we make it do less, we can’t move forward.

Fidelity to What, Exactly?

When we hear fidelity, our minds usually go to faithfulness, integrity, and keeping promises. Implementing a curriculum involves a kind of fidelity. We are not saying that everyone should go off in thirty different directions. We lose the drumbeat of learning across a grade level or a department when teachers and students aren’t walking a similar path.

But fidelity exists on a continuum. On one end, it means rooted faithfulness to a shared set of commitments or values. On the other end, it means strict adherence, accuracy, and exactness. These are very different things. And in most curriculum conversations, few have stopped to name which definition they mean.

When we ask, “Are you implementing with fidelity?” – what are we asking? Are we asking whether teachers are following the published sequence of lessons in order? Are we asking whether they’re using the publisher’s protocols and materials to create consistent teaching? Are we asking whether students are growing in the specific skills the curriculum was adopted to address? These are three different questions, and they require three different kinds of leadership.

What scholars in implementation research have been saying for years (Century et al., 2010) is that our field often lacks a shared definition of “fidelity of implementation.” We need clarity about what stays fixed and what flexes. Good curriculum can provide thoughtfully designed texts, tasks, questions, and learning progressions that help create coherence across classrooms. But coherence is not the same thing as uniformity, and implementation requires clarity about what deserves consistency and where professional judgment remains essential.

We name the non-negotiables – the throughline students should experience everywhere – and we leave room and PD time for teacher responsiveness.

What Fidelity Can Cost When We Define It Too Narrowly.

Here’s what we’ve seen happen, again and again:

Everyone learns the curriculum quickly when teachers strictly follow a specific sequence of lessons inside a specific sequence of units. There is a kind of coherence that gets installed fast, and this has benefits that can appear deeper than they are.

Because over time, something else happens.

Teachers start following the sequence and some kids do fine. But there are many students who struggle to keep up, who jump through the hoops of the unit without internalizing any of the skills. Who shut down. Who don’t like school. Who perform school well but do it for the grades only.

And the teachers who notice this, start to feel the friction, and have to choose whether to speak up and be the squeaky wheel at the end of the department meeting when everyone wants to go home. Maybe they are afraid of not being heard when they raise concerns. So, they either quietly make the adjustments their kids need and keep it hidden, or they stop adjusting and watch their own classrooms feel less and less like teaching. Neither builds a reflective, supported teaching culture that helps everyone flourish.

This is the part many implementation conversations fail to address. Strict adherence to a sequence of prescribed lessons can choke responsiveness, innovation, and engagement in the very classrooms where we most need them.

What’s Worth Being Faithful To

So, let’s name what’s worth being faithful to.

If fidelity matters – and we believe it does – then the first leadership question isn’t whether teachers are implementing with fidelity. It’s fidelity to what?

It feels totally right, for example, to choose a small set of skills and content that we agree kids should be able to integrate and use more independently and powerfully by the end of a unit. And it makes sense that, as teachers, we should be held accountable to the effectiveness of our teaching around those things.

But instead of asking everyone to “follow the curriculum with fidelity,” perhaps we can say: one thing this unit focuses on is teaching students to infer main ideas in nonfiction texts, and this is what we will be tracking in our classrooms. Let’s think together about how this published unit approaches that work and what else we know helps students gain proficiency in this important work.

It’s the difference between asking, “Did you do lesson number three?” and asking, “How is the core work of the unit going for your kids? Are you seeing growth? How do you know?”

Similarly, it’s worth being faithful to practices – say to shared progressions and rubrics of what growth looks like, to a small set of strategies everyone in the building teaches when they teach a given skill, to common language and routines that students recognize as they move from class to class and grade to grade. When students move through your school and encounter the same formula for inferring main ideas in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade – with growing sophistication, in shared language – they build momentum that no single great teacher could build alone.

Where to Invest

No curriculum, however well-designed, can change this truth:

A textbook will not teach your students. Artificial intelligence will not teach your students. A think tank will not teach your students. Curriculum will not teach your students. Teachers will.

That doesn’t mean curriculum doesn’t matter. Good curriculum gives teachers access to thoughtfully designed texts, tasks, questions, and learning progressions. But curriculum is a tool. Learning ultimately happens through the expertise of a teacher making decisions with students in real time.

At the end of the day, if teachers don’t know how to teach the content and skills of a unit deeply – across different abilities, students, texts, and assignments – then most kids will perform at their current level without seeing a path toward growth. They’ll get some practice, but only the most motivated or talented will thrive. This is the ceiling no curriculum can lift on its own, no matter how faithfully it’s implemented.

Which means the best move as a leader isn’t simply to push for tighter fidelity to the sequence. It’s to invest in the expertise our teachers need to coach growth around the set priorities.

Three Commitments You Can Make This Year

You do not have to back away from your adoption to make this shift. You also don’t have to throw out fidelity as a concept. You just have to be more precise about it.

Three commitments to consider:

Define fidelity precisely. Name three to five things that stay consistent across classrooms in your district. Name them as practices and progressions, not as lessons and activities. Publish them. Model them in professional development.

Protect time for teachers to surface the priorities inside each unit. Not to rewrite the curriculum. To read it carefully and identify what matters most for the students they teach.

Invest in teacher expertise around those priorities. Through coaching, through shared toolkits teachers can use across any unit, through good professional development not tied exclusively to a product. Product training can help teachers understand a curriculum. Building expertise around teaching and learning requires ongoing coaching, collaboration, and support.

The Curriculum Is the Beginning

The unit you adopted is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.

What comes next is the work that only you and your team can do: deciding what deserves fidelity, naming it clearly, and building the capacity in your teachers to honor those commitments while teaching the students in front of them.

That’s the version of fidelity that will move the work where you need it to go.

Kate Roberts and Maggie Beattie Roberts are co-founders of K & M Literacy, a literacy consulting practice that works with districts and schools to bridge research-aligned instruction with responsive, sustainable teaching practice. Their book Unboxing the Curriculum is out this year. Reach out to talk about what fidelity looks like in your district.

Related book

Unboxing the Curriculum
Personalize the Program, Center Your Students, and Teach with Agency

This book offers a field guide for charting a better course through unit planning. With real classroom examples alongside a robust appendix full of practical use-tomorrow tools, you’ll navigate curricula without losing sight of the students in front of you. 

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