Ask a teacher what they need, and the answer will likely be uncomplicated.
More time. More support. The ability to actually teach.
These are not unreasonable requests. And yet, for a growing number of educators, they feel out of reach. The reasons for this are not simple, and school leaders know this better than anyone.
Teacher burnout and dissatisfaction have been accumulating for decades, shaped by policy decisions made far above the school building. This distance between policies and the impact on-the-ground can make administrators feel helpless. But that complexity can become its own trap. When a problem feels too large and too structural to touch, it is easy to conclude that nothing a school leader does at the building or district level will matter much.
This is simply not true.
School leaders can control the curriculum they implement, and paying closer attention to the design of that curriculum can pay off tremendously. It turns out that how curriculum is built and what it asks of teachers has a more direct effect on teacher workload, satisfaction, and retention than is commonly recognized. This is not a peripheral issue. It is a lever that district leaders hold, and one that is rarely treated as the priority it deserves to be.
This post is about that lever: the invisible labor that fragmented curriculum transfers onto teachers, what it actually costs, and what a different curricular design approach makes possible.
Invisible Labor
Teachers in the United States work an average of 49 hours per week, ten hours above their contracted hours [1]. Recent survey data also shows that 88% of teachers report working between 41 and more than 80 hours per week [2].
That gap between contracted time and actual hours worked is where the real story lives.
Some of those hours go to grading, to parent communication, to administrative documentation. Those are largely unavoidable parts of the job. But a significant portion goes to something that receives far less attention: the work of making curriculum coherent.
When a core curriculum arrives fragmented — when vocabulary instruction is somewhere else, when grammar lives in a supplemental book, when the differentiation scaffolds are a separate download, when formative assessments are on a screen and disconnected from the lesson — teachers fill those gaps. They spend planning periods, and often their own freetime, doing the coherence work that the curriculum itself should have done.
This workload may be hidden, but its impacts — on teacher morale and cognitive load, on students’ learning experiences, on school climate — are real and cumulative.
Fragmentation Is a Design Problem, With Real Costs
The piecing-together of curriculum is not a new phenomenon, but it has intensified significantly as the supplemental materials market has expanded alongside the adoption of platform-based instruction.
The scale of this fragmentation deserves special attention.
Here is part of the problem: Core curriculum is selected through formal, multi-year district review with a structured process with clear evaluation criteria. However, supplemental materials follow an entirely different path: often chosen ad hoc by individual schools or even individual teachers, with shorter contracts and far less coordination with the existing core curriculum and teachers’ own practices. According to the Center for Education Market Dynamics, the result is that across just 1,700 districts, hundreds of different supplemental products are in use in a single subject area in grades K–8 alone [3]. That asymmetry — a handful of vetted core programs and hundreds of supplemental ones, selected by different people with different priorities — creates deep fragmentation that teachers are ultimately responsible for piecing together.
The connection between curriculum fragmentation and teacher frustration is not difficult to trace.
This frustration also has material consequences for districts. Research consistently links unmanageable workloads to teacher burnout, and burnout to attrition. To put it simply: when teacher frustration isn’t met with tangible solutions, they leave the classroom altogether, and at increasing rates. Ultimately, districts shoulder the financial burden of teacher turnover, to the tune of an estimated $2.2 billion per year across U.S. districts [4].
When a curriculum is fragmented, the assembly cost is invisible on a budget line. But districts pay for this fragmentation in planning time wasted, in teacher energy depleted, in yet another teacher’s decision to call it quits.
What Teachers Are Actually Asking For
The request is simple: teachers are asking to teach. They are asking to spend their time on the work that only they can do.
There is an important distinction between the work that belongs to a teacher — reading a room, following an unexpected thread in a discussion, noticing that a particular student is disengaged and needs more support — and the work that belongs to a curriculum: connecting texts to ideas, ideas to writing tasks, writing tasks to language instruction. The second category is design work. It should happen before the teacher opens the lesson plan, not during it.
When curriculum arrives whole, teachers not only earn time back, but they also get the mental space to be present, to watch what is happening in the room instead of managing what is happening on the screen. To teach, rather than to administer.
This is what rigorous, coherent curriculum actually means in practice. Not more content, more programs, more resources, but better-designed content that does its structural job so the teacher can teach.
What This Looks Like in Practice
At Inquiry by Design, instructional coherence is not a marketing claim. It is a design principle we hold ourselves to in the creation of every unit plan, every lesson, every assessment.
Our grades 6–12 English Language Arts curriculum is built so that reading, writing, discussion, language development, and scaffolded support work together in every lesson, not as separate activities managed across separate systems, but as one integrated experience. Teachers do not source supplemental vocabulary instruction or locate differentiation resources for multilingual learners. Those elements are embedded in the lesson itself, by design, from the start.
This is what we mean by Connected by Design. It is not a tagline. It is a description of a deliberate design choice that builds the coherence in, rather than ask teachers to create it.
The curriculum does its job. Teachers get to do theirs.
Teaching has always required more than content delivery. It requires judgment, relationship, responsiveness; it’s the ability to read what is happening in a room and make decisions that no algorithm can make. That is the work that drew most teachers into the profession. It is the work that keeps the best of them there.
That is what taking back teaching actually looks like: the curriculum does its job, so teachers can do theirs.
This is the second post in The Connected Learning Project, a blog series from Inquiry by Design. Connected learning isn’t just a framework we write about — it’s the design principle behind everything we build. Inquiry by Design is a print-first English Language Arts (ELA) and Spanish Language Arts (SLA) curriculum provider for grades 6–12, serving 40+ districts and nearly 500,000 students nationwide.
1: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-16.html
2: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-11.html
3: https://www.cemd.org/two-markets-one-classroom-how-core-and-supplemental-materials-shape-student-learning/
4: https://all4ed.org/press_release/teacher-attrition-costs-united-states-up-to-2-2-billion-annually-says-new-alliance-report/