This post comes to us from Tyler Schumacher, a fifth grade teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You can also read it on our Substack. 

My sixth year of teaching, which happened to be my first year teaching fifth grade, was supposed to be the year I finally got social studies right. I’d spent previous years caught in what I now recognize as the curriculum-writing trap. It’s cognitively rewarding work, piecing together units and lessons from scratch, but it’s also incredibly time-intensive. Over time, I learned what Gary and Jon have been arguing on this blog: curriculum design exists as a profession for a reason. It requires a unique skill set, distinct from classroom teaching. Most of us weren’t trained for it, and we certainly weren’t given time in our contracts to do it well.

Doug Lemov captures this distinction nicely in Teach Like a Champion 3.0, where he replaces a chapter on “planning” with one on “preparing.” The shift sounds subtle, but it’s massive. Planning implies building the plane while flying it: coordinating units, sourcing materials, interpreting standards, creating assessments, staying current with research…while also teaching. Preparing assumes we have solid materials in hand and can focus our limited cognitive energy on what actually matters in the classroom: anticipating student thinking, rehearsing key moves, and showing up ready to teach with a firm grasp on the content.

This year I wanted to be preparing. But when I turned to social studies, I found myself right back in planning mode.The materials available to me were written as if I had an hour a day, five days a week for social studies. The reality in elementary school is often, generously, forty-five minutes, three days a week, with competing demands at every turn. I tried to massage what I had into something coherent and rigorous. Predictably, it didn’t go well. Then I discovered the Four Question Method.

4QM Curriculum Is A Game Changer

I’d heard Gary and Jon on the Knowledge Matters Podcast and was intrigued by their framework. When I found the first unit (freely available) of their U.S. History curriculum, I knew immediately I’d stumbled onto something different. This wasn’t simply a collection of activities or a pile of primary sources to sort through. It was a complete, coherent course built around a clear intellectual structure (Four Questions!) and packed with everything I’d been trying to cobble together on my own: spaced retrieval practice, interleaved review, carefully edited primary sources, sentence-level writing exercises, discussion protocols, slide decks, narratives, and daily lesson plans paced for forty-five minutes. The clear structure and high quality teacher-facing materials (specific historical content, written for adults!) meant I could actually prepare instead of plan.

But what’s convinced me most is what’s happened in my classroom. The common wisdom in social studies is that “inquiry-based learning” means students should form opinions and draw conclusions through open-ended exploration. In practice, I’ve found this often means asking kids to opine on things they don’t really understand. Their conclusions end up vague, their reasoning thin. The 4QM curriculum flips this: students learn a story first, then think hard about it. The result is that their thinking has become focused and precise.

The lesson arc on Bacon’s Rebellion was a turning point. My fifth graders found the narrative genuinely surprising to the point of being almost unbelievable. A man named Bacon, involved in a rebellion sparked partly by a dispute over pigs? Fact is stranger than fiction! When we turned to the primary source, Elizabeth Bacon’s letter, students had the context they needed to actually interpret it. Gone were the haphazard guesses at meaning or skimming for keywords. Instead, they were reading carefully to construct understanding, arguing from evidence, and building historical empathy for people whose world was radically different from their own.

And the learning stuck. The takeaway from that unit, that colonial Virginia had become dangerously polarized along class and racial lines, set the stage for later lessons on the French and Indian War, settler attitudes toward Native Americans, and the alliances that shaped the Revolution. My students didn’t just accumulate facts; they built a coherent mental map of early American history.

Preparing Is Better Than Planning

I’m back to preparing now. I read through the upcoming lessons, do the exercises myself, and think about where my students might struggle or surprise me. My working memory is freed to think about the craft of teaching rather than the grind of curriculum design. The predictable structure of the curriculum drastically reduces my own extraneous cognitive load, as I am not spending hours trying to make sense of bloated materials. That’s how it should be.

If you’re a teacher who knows social studies matters but doesn’t quite know how to make it work, give this curriculum a try. It’s the real thing.

-Tyler Schumacher