Whose Development Is the Curriculum Built For?

Essay Four in the series Fundamental to What?

I've spent a good part of my career running tennis centers, which means I've spent a good part of my career trying to make things orderly. You need enough players to fill the courts and enough coaches to teach them, on a schedule that works for families and staff. Parents want to know what their kids are learning, and coaches need enough consistency that a kid isn't told one thing by one coach and the opposite by another. Those are real responsibilities, and I've carried all of them.

I've also spent enough time on court to know that children don't develop on the schedule we pin to the bulletin board. One kid figures something out in ten minutes that another wrestles with for three months. A player can look stuck for weeks and then show up doing something he couldn't do the week before. The institution needs predictability, and the learner doesn't supply it.

So we build programs. We sort players into groups and progressions, and we write standards that coaches can teach and parents can follow. If we do it well, families know what they're paying for. Somewhere along the way, though, it gets easy to lose track of whose problem the curriculum was supposed to solve. I've been on both sides of that, and plenty of times I was on both sides at once.

Power Bands sat on both sides. I wrote in the last essay about the program Kris Soutar and I built at Samuell Grand, and I liked it then and still do. The bands gave kids something concrete to work toward. Instead of being told they were getting better, they could show it and get recognized for it. The bands also made the organization's work easier. A coach knew what to look for, and a parent could follow the progression without knowing much about tennis. None of that was accidental. We designed it that way. The kids got one kind of benefit and the organization got another, and a system that serves the institution well doesn't automatically serve every child well.

The play-first program from the second essay, where kids made up their own games and asked for instruction when they wanted it, lasted about a year before its funding ran out. A version of Power Bands is in use today. They weren't built for the same job, and I can't say the difference between them explains why one lasted and the other didn't. Still, a good idea about development has to survive the institution that delivers it, and not every good idea does.

Every decision this series has looked at ends up inside an organization sooner or later. An instruction becomes something coaches are expected to teach, and a preferred order becomes a progression. The progression turns into an assessment, and the assessment becomes the way we sort players, talk to parents and decide whether the program is working. By the time a decision has traveled that far, questioning it gets hard. The coach who wants to teach something differently looks inconsistent, and the player who doesn't fit the progression becomes an exception to be managed.

The administrator has to think about what happens if every coach and every family starts making different calls. I understand that administrator. I've been him. You can't run a tennis center as if every lesson were an independent experiment. You have to hire and train people and set expectations for their work, and you need some way to know that what happens on Court Two resembles what you promised the family at enrollment. Without that, things get chaotic, and kids are usually the ones who pay for it. Institutions need structure. What concerns me is the point where the structure we need to run the place starts deciding what we believe the child needs to learn.

Look at how we group players. Age is easy to establish, and we can make playing level look nearly as simple once we've built tests for it. With the groups in place we can assign courts, build schedules and set tuition, and a kid who fits one of those groups makes the whole operation run smoothly. A kid who doesn't fit makes it harder. Maybe he's far ahead in one part of the game and well behind in another, or he's ready for the next level before the next level is offered. Sometimes we adjust the program for him. Sometimes we tell him he isn't ready, and sometimes that's true. Other times it means the program doesn't have a place for him, and those are two very different statements.

A player can be ready for something the institution isn't ready to provide.

I've made plenty of those calls myself. There are only so many courts and coaches, and a perfectly individualized program sounds wonderful until somebody has to schedule it and explain what it costs. Even then, a kid still has to learn to work alongside other people, which is part of development too. I don't think the answer is to pretend the constraints aren't there. The answer is to stop confusing them with developmental truths.

Telling a family that a particular experience isn't available because the program can't provide it is disappointing, but it's honest. Telling them their child needs three more stages before he's ready, when the real reason is that we have nowhere else to put him, takes the institution's limitation and hands it to the kid. Children and parents build their understanding of development around the explanations we give them. A kid who hears he isn't ready will reasonably decide something about him falls short, and sometimes all we've done is describe a scheduling problem as a personal one.

In the last essay I questioned whether earning the bands showed that a player could solve the changing problems of a match. I also understand why we built them the way we did. A rally reaches ten or it doesn't, and the serve pattern comes off nine times out of twelve or it doesn't. The coach can make the call and the program can record it, which is enormously useful in a busy organization. It's much harder to measure whether a player is reading the game better or making decisions without a coach's help. That kind of change rarely shows up on assessment day. It may appear in a match three weeks later and be gone the next weekend, and it takes watching across time and settings to see it at all.

An institution naturally drifts toward what it can measure consistently. If we aren't careful, we start treating what we can measure as more important simply because we can measure it, and before long the assessment is shaping the curriculum. Coaches teach toward whatever gets evaluated, and parents read the resulting progress as proof that development is on track. Everyone is doing what the system asks, and by its own measures the system is working.

When we call something fundamental, the question this series keeps coming back to is, fundamental to what? Sometimes the honest answer is the child's development. Sometimes it's the smooth running of the program. There's nothing shameful in the second answer, because programs have to run, and a program that can't run doesn't help anyone. But it's a different answer, and the one thing we shouldn't do is tell a kid he isn't ready when what we really mean is that we aren't.