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

If you’re reading this, you probably have a unit plan nearby―stuffed in a binder, buried in a shared drive, or gleaming from a fresh box of published curriculum. There’s solid content in there. Maybe even great content. But if you’ve found your way to this book, something isn’t lining up: the work doesn’t fit your students, gaps remain, or last year’s units didn’t deliver.

All too often, curriculum shortfalls are chalked up to implementation. But in Unboxing the Curriculum, author Kate Roberts, with Maggie Beattie Roberts, argues that it’s often the road map that needs some work. The path doesn’t lead where it should, and sometimes, there be dragons.

This book offers a field guide for charting a better course through unit planning. In its pages, you’ll learn to:

• see your curriculum clearly
• set smart priorities
• tailor units to your classes
• monitor for equity, engagement and relevance
• build supplemental materials that truly support your students.

With real classroom examples and team-friendly protocols that apply to any subject, grade level, or program alongside a robust appendix full of practical use-tomorrow tools, you’ll navigate prepackaged or scripted curricula and prewritten units without losing sight of the students in front of you. The result? A path learners can take to their destination.

Like a map well marked, Unboxing the Curriculum plots a direct route through mandates and box sets right to the hearts of the students in front of you.

Kate Roberts is an education consultant, author, and speaker known for her practical, humorous approach and deep respect for the art and labor of teaching. With decades of experience as an eighth-grade teacher, literacy coach, and consultant, she brings classroom-tested strategies and compassionate insight to every aspect of her work. She is the author of A Novel Approach, which offers a path for balancing whole-class texts with student choice reading, and The Heart of Fiction, a resource-rich guide that helps students analyze character, theme, and craft. She has also co-authored (with Christopher Lehman and Maggie Beattie Roberts respectively) Falling in Love with Close Reading, a fresh take on close reading instruction, and DIY Literacy, a guide for building powerful teaching toolkits. Kate’s work celebrates the creativity, intellect, and heart that teachers bring to their classrooms. She champions literacy practices that are meaningful and manageable―designed to honor both the humanity of students and the professionalism of those who teach them.

Maggie Beattie Roberts began her teaching career in the heart of Chicago before moving to New York City and completing graduate studies as a Literacy Specialist at Teachers College, Columbia University. Today, she is a national literacy consultant, author, and highly sought-after professional learning facilitator. Known for her ability to build strong relationships with teachers and school leaders, Maggie thrives working side-by-side with educators. Maggie is passionate about supporting teachers in creating inclusive classrooms that meet the needs of all students and is the coauthor of DIY Literacy: Teaching Tools for Differentiation, Rigor, and Independence and the upcoming Foundational Skills for Writing.