Why Curriculum Shopping Feels So Hard (Even After Hours of Research)

You’ve spent hours researching. You’ve asked in Facebook groups, scrolled Reddit threads, read every review you can find. And somehow you still don’t know what to buy.

It’s not that you’re overwhelmed by the number of options, although that’s part of it. Every time you ask in a group or online, you get more options to choose from. But it’s not the options that are causing the overwhelm. You’re trying to decide which tool to use, but you don’t have a criteria. And that’s what’s actually causing the problem, because without a criteria, everything looks like a good option.

The Hardware Store Problem

Imagine walking into a hardware store and asking the person at the desk, “What’s the best tool?” They’d look at you like you’re crazy, because the best tool for what?

That’s kind of what we do with curriculum. We put it out there and say, “I need a language arts curriculum for my seventh grader.” And we’re hoping for the magic tool. But we haven’t actually given criteria. Sure, we’ve said it’s for a seventh grader, but there’s so much more to it than that. That’s what’s causing some of the overwhelm: you haven’t narrowed down the criteria.

Criteria creates clarity. And once you have clarity, you can do the equivalent of going into the hardware store and saying, “I have a Phillips screw this size, I need a screwdriver for it.” Instead of asking for the magic curriculum, you can say, “I have a seventh grader, and these are the criteria for a language arts curriculum. Does anybody know a curriculum that matches these criteria?” You have clarity because you have the criteria, and you’re more likely to find what you’re looking for. That makes it way less overwhelming.

What Actually Belongs in Your Criteria

So what criteria do you need? What matters?

Your principles. What do you believe about learning and your family, and what principles are you operating under? Each curriculum has a worldview. Does your worldview match that of the curriculum? Are you looking for a particular worldview to be represented in it? That’s really important.

Your overall approach. If you say, “We’re doing classical education,” that’s a particular approach. If you did Charlotte Mason through the elementary years, now you’re in middle school wondering, are we still doing Charlotte Mason? What does that look like for middle school? Maybe you’re eclectic and pulling from all over the place. That’s good to know too. What is your overall approach to homeschooling? Because the curriculum you choose needs to fit into that.

Your day-to-day methods. It’s fine to say you do a Charlotte Mason approach, but what does that look like on a Tuesday? What does it look like on a Thursday? And then, how does this curriculum fit into that day? Will it actually fit?

Do you see how you’re starting to narrow down the options? The more clarity you get, the easier it is to actually choose the curriculum.

Then Ask the Real Question

Once you know your principles, your approach, and your day-to-day methods, you can ask the question that creates even more clarity than those three combined: what are you trying to build? What are you trying to accomplish? What is the end game here?

Because if you know that, it informs the tool. Just like when you went into the hardware store knowing exactly what type of screw you were trying to screw into the wall, then you know what kind of screwdriver you need.

You’ll have your first three criteria narrowing you down to some curriculum options. Then, to narrow it down even further, you ask what the end goal is. You look at the curriculum choices you have left, maybe only five or six now, and you can say, “If our end goal is X, there are only two options that help us achieve that.” All of a sudden the overwhelm goes away, and it becomes obvious what curriculum you should use to accomplish your goal.