I will always remember a conversation with my last division head who remarked that enacting change in a school is like steering the Queen Mary. A slow, laborious process. I understand that I am lucky to be in an independent school where our students do not have high stakes graduation tests looming over their heads (or, more truthfully, they just have different ones in the form of AP and SAT/ACT tests) so that my department has some real autonomy about curricular decisions. As long as we’re not setting our kids up for future failure we can eliminate some repetition and some downright unnecessary material from the curriculum. Christopher Danielson has written eloquently about this issue. Too often, we get hung up on curricular checklists convinced that the kids will suffer in their next class if we don’t adequately ‘cover’ some idea. I am trying to get my department to let go of that idea by trying to open a conversation between the team members about what they really need to have their students know in class X. I’d love to hear how others have conquered (or are simply tackling) this question.