Some curriculum requirements ask teachers to instruct students in ways that go against their beliefs about effective instruction. In this article, the authors share their findings from a review of literature about teachers’ principled resistance to curricular control. They provide examples from the literature of teachers resisting curricular mandates when they believe they do not serve their students’ best interests. These teachers reject policy mandates through strategic compliance, strategic compromise, strategic redefinition, overt and outright resistance, and leaving. Implications are provided for administrators who seek to maintain instructional cohesion on their campuses and for teachers who experience value conflicts with the instructional mandates they receive.
Huddleston et al. (Sun,) studied this question.