Why We Dogfood Our Own Curriculum
There's a term borrowed from the software world that Jennifer Gonzalez at Cult of Pedagogy introduced to the teaching world back in 2015: dogfooding. The idea comes from tech companies who load their own apps onto their devices and actively test them during the development phase (eating their own dog food, as it were). Gonzalez's argument, which we wholeheartedly agree with, is that teachers should do the same thing with their lessons. Try the assignment. Take the test. Complete the project. Do the homework. Only then do you really know what you're asking of students.
At Econiful, dogfooding isn't a quality control step we added after the fact. It's built into how we design curriculum. Every lesson gets run through by the people who built it before it goes anywhere near a classroom. What we find in that process shapes everything from the handout margins to the sequence of the entire unit.
Eating Your Own Dog Food
The small questions dogfooding answers are the ones that cause the biggest headaches in a classroom.
Much of what dogfooding surfaces can feel small, but it matters. Is there enough room on the handout for a student to actually write an answer, or did we underestimate how much space a real response takes? Do the instructions read clearly on a first pass, without a teacher standing next to a student and filling in the gaps verbally? How long does this section actually take, not how long we assumed it would take when we were building it?
These are the questions that sound minor until a teacher is standing in front of 30+ students and realizes mid-lesson that the directions skipped a step, or that a timed activity needs twice as long as planned.
How Dogfooding Assessments Creates Exemplars
Completing an assessment ourselves doesn't just check the instructions. It generates the sample responses students need to understand the rubric.
One of the most useful things that comes out of dogfooding an assessment is what it produces: real sample responses. When we completed the Analyzing a Product Market assessment in Lesson 2.9: Analyzing a Product Market ourselves, we weren't just checking that the instructions made sense, we were also generating the raw material for Lesson 2.8: Assessment Preview.
Lesson 2.8 gives students a chance to score sample responses before they write their own, so they understand what the rubric is actually looking for. Those samples didn't come from us sitting down and crafting perfect model answers. They came directly from completing Lesson 2.9 ourselves, which means they reflect the kind of reasoning and decision-making a student actually encounters when they sit down with that assessment. What we produced while dogfooding one lesson became the anchor activity for another.
Catching a Sequencing Problem
Structural problems in a lesson sequence are often invisible on an outline. You only feel them when you move through the lesson as a student would.
In an early draft of Lesson 5.9: A Closer Look at Budgeting, the order went something like this: benefits of budgeting, then budgeting tools, then how to budget, then tips. That sequence looked reasonable on an outline. When we actually ran through it though, a problem surfaced: students were being handed specific tools before they had the general framework to make sense of them. The "how to budget" section needed to come before the tools, not after.
That's a structural problem you often can't see from above. You only feel it when you're actually moving through the lesson in order, completing the activities and trying to follow the logic the way a student would. The revised sequence, general principles before specific tools, fixed the progression. But we only found it by doing the lesson ourselves.
Dogfooding Interactive and Tech Elements
When a lesson depends on buttons and navigation working correctly, reading through it isn't enough. You have to click through it.
Not all dogfooding is about content. Lesson 5.2: Investing Like an Economist features a choose-your-own-adventure style Google Slides activity where students navigate branching scenarios by clicking buttons. Reading through the slides wouldn't tell you whether the navigation actually worked. You had to click through it.
Econiful staff ran through the lesson first. Then we brought in someone with 100% fresh non-educator eyes: my husband, Stephen. As a river guide in Grand Canyon, he has a wealth of knowledge in a lot of areas (reading water, geology, astronomy, etc.). He has almost no experience navigating Slides, which was perfect. His perspective was valuable precisely because he wasn't approaching it with curriculum-designer assumptions about what a button should do. The testing surfaced navigation and button issues that would have broken the lesson for students and teachers encountering it for the first time.
Teachers Can Do This Too
Dogfooding doesn't require a curriculum team. Any teacher can build it into their practice, even with lessons they've taught for years.
A few questions worth asking before any lesson or assessment goes to students:
- Are the instructions clear without verbal clarification?
- What response am I actually looking for, and does the prompt get students there?
- Is this manageable in the time available? And how long does it actually take?
That last question is also among the most important to ask. Timing estimates made while designing a lesson almost always run short. Actually doing the activity, even quickly, gives you a much more honest answer.
The point isn't to do this once and move on. Dogfooding is a habit. Econiful runs every lesson through this process, and runs revised lessons through it again. The curriculum gets better each time, not because we found a problem, but because doing the work ourselves is the only reliable way to know what we're actually asking of teachers and students.
The Bottom Line
Gonzalez's original framing holds: "Eating your own dog food is time well spent, a simple way to take your practice one step closer to perfection." We'd only add that it also tends to make the lesson more interesting, because the process of doing it usually surfaces a better question, a tighter sequence, or a more honest exemplar than the one you started with.
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