Music teachers, like their colleagues in other fields, are living through a paradoxical time in schools. Currents of change in education and society seem to pull teachers in contradictory directions. Nowhere is this flux more apparent than in curriculum. While teachers are called upon to differentiate teaching approaches to meet the diverse needs of students, they are also asked to standardize expectations and provide highly structured content for these very same students. School reform initiatives call for multiple means of documenting student learning, but, at the same time, the reliance on grades and test scores as the primary indicators of progress seems more restrictive than ever. At a time when resources are reappropriated for subjects most susceptible to rigid accountability measures, other subjects--the arts too often among them--struggle to maintain funding. Times of widespread change call for creativity and vision as we examine essential questions about teaching and learning and think differently about the curriculum's capability to answer them. The works listed in the Suggested Reading sidebar provide just a sample of some of the current thinking on the subject.