The Mediating Role of the Designated Curriculum in the Enacted Common Core State Standards for Mathematics

• In Event: 32.073 - Studying the Alignment Among the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics, Teachers' Perceptions, Lesson Design, and the Enacted Curriculum

Abstract

Objectives:
We studied how features of curriculum programs chosen by schools and districts to address the CCSSM potentially mediated teachers’ enactments of the standards. The authors of the CCSSM intentionally did not specify characteristics of curriculum and instruction that should be used to enact the CCSSM, leaving open the opportunity to study the mediating effects of curriculum programs chosen by schools and districts to address the CCSSM.

Perspectives:
The alignment of standards with other parts of instructional systems, such as curriculum programs adopted by districts to address the CCSSM, is critical to meeting the ambitious goals of the CCSSM (Coburn, Hill, & Spillane, 2016). The adoption and use of the designated curriculum provides insight into the alignment between the official and enacted curriculum, so we focus on the role of curriculum materials. We conceive of curriculum materials as tools that influence teachers’ planning and enactment of lessons: curriculum materials do not determine what teachers do, they provide a structure in which teachers operate and thus influence their instructional decisions, in a dynamic interrelationship between tool and user (Remillard, 2005).

Methods:
We characterized the curriculum materials used by the 50 teachers in our sample according to their message and structure and analyzed the enacted curriculum. The teachers in our sample – regardless of the curriculum program used – had similar perceptions that the CCSSM emphasized active student engagement with mathematics. We analyzed the mathematical activity and discourse patterns and grouped the lesson observations by curriculum category to see the impact of the designated curriculum on the enacted curriculum.

Results:
The designated curriculum was strongly associated with instructional outcomes, especially in the lessons of teachers using programs classified as Delivery Mechanism (DM). Almost all of the DM lessons involved non-conceptual activity and teacher focused discourse. There was considerably more variation in the lessons of teachers using programs we classified as Thinking Device (TD), with half of those lessons classified as conceptual and a third classified as student focused. Overall, only seven of the 50 lessons were categorized as both conceptual and student focused, all from teachers using TD materials. Thirty-nine of the lessons were categorized as teacher focused; of these, 27 lessons had no segment coded as student focused. Notably, for the DM teachers, there was a near absence of student focused discourse.

Significance:
An implication is that the choice of curriculum programs – whether by district, school, or teacher – is associated with instructional approach. An underlying question, then, is what these entities are responding to in their choice of curriculum programs, especially if the ostensible goal – to align instruction with the CCSSM – is the same across the contexts. A second implication is that people should be deeply skeptical of claims that content designed in the DM model can lead to rigorous instruction. Many schools, including some in our sample, turned to DM materials while still communicating expectations to teachers that they need to incorporate CCSSM-aligned instruction, like problem solving, communication, and exploration.

Authors

• Jeffrey M. Choppin, University of Rochester

• Amy M. Roth McDuffie, Washington State University

• Demeke Gesesse Yeneayhu, University of Rochester