The Role of High-Quality Materials in Building Math Coherence

• In Event: What Does it Take to Maximize HQIM's Potential to Support Math Instruction and Student Flourishing?

Abstract

We address questions about the use, purpose, and value of high-quality instructional materials from our experience developing K–12 math curriculum. Grounded in coherent standards, CURRICULUM was designed to help teachers and students experience mathematics as a connected, unfolding story (ORGANIZATION, 2024a). Knowing that the problem-based instructional model we chose would be a shift, we included support for teachers: guidance in launching and synthesizing activities; description of common student misconceptions; and learnable instructional routines. We also developed extensive professional learning offerings to support implementation. In the process of developing our Implementation Reflection Tool, which collects data about implementation at the school, team, and classroom level, we observed a wide variety of classrooms (ORGANIZATION, 2025). We have also conducted four case studies and run implementation coaching sessions at a number of schools (ORGANIZATION, 2024b). From these observations, we believe the materials have the potential for a strong beneficial effect on student learning, but we also see barriers to achieving that effect.

One barrier is over-reliance on curriculum alone as the solution to a district's problems, at the expense of other actions supporting teachers in the classroom, such as professional learning, planning time, and building communities of practice. This varies greatly from district to district, and is related to where the district sits in the 2020 Christensen Institute report, Solving the Curriculum Conundrum. Is the district looking to overhaul instruction, build consensus among teachers, update materials, or influence the field?

Another barrier is the volume of support material for teachers to read. This material contains important knowledge for implementing the curriculum, but not all teachers have the time or professional learning opportunities to digest it. This relates to the previous barrier in that districts with strong implementation plans and a recognition of teacher learning as a multi-year process do better than districts that just place the materials into teachers' hands.

A third barrier is the extent to which materials can support classrooms that are diverse, both culturally and in the amount of prior knowledge students bring. Hammond (2015) reminds us that “all learners have to connect new content to what they already know.” Our ways of knowing and sense-making are connected to the cultural experiences and connections our brain makes as we engage in the world. From the launch of a lesson, to students’ opportunity to engage in individual or small group sense-making activities, the process of valuing and extending a student’s prior connections to thrive in understanding a new experience is at the core of IM’s instructional model. However, this process is highly dependent on the classroom context, and there is a limit to the extent to which instructional materials can encode it.

Our conclusion as we move into the next phase of our work is to view the set of offerings we or our partners bring—curriculum, professional learning, implementation support, supplemental products, family supports—as a coherent whole, whose impact derives as much from the way the components fit together as from their separate quality.

Authors

• William McCallum, University of Arizona

• April Mouton, Texas State University