Curriculum Adoption Support Resources (Math Focus)

Idaho Math Curriculum Adoption Tips:

• No product will solve all your problems -- positive results follow sustained investments in educator capacity more than product choices.

• Publishers want you to buy their products. Be skeptical of marketing bells and whistles. Don’t just look at the stickers! Determine what is important to you and make your own conclusions.

• Is the curriculum led by integrated, rich problem-solving with quality tasks, or is it primarily show and tell? Research supports building "procedural fluency on a foundation of conceptual understanding" (see the NCTM position paper and comments linked below)

• Every curriculum has pros/cons -- cherry-picking curriculum across grade bands can be effective as long as instruction is rooted in the standards.

• Narrow selections to a few programs (consider ideas from the Curriculum Adoption Process Framework, or IMET/GIMET tools), and pilot before adopting.

• Adoption requires PD and support to succeed -- deliberately plan room for this support in teachers' schedules. Consider adoption resources and training sustainability as part of the review process.

• For parents and community members to participate successfully in an adoption committee, they need clear training and well-defined evaluation criteria. Establishing agreed-upon criteria or a rubric in advance helps keep the focus on students and content rather than politics. A few problematic lessons or problems don’t make an entire curriculum ineffective—teachers are professionals who modify, adapt, and refine content to meet student needs, which shift from week to week and year to year. (See the analogy below for example verbiage to share this idea with committee members)

A Note on Procedural Fluency

The Idaho Content Standards for Mathematics has a "A Special Note about Procedural Skill and Fluency" on page 9 that guides our approach to fluency in our classrooms. Here is more context that might help when we feel tension or imbalance between "conceptual understanding" and "procedural skill."

Many teachers feel that their students need more practice than some curricula offer. We'd love to talk about about resources for folks who are looking for more practice for their students -- there are many! However, before you dig into those resources, we suggest reading through the NCTM Position Paper on Procedural Fluency one-pager to see what research-based practices look like for math fluency (which is different from other subjects!). An excessive focus on procedural skills will exclude some of your students from learning (these are students we often label as "low" who rarely escape that label later), and an excessive focus on conceptual understanding without practice will weaken procedural fluency for most students. The ISAT Math test now assesses procedural skills (Claim 1) AND conceptual understanding (Claims 1-4), so Idaho teachers are being asked to help students do both. In fact, half of the ISAT score is now based on conceptual understanding (click the link for a diagram).

The idea of “balance” between approaches may seem reasonable, but it often overlooks two key points: conceptual understanding and procedural fluency develop together, and conceptual understanding is essential as the foundation for building procedural fluency. A so-called ‘balanced’ curriculum that treats these as separate is more likely to reduce math to memorization without meaning. (see "The myth(s) of a ‘balanced’ approach").

When a curriculum prioritizes conceptual understanding as a foundation and includes minimal procedural practice (though no curriculum completely excludes it), supplementing with procedural exercises is relatively easy. However, when a curriculum prioritizes procedural practice while excluding conceptual foundations, it becomes much more difficult—near impossible for many teachers—to effectively supplement tasks and lessons that drive toward deep conceptual understanding.

A helpful analogy to prevent politicization of curriculum adoptions:

We don’t "teach curriculum"—we teach students. The standards are our guide, and curricular resources are our toolkit. No single curriculum is a perfect fit for our schools, just as no single toolkit has every tool in exactly the right shape and size for every job. Some modification is ALWAYS required if we want to meet the changing needs of our students. Our job is to define what matters most for our teachers and students and to find the best resources to support that vision.

Every curriculum includes lessons, problems, or approaches that may not perfectly align with the needs of our students and our community. But just as a skilled carpenter doesn’t discard an entire toolkit because one tool isn’t quite right, we trust our teachers to refine, discard, and supplement curricular resources as needed to ensure the best possible learning experience for our students.