How can we tell if high-quality materials “work”?

There are two common scenarios I’ve heard from skeptics of a curriculum shift to high-quality materials. In the first, the school district purchases a new curriculum and is met with teacher frustration and resistance to change. In the second, the district fails to see improvements in student growth over a few years. In both cases, the concern is similar: Why isn’t the new curriculum “working”?

It’s true that high-quality materials aren’t an immediate one-size-fits-all solution (something I’ve written about before). The adoption and implementation process – when done right – is lengthy and requires the commitment and participation of many stakeholders, including district and school administrators, educators, and families.

But it’s also true that there are ways to capture and share markers of progress along the way, and a new resource from Rivet Education is making that even easier. The Instructional Materials Implementation Tool helps district leaders identify the multiple measures of instructional success, assess whether they’re on the right track, and prioritize role-specific actions to continue making progress.

Successful implementation includes many factors, from vision-setting to teacher engagement in communities of practice to a focus on student outcomes. Being able to check off concrete actions throughout the journey can help teachers and leaders feel more confident that they’re achieving the results they expect with a new instructional program.

For example, Rivet outlines specific elements of the “Consistent Implementation” phase, when a new curriculum has been in use for a year or two and leaders would typically be waiting for assessment scores to trend upwards. While monitoring for improvement across all student groups is an important step in this phase, Rivet’s tool includes other actions by leaders to ensure successful implementation, like:

Providing teachers with feedback and opportunities for both group and individual reflection focused on the use of the instructional materials to meet diverse student needs; and
Incorporating feedback from school leaders to improve lesson delivery.

Rivet has studied this work in action in Wisconsin’s Mount Horeb Area School District (MHASD), where the district enacted a new math curriculum after teachers noticed their students struggling with more challenging math work. Once they reached the Consistent Implementation phase, MHASD created intentional practices, giving space to teachers to “lead their own weekly grade-level meetings to discuss curriculum implementation, internalize units and lessons, analyze student work and assessment data, and address other miscellaneous issues for their grade level. Instructional coaches and school leaders participate in the meetings only as observers or until their input is needed.” These efforts paid off – not only did state assessment scores rise by more than 13% over three years, but 44% of teachers indicated that “the collaborative planning time was the most effective in supporting their curriculum implementation.” Bonus: the case study includes a set of key actions to take, regardless of your implementation phase.

With tools like Rivet’s available, it’s easy to quiet high-quality curriculum skeptics – something we should all be doing. Let’s encourage leaders to follow concrete steps, report out on progress against different measures, and assure their communities that new instructional programs are working for teachers and students.

Jocelyn Pickford is an education policy and communications specialist focusing on understanding and promoting practitioner-informed public policy across the private, public and non-profit sectors as a Senior Affiliate with HCM Strategists. She began her career in education as a high school English teacher in a regular and special education inclusion classroom and is now a public school parent and recent member of her local district school board. Previously, Jocelyn led the design, launch and implementation of the Teaching Ambassador Fellowship at the U.S. Department of Education to integrate teachers into the national education policy dialogue. Jocelyn’s passion for her work was seeded during her own public school education and took root during her classroom teaching experience in Fairfax County, Virginia, where she led action research and presented instructional materials to a variety of audiences. Jocelyn earned her bachelor’s degree from Trinity College (CT), working as a professional writer and editor prior to becoming a teacher, and obtained her master’s in secondary education from the George Washington University. Jocelyn lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and two children.