Dylan Kane likes his math curriculum. But there’s one important piece missing, he says.
The 7th grade math teacher in Leadville, Colo., uses a program that teaches math skills through real-world problem solving. A lesson on proportional relationships, for example, asks students to write an equation that represents the ratio of honey to flour in a recipe.
This kind of approach helps students understand what equations represent and why math is useful in their lives, he said. But the lessons don’t always give them enough practice with the underlying skill of writing an equation to represent a proportional relationship, he said.
“I should be able to click one button and say, ‘Can you give me 10 more problems so I can get students a little more confident and reach a higher success rate before we move on?’”
Instead, Kane has to make them himself. “It’s a huge gap in the market,” he said.
All over the country, math teachers face a similar challenge. The average teacher uses five supplemental resources, according to a survey of math, English/language arts, and science teachers from the RAND Corporation.
It’s an issue that’s now caught the eye of the Gates Foundation, which has put big investments into improving math education. Three recent grants from the organization aim to align core curricula and supplemental materials—like online games, practice drills, and interventions—with the goal of making them easier to use for teachers and more effective for students.
Core curricula are designed to cover grade-level content, but not every student is equally prepared for that challenge, said Rachel Leifer, a senior program officer on the Gates Foundation’s U.S. program’s K-12 education team.
Teachers have to fill in those gaps, making “access to the right, and really strong, supplemental support really important,” Leifer said.
What is instructional coherence?
Looking for more practice problems is just one of the reasons why teachers seek out these extra materials in the classroom, or create their own. In surveys, teachers also cite needing to differentiate for diverse student ability levels and supporting students with disabilities
But some teachers argue that this work sidesteps a larger problem: Often these extra opportunities for practice, and more resources for students without grade-level skills, aren’t embedded within core math programs. And many teachers think they should include those features to support struggling students.
“Curriculum companies should absolutely step in and do this work for teachers,” said Kane.
The Gates grants target different curriculum series, but all have the same goal: instructional “coherence.”
If a 3rd grader is in math tutoring, the argument goes, the tutor should focus on the same skills they’re learning in their core classroom, using the same terminology and strategies as their math teacher.
In practice, that kind of alignment has proved hard for schools to achieve. Often, materials like intervention lessons or digital math games aren’t designed to line up with core curricula. They might present topics in a different order, teach different approaches to problem-solving, or even have different user interfaces that could confuse young kids learning to navigate them on computers.
These are some of the problems the Gates grants aim to address, said Leifer. (Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week, receives sustaining support from the Gates Foundation. The media organization retains sole editorial control over its articles.)
One $1.17 million award to the curriculum company Great Minds is supporting the organization’s work to align digital math supplements to its core math programs.
Another, to the nonprofit American Institutes for Research for $3.58 million, funds research with districts and developers to improve coherence between supplements and Illustrative Mathematics, another popular core curriculum.
A third, smaller grant for $5,000 to Spokane Public Schools in Washington state supports the district in disseminating lessons learned from using Illustrative Mathematics and the adaptive digital-learning program MATHia together.
The end goal is to make it easier for teachers to differentiate instruction to meet student needs, said Steven Shadel, a senior national content specialist at Great Minds.
Some students need extra practice with a few concepts, some need special education support services, and still others need enrichment. It should be easy for teachers to find the resources that they need to do all of those things, all aligned to the main lessons they’re teaching, said Shadel.
“We’re trying to solve that entire puzzle,” he said.
Educators want more options within core programs—not as supplements
One way to solve this puzzle, some teachers say, would be to embed more practice and differentiation directly into core math programs, rather than expecting them to turn to supplements.
At Goldrick Elementary School in the Denver district, teachers modify Great Minds’ Eureka Math Squared to offer this practice, said Piper Lowrey, a math interventionist at the school. For some skills, the curriculum teaches students several different approaches to solving the same problem. But the days spent teaching all of the strategies leave less time to practice applying them, Lowrey said.
The school’s math team sometimes picks just one strategy to teach and spends the rest of the time giving students extra practice. “I wish we saw more of that,” Lowrey said.
Other educators say core curricula need to do more to build foundational math skills, like addition and multiplication facts—especially in a post-pandemic landscape, where math scores nationwide are still depressed.
“You have to give them the skills to become problem-solvers,” said Erin Houghton, an independent academic coach in Maine who works with students struggling in math. “When you don’t start there, the students who don’t have the resources to get outside help stay stuck.”
Such critiques point to a deeper ideological difference between how many math curricula are designed and what some teachers say they need.
Illustrative Mathematics, for example, is problem-based: The lessons ask students to explore ideas and make connections before learning the formal equations.
“In our curriculum, we actually embedded practice as a fundamental part of the design, but it does sometimes look different from familiar worksheets,” said Kristin Umland, the CEO of Illustrative Mathematics. “We have lots of repeated opportunities to build ideas over time.”
Traditionally, other materials like intervention have been separate from core curricula, she said. Currently, Illustrative Mathematics provides a list of certified partner supplemental-materials providers.
But that system should perhaps change, Umland said. “We’ve been doing a lot of thinking about, what would it look like to design a coherent instructional system from the ground up?
“We’re still learning,” she said. “We’re learning about what teachers need, where there might be gaps.”
