Research Report: Curriculum Development and Implementation

Policy makers and district leaders have wanted a greater understanding of the essential elements of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) in mathematics and how they can be implemented to bolster student learning. As a result, researchers are tasked with understanding the impact and implementation of HQIM at scale. Scale, however, presents methodological difficulties as researchers seek to understand how curriculum implementation impacts students' opportunities to learn with validated instruments and without costly classroom observations. This session presents a conceptual framework and suggested instruments to study how teachers interpret, adapt, and implement HQIM to improve student learning. The framework relies on an understanding of HQIM as dynamic thinking tools rather than static delivery mechanisms (Choppin et al., 2022), emphasizing their role in fostering meaningful and mathematical teacher-student interactions. The framework supports the development of scalable instruments to measure curriculum implementation that supports a comparison of the impact of various HQIM in diverse contexts. The instruments include teacher and student surveys, and teacher implementation logs designed based on curriculum implementation literature, curriculum review, and focus groups with curriculum developers. These instruments are designed to align with each other while providing districts with valuable implementation data to support their teachers' ability to enact the materials as intended. 

In this talk, we share our progress in adopting Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's literacy model for historically responsive literacy in our research program focused on supporting and characterizing students' meaningful learning of mathematics. From a historically responsive literacy model, curriculum designers attend to five learning pursuits: identity, skill, intellect, criticality, and joy. We will introduce Muhammad's model, how we leveraged it as a tool to guide our curriculum research, and what we learned by applying it as an analytic lens to study students' responses to mathematics lessons. 

In this time of curricular constraints, it is more important than ever that teachers develop curricular agency that supports their curricular reasoning. Existing research has identified curricular reasoning as the thought processes used by teachers in their curricular decisions. Building from this research, we identify the essential role of curricular agency in curricular reasoning. Curricular agency incorporates curricular reasoning and voices from school and university contexts, including mentor teachers, learners, professors, and curriculum writers. Using self-study methodology, we studied the instructional activity design process of three mathematics teacher educators focused on supporting preservice teachers' curricular reasoning. Through dialogic analysis of instructional activity design and implementation, construction of evidentiary maps of events and activities from our methods courses, and PT work samples, we constructed models of PTs' curricular agency. Findings include models of PTs' curricular agency and our use of models to inform our instructional activity design in support of PTs' curricular agency. Implications for MTE practice, including structuring instructional activities for curricular reasoning with explicit attention to curricular agency, are shared.