The Best Math Curriculum

Inside of my Facebook group, Build Math Minds, there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of posts all about asking opinions around a certain curriculum or textbook. Basically, wanting to find out if this a good curriculum. Or is this a good textbook series?

Today I want to spend a few moments talking about what is the best math curriculum that’s out there. I hope you’ll join me as we try to build our math minds, so we can build the math minds of our students.

Watch the video or read the transcript below.

There Is No “Best” Math Curriculum

Now I’m going to start off with the answer you probably do not want to hear. There is no best math curriculum. Yes, I’m saying it. There are definitely ones that I personally like more than others, but my teaching style is different than your teaching style. I know this makes it super difficult when you have a school of lots of teachers, all with different philosophies about math education and teaching styles. Even if you all have the same philosophy about how math should be taught, our style of teaching is different. So I’m going to tell you straight off, there will be no best curriculum (I will go back and forth between the terms ‘curriculum’ and ‘textbook series’). There’s probably one that you will like more than another, but there’s no way that your district is going to adopt a curriculum that makes everybody happy. It’s just not going to be possible.

I want to talk about two things in particular, that I personally like to look at when I’m helping districts evaluate curriculum.

The first one is looking to see if there’s more of an emphasis on conceptual understanding or procedural understanding. If you’ve seen my previous videos, I talk about how we really need a balance of both. There are different philosophies of math education:

• Some state that we should teach procedural first and then bring in the conceptual.
• Other people believe we should do conceptual first and then practice the procedural afterwards.
• There are still some who say the emphasis should be on procedural, while others say the emphasis should be on conceptual.
• Finally, there are textbook series that adopt any, that go any of those ways.

Conceptual Versus Procedural

I want you to be mindful of when you get a series, look to see how they are balancing conceptual and procedural. I can almost guarantee you there isn’t one that has a wonderful balance of both. You will find curriculums that tend to be more conceptual, and they don’t have as much practice in procedural skill-based stuff in them. You’ll find a camp that is more procedural with little to no conceptual building. I want some of both, but textbooks don’t necessarily have the best balance of those. Whatever it is that gets adopted, if you’re a part of that adoption, that’s a piece I would want to be looking at. If you get a textbook after it’s already been adopted, that’s what I want you to look at. Where is this textbook having most of its emphasis? If it has a really strong emphasis on conceptual building, then you’ve got to be able to bring in the procedural stuff.

Vice versa, if it’s more procedural, I want you to find conceptual building activities to supplement that curriculum. I know it’s hard because there’s already too much in the textbook to do in a year, but there are pieces where you have to say that these are the most important pieces my kids need to learn this year and this textbook is really just focusing on procedural skills. I need to bring in some conceptual stuff to supplement that. You don’t have to bring in conceptual around everything, but you really want to make sure that the foundational pieces of the big things need to be there. So, conceptual versus procedural. You are going to be hard-pressed to find anything that is a nice balance of both. Be aware and look for it and know what needs to be supplemented.

Spiral Versus Mastery

The next piece is, is the curriculum more spiral-based or mastery-based? Now, I will tell you there’s research that you can find to back up both of those things. So I cannot say that one is better than another. I, personally, liked teaching out of a mastery-based curriculum more than I liked teaching out of a spiral-based curriculum. Here’s the difference between the two (again, this is a brief difference):

• A spiral curriculum is where we introduce the topic and we don’t go really in depth. So, we introduce, then we work on it a little bit, then we move on to another thing. We move on to another thing, but we’ll spiral back around to that first thing we introduced to bring it back up. The theory behind this is that, when we first introduce something, not every kid is ready for it. So if we come back around, the more repetitions that we get to, and at different points in the year, they might be more ready for it at different times. The downside of that, when I was teaching out of a spiral curriculum, it felt like I was moving on before the kids were ready. Which is kind of the point, but I could see them get defeated because they never felt like they had success. So, some of those kids who just get it on the first try, always felt successful. My students who didn’t get it the first time felt defeated. We would move on to something new and they wouldn’t get that and we’d move on again and they didn’t get that. It felt like I was always bringing something new to them and they didn’t get it. By the time we’d bring it back around they’re already so defeated, it’s part way through the year, and they’re hating math. So, I personally did not like teaching out of a spiral curriculum.

• A mastery curriculum is where the curriculum tends to focus on a certain content for a longer period of time. Going in depth, letting kids approach that concept in lots of different ways. So, if I’m teaching two-digit addition, we would spend a lot of time focusing on two-digit addition: looking at it in different ways; looking at it in context, and really building mastery around that content before I moved into two-digit subtraction or before I moved into measurement concepts. So, you’re really focusing in-depth on a concept, which I loved. The downside of that type of curriculum is that you don’t bring it back around. So you’re focusing on two-digit addition, for let’s say a month (maybe two months depending upon how long you need to spend on it with your kids), then you don’t bring it back up again until the end of the year. By that time they may have forgotten the things that we talked about in the beginning of the year.

There are pluses and minuses to both types of curriculum. I want you to know which type of curriculum you have so that you know the issue. If you’re teaching out of a spiral curriculum, it may not be that the kids don’t understand, but rather that it’s just moving too fast and they don’t feel like they’re going in-depth enough. If you’re teaching out of mastery and you feel like, oh my goodness, we are almost towards the end of the school year and the kids seemed to have forgotten stuff that we did at the beginning. That’s because we haven’t brought it back up. Be mindful of those issues and work towards doing things that help solve it. If you’re in a mastery-based curriculum, you can do things like review every single day. Have a little 5-minute review time that you can use to bring that back up. Or if you use guided math, having those things you’ve done kind of at the beginning of the year, could be in your stations and your work times, so that they can get more review stuff. Be mindful, look for those things, and then know that you’re going to have to supplement in different ways, no matter what curriculum your district goes with.

Now, if you want official documentation of what is a good curriculum and a not so good curriculum, there is a site called, Ed Reports. Ed reports have a very lengthy process. They go through evaluating curriculum series. Take a look at the results with a grain of salt because I believe Eureka math a.k.a. Engage New York, is the only one that is all green across the side there. The link that it takes you to gives a little comparison chart and Eureka, I think, is the only one that has all green. There are some that are pretty much all green but have a couple yellow spots in there. So, even though the Ed reports might say this is a great curriculum, it goes back to your teaching style and your philosophy of how math should be taught to students. There is no one great, best curriculum out there.

I want you to keep these two things in mind, the conceptual versus procedural and whether it’s a spiral versus a mastery curriculum. Go to Ed Reports to see their official documentation. I also want to invite you to our Facebook group. We have over 20,000 teachers in there and people post all the time asking questions. You can get personal responses from teachers who are using that particular curriculum and maybe they’ve been using it for a few years, your district just adopted it, and you want to get some insight into what they feel are the good points and bad points of the curriculum. This is a great place and it’s not just about curriculum. There are definitely a lot of other things that people talk about inside of this Facebook group, but it is one of the biggest things I see people asking inside of that group. So keep those two things in mind and come over and join the Build Math Minds Facebook group. We can all build our math minds and help build the math minds of our students.