Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists!!

A teacher was part of one of the largest educational studies ever done. On paper, her classroom counted as using the HighScope program. But the day the program developer walked in? It wasn’t happening.

So when someone says they use a specific math program or philosophy how often do they actually use it and use it well?

That question has been rattling around in my head ever since I started listening to Season 2 of Sold a Story. Episode 3 made it even a bigger question in my mind. In that episode, Emily Hanford tells the story of Project Follow Through, and I came away with more questions than answers. So let’s talk about the curriculum on paper versus the curriculum kids actually get, and why this conversation matters so much right now.

Why I’m Talking About This Now

Even before Season 2 came out, I could feel the tide getting ready to swing back to the “traditional” way math used to be taught. That’s when I started saying we need to find the middle ground in math: conceptual understanding, procedural skill, AND application. Not just one of those. Not just two. Kids need all three.

Now that Sold a Story 2 is out, I think there are definitely things we can all learn from Project Follow Through. But there are also things I’m questioning about it, and I want you to question them too. Your questions may be different than mine, and that’s okay. Here are mine.

A Quick Backstory on Project Follow Through

If you haven’t listened yet, here’s the short version. In 1967, President Johnson wanted a big new elementary program to build on what he had started with Head Start. Then Vietnam came along and ate the money, so the program was essentially turned into a study instead. That study became Project Follow Through.

It included 22 different programs (or models), ran for roughly 10 years, and involved more than 300,000 kids. The models ranged from very highly structured Direct Instruction to discovery-based approaches like HighScope.

Capital DI vs. lowercase direct instruction

Before we go any further, I want to clarify something, because it gets misused ALL the time.

• Capital D, capital I Direct Instruction (DI) is a specific set of programs created by Zig Engelmann. In Project Follow Through, those were the DISTAR reading, arithmetic, and language programs. Every word the teacher says is scripted. Lessons are tightly sequenced. Kids answer in unison on a signal.
• Lowercase direct instruction is a general teaching idea of teacher-led, whole class explicit instruction.

If someone tells you they “use direct instruction,” my guess is they mean lowercase. Very few people use capital DI. So when you hear that “DI won” Follow Through, that means Engelmann’s programs, not teachers up front explaining things to students.

So what “won” Project Follow Through?

In 1977, the government evaluated all of the programs. Capital DI was the only model with positive results in every category measured, and that did include problem solving and self-confidence, the things we talk about a lot around here.

But here’s the catch the episode digs into: those were averages. In Sold a Story, Hanford compared it to rating chain restaurants by averaging the reviews from every location across the country. A great chain will still have bad locations. A bad chain might still have some good ones. And that’s what happened with the programs in Follow Through. Even DI had schools where it worked and schools where it didn’t.

As people were evaluating the results from Follow Through, one camp said there was too much variation to call any program the winner. The other camp said, hey, these averages mean something and you can’t just ignore them. In the end, the government highlighted successful SCHOOLS instead of successful PROGRAMS, and the message became: anything can work somewhere.

That’s where I want to stop my summary and share my ponderings.

Pondering #1: How Many Classrooms Were Actually Teaching It?

There’s a difference between the written curriculum and the enacted curriculum.

In the episode, HighScope developer Larry Schweinhart describes walking into a classroom where the teacher was supposed to be doing HighScope, and it simply wasn’t happening. And it wasn’t just HighScope. The episode also includes DI coach Adrienne Allen describing what she found when she showed up to check on teachers who were supposed to be using DI.

That brought up something I feel like we all know happens but don’t really like to talk about: the curriculum on paper isn’t always the curriculum students actually experience.

So when research says a school “used” a program, I can’t help but wonder: how many classrooms were actually teaching it? And how well?

Now think about your own situation. Your district says it’s using Program X. Is that happening in every room? And in the rooms where it is, how well is it being used?

Pondering #2: How Much Training Does It Take to Do It Well?

This is the part I don’t want us to skip over. The most scripted program in the entire study still depended on teachers and their knowledge.

DI had trainers. They videotaped lessons, gave feedback, and made revisions. The episode includes Gary Davis, a colleague of Zig Engelmann, talking about how the program worked well after years because the teachers got good. Even the program where every word was written out needed teachers who knew what they were doing.

Because a scripted curriculum can tell you what to SAY. It can’t tell you what to DO when a kid’s answer isn’t in the script, or where to go from there. Sure, some programs try to put that into the teacher resources. But let’s be honest. How many teachers actually dig into those?

Pondering #3: Did Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge Matter?

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is knowing the mathematics AND knowing how kids build their understanding of it. It’s the knowledge you need to actually teach it: the common misconceptions, which representations help, and what questions to ask to move kids’ thinking forward.

From what I found, Project Follow Through tracked whether teachers were implementing the program and collected things like their education and years of service. But it did not test what teachers actually knew about the math or how kids learn it.

That makes sense, because PCK wasn’t really a “thing” yet. Lee Shulman coined the term pedagogical content knowledge in 1986, almost 10 years after Follow Through ended. So we can’t know whether PCK explains those good and bad pockets of results.

I wish we could, because I have a feeling it might have something to do with it. And it’s not just a feeling. More recent research by Hill, Rowan, and Ball (2005) found that teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching predicted how much their first and third graders grew in mathematics.

Personally, I know the way I taught the curriculum that was handed to me was highly influenced by my own understanding of the math and how children learn it. That’s exactly why I do what I do now.

It’s Not Curriculum OR Teachers

Here’s where I’ve landed so far:

It’s not curriculum OR teachers. It’s curriculum AND teachers.

A strong curriculum in the hands of teachers who understand the mathematics, and how children develop their understanding of it, leads to kids who learn the math.

This matters even more right now, with all the talk about HQIM (high-quality instructional materials) and making sure great curriculum gets into teachers’ hands. Great materials matter. But materials alone were never the whole story, not even in the most scripted program in Project Follow Through.