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As American students continue to flounder in math, Bellwether, a national nonprofit that seeks to improve opportunities and outcomes for marginalized kids, said schools seeking a turnaround must first establish a clear, shared vision of effective math instruction.

Its recent report“How We Solve America’s Math Crisis: A Systemwide Approach to Evidence-Based Math Learning,” talks about building a teacher and student “math identity” and balancing “conceptual understanding and procedural fluency while creating meaningful opportunities for real-world application.”

The plan must also ensure that learning progresses “logically and cumulatively” to deepen students’ knowledge as they move through the perennially difficult subject over time.

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“These steps may seem familiar, and that’s because they are widely accepted best practices for developing and sustaining strong instructional design,” the report reads. “However, to be effective, they must be consistently applied over time and throughout the system.”

And that’s where schools have fallen short, Bellwether’s researchers note, despite evidence supporting the approach.

“Data demonstrate that when high-quality materials, intentional instructional practices, and strong teacher support are combined, students’ math proficiency can improve significantly — even in schools starting with very low baseline scores.”

Anson Jackson, senior partner at Bellwether, sat down with The 74’s Jo Napolitano to describe what schools need to do to get on track.

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This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What is effective math instruction?

There’s a couple of layers to that. At the baseline, it is leaders, teachers and essential office personnel all understanding what good math instruction looks like. And they are not just focused on outcomes, but on the practices they want to see in math classrooms, the mindsets in math classrooms. There’s a shared understanding of what they believe math instruction looks like.

That then determines how they build their professional development, how they build their training and how they build their assessments. It’s almost like a philosophy on math instruction. Without that philosophy, it’s like whack-a-mole.

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After they reach this consensus, what then?

You then align on what those systems and structures look like to support that vision for mathematics. If you are focused on hands-on activities, then you want to have systems to train staff on how to develop strong activities to facilitate hands-on learning.

If you believe kids need to show the work and do the math, you need to build in systems that allow kids to show the work and do the math on a regular basis. So that’s the idea: build a philosophy, build a vision, and then build a structure to support that vision throughout the district.

What if you don’t implement a shared vision?

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When you don’t have that, success is random. Teacher development is random. You’re always changing what is in front of kids or in front of teachers.

When there’s no real shared vision, then the next leader who comes in changes the vision. And, without that shared vision, when you go from grade to grade, students don’t have the coherence of learning, which they need for success in math.

How can schools identify — and adopt — high-quality instructional materials, especially when time and money are tight?

The first thing they need to do is understand the science behind mathematics and math learning. High-quality materials are backed by science and evidence of learning. Secondly, there must be coherence across grade levels — and in grade levels.

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The curriculum must be aligned. But before I get to the curriculum, I want to understand the key things that we know by science and evidence happen for kids to learn math at a high, high level. That could involve professional development, training, school visits, observations, doing some light research and analysis of what math looks like and coming to these conclusions as a collective — from the superintendent to chief academic officers, principals and teachers.

From there, I would then have them do a gap analysis of what they know works. They should ask, “What in our curriculum is missing or lacking from what we know should be there?” From that gap analysis, hopefully they’ll determine, “Oh, guess what? Light bulb moment: We are missing the mark on the curriculum or the materials.”

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After that, they go through an adoption process where they take a look at what’s out there, and make some choices. But it needs to be a shared learning experience and not just that a team is told to adopt something because experts said it’s good. They should really understand why it’s good and what in the curriculum makes it high quality.

Is there a shortcut for cash-strapped schools with little time to do this?

The short answer is yes: There’s lots of resources out there, including lists of high-quality instructional materials that are already vetted and backed by science. You can also use Google or ChatGPT to find them.

However, this is where implementation can fail, without a deep understanding of the curriculum and why it works. A lot of folks, when things get hard, they put it away, right?

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So, I would say, yes, expert A can tell you the best resource for mathematics teaching and give you a set of resources. And that’s great. But unless they understand the true reasoning behind it and how it connects to learning, teacher practice, and systems, a lot of times it becomes another resource that’s on the shelf in two years.

How do you get teachers to support your approach?

It’s about trying to get them engaged early on in the process, not telling them what to do, but having them learn what to do. I would not try to beat them down, but have them understand what’s working already and what’s missing.

The second piece is that I would want to use a coaching model, side-by-side training and support for teachers — and not use it in a negative way. A lot of times we’ll shift to, “You’re not doing this, you’re a bad teacher,” when it’s actually about a learning continuum, as in, “We’re going to focus on this in year one, year two and year three.”

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What’s at stake if we don’t improve kids’ math scores?

The data shows a lot of the careers that are high paying usually have math as a core foundation. And the other piece is we know there’s an equity gap in this country when it comes to those who do math well and those who don’t — which leads to career choices, right? We want to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

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Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham is a co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether who sits onThe 74’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this article.

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