Starting this school year (2024-2025), all 23 of our Uncommon Schools’ 5th and 6th grade classrooms across Brooklyn, Newark, Camden, Boston, and Rochester will be using the Illustrative Math curriculum. Like many schools nationwide, teachers at Uncommon have struggled to reverse the pandemic-related learning loss. We decided that making the shift to a new curriculum would support our efforts to dramatically accelerate student achievement.

Why Illustrative Math?

We chose Illustrative Math for three key reasons:

1. Grounded in Best Practices: The curriculum is research-based (especially leveraging the work of “Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions” (Smith & Stein 2011)). It provides opportunities for students to study all three aspects of rigor: conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and application. The curriculum addresses both the Common Core content standards and the Standards for Mathematical Practice. This intentional focus on the practice standards will greatly benefit our students’ ability to solve challenging tasks.
2. Aligned to our Core Values: The Illustrative Math curriculum is closely aligned to our vision for math instruction. We observed a strong overlap between our Uncommon Math “Core Values” and the Illustrative Math “Beliefs for Teaching and Learning Mathematics”.

3. Highly Rated: We consulted EdReports (an independent nonprofit that reviews K-12 instructional materials) and learned that Illustrative Math is highly rated across all criteria, such as focus, coherence, rigor, mathematical practices, and usability.

Planning for Implementation

“Curriculum alone won’t fix the problem.” To ensure that the Illustrative Math curriculum actually yields dramatic growth in student achievement, we knew we needed a clear and strategic approach for implementation.

1.  Teacher Internalization: We hired two full-time middle school math curriculum writers to create resources to support teachers internalizing the Illustrative Math curriculum. For example, we provide teachers with a scripted “Key Takeaway” for each task of the curriculum: By the end of this task, what should students understand or be able to say? This ensures teachers have a clear goal they are driving towards while facilitating each task discussion.

Source: Illustrative Math (Grade 6, Unit 1, Lesson 7)

2. Professional Development: This summer, we trained all Uncommon leaders on the vision for what robust implementation of Illustrative Math should look like in classrooms, and then we repeated a similar training with teachers. This ensured everyone was aligned on the principles and mechanics of “how to teach” the curriculum.
3. Learning from Experience: Illustrative Math is already being taught in over 200 districts including New York City, Achievement First, Dream, and KIPP Capital Region, and we’ve been able to collaborate and learn from their experiences with implementation. We also piloted the curriculum in a handful of classrooms for one key instructional unit in 23-24 before launching it in all classrooms for all units in 24-25.
4. Supplementing the IM curriculum: Two concerns we heard from our peers about the Illustrative Math curriculum are related to procedural fluency and independent practice.

Procedural Fluency: Although the IM curriculum expertly addresses one aspect of procedural fluency – flexibility – it does not offer enough opportunity for students to work towards the other two aspects of procedural fluency – accuracy, and speed.

Independent Practice: Because the curriculum emphasizes discussion, students do not always get enough “pencil to paper” practice to independently apply their learnings, nor do they get enough opportunity to revisit and “spiral” previous content.

As a result, at Uncommon, we’ve extended the math block to 90 total minutes so we can supplement the Illustrative Math curriculum with additional, high-impact activities:

Progress Monitoring

To measure the effectiveness of the Illustrative Math curriculum implementation, we worked with Math Consultant Chi Tschang to first answer the question, “What should we be measuring, and when should we measure it?”. He guided us to consider the “Arc of the Year” and identify one aspect of a math lesson to focus on each quarter:

To measure our teachers’ progress towards the Quarter 1 goal, Launch, we distilled that portion of the lesson into five key components. Then, we observed many classrooms looking specifically at these components using our simple 5-point rubric. By the end of the day, we identified trends across the school that the school leader could address in their next math department meeting.

Summary

This curriculum will lead us to fulfill our mission at Uncommon, where every mathematics classroom is a joyful community of learners who are problem-solvers, flexible thinkers, risk-takers, and math lovers. We want to ensure students develop deep, lasting, and flexible mastery across lessons, units, and courses, and we believe the Illustrative Math curriculum can help us accomplish this goal. For other teachers, school leaders, or district leaders looking to level up their math achievement, we recommend considering these questions:

1. Self Reflection: Is your current math curriculum student-centered, rigorous, and Common Core aligned? If not, consider looking at Illustrative Math.
2. Anticipate Challenges: Who else has already used the curriculum you’re planning to adopt? Speak to them to find out lessons learned. Does the new curriculum meet all your needs? If not, create a plan to supplement it.
3. Measure What Matters: What is your plan for how to identify successes & challenges with the curriculum implementation? Create a year-long plan, and focus on one thing at a time.