As another school year begins, I have been struck by the many different ways leaders and educators talk about instructional materials. At meet-the-teacher nights or staff meetings to explain the move to a new curriculum or in board meetings to explain plans for the year, educators often talk about the role the curriculum will play with bold claims. I have heard:
- “These materials will ensure every student gets excellent instruction every day.”
- “These materials will improve student learning.”
- “These materials will shift us to the science of reading.”
- “These materials will ensure every teacher teaches grade-level work.”
As a big believer in the importance of instructional materials, I celebrate the focus they are getting. However, I observe these claims with growing concern.
As I reflect on what is driving that concern, I realize that supporting so many school systems through adoption and implementation has both increased my conviction in the critical role that high-quality instructional materials play and radically changed my perspective on why they matter.
At various points over the last ten years, I believed that better materials would—to some degree—improve instruction and student learning directly. Admittedly, I was a slow convert to high-quality materials playing any role in instructional improvement, having taken pride in writing my own materials as a teacher and coaching teachers with a focus on assessments and backwards design for many years. I came to see their value in helping teachers see what the new standards look like in action and allowing teachers to focus on engaging students rather than writing lessons. I believed they could support instructional improvement. There is compelling research on the impact of better tasks. I expected better materials would directly lead to significant instructional shifts (e.g., shifting from skills-based ELA instruction to knowledge-based instruction) and at least some improvement in student learning.
However, after seeing high-quality materials implemented in such a wide range of ways over time and across contexts, I have come to see materials as an unreliable lever to improve instruction. Seeing such a wide range of implementation gives me little faith the materials will cause instructional improvements or learning gains on their own.
In this same time, however, my conviction in the importance of high-quality instructional materials has grown because I have seen the powerful role they play in creating conditions for better instructional support for teachers. I have seen high-quality instructional materials improve teacher support better than any federal policy, professional development trend, or investment in people alone.
When the instructional materials are treated as the foundation for teacher support, I have seen their implementation lead to incredible growth in student learning and teacher satisfaction and efficacy. In those examples:
- Teachers used collaborative planning time to internalize the content of lessons.
- Leaders used the materials (not a set of instructional strategies) to anchor their vision of instruction and drive their feedback.
- Teachers used the materials like a common language to discuss instruction and focus problem solving.
In my experiences supporting implementation over ten years, high-quality instructional materials have had less direct impact on instruction than I imagined they would but more impact on teacher support than I imagined they could.
Changing perspective on why materials matter has changed what I see as important in their implementation. Because I believe their value lies primarily in improving teacher support:
- Above a threshold of quality and standard alignment, I care deeply about how understandable and accessible the materials are for coaches and principals.
- I focus more than I used to on principal and school leader training on supporting teachers’ use of the materials.
- I pay more attention to whether school system leaders are monitoring the way leaders are using the materials to improve the quality of teacher support.
Above all, shifting the role I see materials playing has shifted the way I think about success. I don’t expect to see better student learning outcomes if the implementation approach has not improved the quality of teacher support. Instead, I only expect to see these outcomes if a system effectively uses high-quality instructional materials to improve teacher support.
As a result, in the year to come, I hope to hear the messages about materials in board meetings and teacher conferences and faculty meetings shift to “these materials will allow us to provide better support for our teachers and leaders.”
Editor’s note: This was first published in an email newsletter from Emily Freitag in her role as CEO of Instruction Partners.
