So you have implemented the Open Up Resources (OUR) math curriculum with fidelity but are not seeing results? I created this guide to offer moral support but also to help you reflect and improve your practice so you can start seeing results. Yes, there is a lot going on in our students’ world now (and always) and it is very tempting to find external reasons for poor student performance however it is important to focus on what we have control of as teachers in our classrooms when reflecting.

1. How do your students do with the shift?

First and foremost it must be acknowledged that walking into an OUR math classroom can be extremely difficult for students. This is because the OUR math curriculum is very different from how students are taught math in many classrooms in the United States today. In the book Principles to Action by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics the following best practices are suggested to maximize student learning in math:

• Establish math goals to focus learning
• Implementation of tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving
• Multiple entry points on tasks
• Use of different representations and tools
• Incorporation of student prior knowledge and common experiences to tie the math to student identities
• Build procedural fluency from conceptual understanding
• Development of non-algorithmic thinking

Sound familiar? If you have implemented the OUR math curriculum before it should. The OUR math curriculum is one of the best at hitting these crucial best practices. Still, that does not mean that students will embrace this new way of doing math and usually they don’t (at least not on their own). In my experience, the students most resistant to this change are those that were previously very successful in traditional math classrooms that didn’t implement the above best practices regularly. The key here is to build structures into your classroom that support this shift. The OUR math curriculum is collaborative which means if you still have your classroom set up in individual desks facing the front of the classroom, that structure must be changed. It must be an expectation that students are sharing their ideas and working together with their classmates. The idea here is if the students are not doing the heavy lifting of problem solving and reasoning, they are not learning at the ideal rate. It is key that this becomes a non-negotiable in your classroom and it may require heavy practice in the beginning of the school year to get students on board. Here is my favorite table configuration to set up the structure and expectation of collaboration.

Another structure that I see many students (and teachers) question is the amount of conceptual activities vs. practice built into the curriculum. Many teachers will respond to this concern with more practice however it is important to note that procedural fluency is built from conceptual understanding and a rush to procedural fluency is a very real cause of math anxiety. Sometimes more practice is needed however we must be careful we are monitoring student data to know when the timing is right otherwise giving students more practice for the sake of more practice will have a limited effect.

1. How do you support struggling students?

Struggling students push back on the OUR math curriculum when they don’t feel supported. Many will ask that you teach them the formula because they don’t understand the task. It is key that students are given the opportunity to productively struggle with learning mathematics however as teachers we must know when our students need support. This means we must be ready to provide manipulatives, math tools, diagrams, sketches, and anything else they might need to access the tasks. We must be very careful that we are not helping our struggling students if we do the work for them. Struggling students more than anyone need to think through problems and collaborative with their peers so we must resist the urge to show them how to do the work or give them more practice. If a school-wide assessment reveals a student is behind multiple grade levels or has not yet mastered particular standards, more practice might not be the solution because that student is likely still in the conceptual understanding stage. Students do not master all standards every year. This is completely normal. How we respond to support them is crucial. As you plan, look for these boxes that can be found in each OUR lesson that contain excellent ways to support our students:

1. How do you prepare for each lesson?
   

The importance of planning in a collaborative, problem-solving classroom can’t be emphasized enough. To be properly prepared to teach complex tasks with multiple entry points we must complete the tasks ourselves before teaching the lesson. Why? We can’t anticipate how students will answer unless we have studied the tasks ourselves. If possible, we should also work collaboratively with other teachers because they will almost always see the task in a completely different way. We also can’t anticipate what kind of support students might need unless we’ve examined the tasks thoroughly first. For example, in 7th grade unit 1, lesson 1, students are asked to determined which polygons on a grid are scaled copies of an original polygon in both activity 3 and the cool-down. I know some of my students have not yet mastered area, so I must be prepared to support them in understanding what the grid means and how to measure the side lengths of the polygons. For this I will model by color-coding each polygon side and provide markers so students can properly track corresponding sides. As you can see in my planning document below, I also plan on generating guiding questions to help students get started without doing the heavy lifting myself.

Please share any additional questions that can be used for the reflection process below!