Q&A: Navigating Curriculum Implementation Challenges

During our recent webinar on the common pitfalls of curriculum implementation, Executive Director of School Partnerships Pat Coyle answered questions from educators across the country.

We’ve compiled the highlights below, featuring insights on everything from instructional visions to the principal’s role in supporting a new curriculum.

This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity. You can access the full webinar recording here.

Is it more effective to have one instructional vision, or content-specific visions by subject?

Alignment in your instructional framework is essential, along with having a purpose statement that connects different content teams. It’s important to understand how you envision supporting a child holistically, across all of their content areas.

But ultimately, a content-specific vision is highly beneficial. It allows you to get much more specific and provide feedback that is not curriculum or content agnostic. Defining what excellent, researched-based instruction looks like in each content area helps clarify expectations for classrooms. The goal is to get specific while maintaining coherence across your broader instructional framework.

What should districts do when a vetted HQIM doesn’t fully align with their instructional vision or student needs? (For example, gaps for AP readiness)

No curriculum is perfect. Nothing will exactly fit your specific needs, so district leaders must identify gaps and determine necessary supplements. For example, if AP readiness isn’t addressed in the curriculum, considering what the skills, capabilities, and knowledge requirements might be to succeed in AP classes will help you think about how you need to supplement.

You may need to adjust your scope and sequence to cycle through specific standards more frequently throughout the year. Make sure you collect strong data to inform these decisions and clearly communicate why changes are being made to improve student outcomes. Center this as part of the continuous improvement process: identify patterns across schools to target coaching and support, align people to work, set measurable goals, and create feedback loops so you can adjust throughout the year, rather than waiting until the end of the year to find out what didn’t work.

How can district leaders support principals in this work?

If you can get principals to sit with teachers for professional learning on the new materials, that is extremely powerful. I love when principals and teachers can learn together.

It’s also helpful for district-level content leaders to work with principals to understand the curriculum design and define their roles and responsibilities in supporting implementation. This resource includes both guidance for planning this type of training and a sample agenda for a leadership curriculum study. This process helps leaders understand and clarify what is required of their teachers, so that they can connect professional learning to best support implementation.

For example, in our work with school leaders, my colleague will spend a couple of minutes reviewing a lesson together before walking into a classroom so that the leader knows the purpose, key moves, and what students should be doing. That gives the leader enough context to provide really strong feedback from the observation.

There are a lot of moves like that, and they require coordination between academic and school leadership teams to ensure a common view of instructional leadership along with clear roles and responsibilities across teams.

How can a leader who oversees all content areas develop a deep understanding of instructional materials?

Lean into a shared leadership model as much as possible. Our Principal Role Clarity paper explores how a principal can distribute some responsibilities. That might mean building up teacher leaders to provide additional support for instructional materials, or assigning assistant principals to oversee specific content areas, while the principal supports those assistant principals in their roles. That can help each instructional leader lean deeply into one content area.

If you don’t have all these roles, focus on the importance of small wins and not trying to do too much at once. Have a very feasible goal for curriculum implementation and build a strong coalition, so that teachers feel invested and share ownership and responsibility. That way, you aren’t the only one trying to push the materials forward.

This often involves the leader being able to clearly frame the purpose and use of the materials, and to speak clearly about how these materials will help students learn. Then, continuously improve by listening to your team’s perspectives and further building that inclusivity.

What type of data should you use to monitor curriculum implementation?

Walkthrough data using a focused observation tool, like the Instructional Practice Guide, is very helpful, so you can go into a classroom and norm on what you’re looking for. Particularly in the first year of implementation, focusing your efforts on key indicators can help instructional leaders and teachers norm on what effective implementation looks like in the classroom without trying to do too much at once.

I also recommend triangulating data to get a complete picture of what’s happening in the classroom and why. Conduct regular focus groups and surveys, ideally keeping the same questions so you can track responses over time. It can be helpful for your implementation committee to do empathy interviews with both reluctant and excelling curriculum users to learn from those experiences. Finally, I recommend building a theory of action—if we do this with materials and support leaders and teachers in this way, then we will see students impacted in that way—and assigning data points to measure each step in that chain of change.

Visit the Curriculum Support Guide for more free guidance and resources to support HQIM selection and implementation.