ABSTRACT

These excerpts come from interviews with Beth, a first-and second-grade teacher in a large urban school, about her experiences piloting a set of Standardsbased mathematics curriculum materials. As Beth gained experience with the curriculum program, her interactions with the curriculum materials changed. In her initial months using the materials, Beth was concerned with making transitions from one activity to the next and from one day to the next. She read the teacher’s guide very closely for specific ideas about how to make these transitions. She was often frustrated that she did not find the information she was looking for and felt she had to create these transitions for herself and her students. Later, she moved away from this search for detailed information and began using the curriculum materials as more of a “resource.” From the middle quotation alone, one might suspect that Beth was moving away from using the curriculum materials altogether or that she was beginning to use them in a piecemeal or incoherent way. However, as the third quotation suggests (and as was

confirmed by our observations of her teaching), Beth was instead moving towards a more connected and trusting use of the materials, confident in the decisions “they” [the curriculum developers] had made in creating a set of materials in which there was a “natural flow” for students across the year.