Soon, high schoolers won’t use tattered math textbooks or even those still in somewhat pristine condition, instead, they will experience a new way of learning math. One without textbooks.

The end of the 2022-23 school year is the end of a district-wide math curriculum revision process that began about five years ago. Normally, curriculum revisions only take two years, but the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted the math revision’s progress. Changes in general curriculum revision that the math department was the first to go through also pushed back the ending date. The end is now in sight, with implementation being planned for the 2023-24 school year. Part of the implementation includes new workbooks for all of the classes in the high school.

Illustrative Math is the new program for grades K-5, and Carnegie Math will be used for grades 6-12. Math Department Head Daniel Krause was one of the high school representatives on the small group leadership team. “The biggest change I think that we’ll see is going to be a huge update to a focus away from more like traditional textbook problems and a lot more into like problem-solving and applicational math that is going to be a lot more connected to the 21st-century skills and strategies…” he said. They think the workbooks students can write in will serve the students in this way as they move away from the traditional textbook method of teaching math.

Superintendent Greg Dufoe said the board approves the purchases of these resources in the spring before training happens in June for the teachers impacted by this change. There will be people from the textbook providers training the teachers on-site during this time.

Throughout the revision process, Krause said, “We’ve [the small group leadership team] met almost every single month at the DAC with members from all of the different buildings and administrative team as well.” Their job is to pick the resources to transition to in the coming years, but he said it involved research before they could choose those resources.

“We’ve done a ton of work on you know research-based strategy and what we want good instruction to look like, what we want students to be doing, what we want teachers to be doing at ADM; and so we spent almost a year not even looking at resources, but looking at instructional strategies…” said Krause.

Math is not the only subject undergoing changes. There are other subjects in different places of the curriculum revision process as well. “Each year there’s always going to be a number of content areas or curriculum areas that are in revision,” Dufoe said. He mentioned that English/language arts for grades K-8 was in year 1 this year, grades 9-12 will start revision next year, while world languages are set to finish the final year of the process in the fall, and specials like art and music are finished this spring.

Even with an impactful change coming next school year, Krause said, “I’m looking forward to the challenge for students and facilitating that growth because it’s going to be very very kind of growth focused on how do we not only meet kids where they’re at but how do we grow beyond just the traditional math computation and into really the connection of the math story.”