| In the current educational climate, teachers in low-performing schools are experiencing pressure from state and district policy-makers to raise student performance on state tests. Some district administrations have undertaken various measures including implementing numerous and specific mathematics content standards, adopting particular curricular packages and requiring teachers to use them as their primary instructional materials, and even creating pacing guides with uniform timelines for presenting lessons to students. These efforts have had the cumulative effect of urging teachers to stick closely to a standard curriculum in order to raise student test scores. Teachers must also interpret and attend to the needs of their students, and ideally teach their students to understand mathematical concepts and processes, as opposed to narrowly mastering procedural skills. It may not always be possible to both follow administrative mandates about instruction and meet student needs, and teachers may have to make a compromise between these two objectives.;My findings indicated that the teachers' individual goals for their teaching, beliefs about their students' needs, and interpretations of the district's curricular mandates interacted to steer their instructional choices to very different results. Two of the teachers dutifully followed the textbook, while two essentially disregarded it in favor of other materials. Teachers' own senses of their autonomy to make curricular decisions and their support for their students' autonomy in learning math emerged as important factors. I suggest implications for teacher professional development and curricular materials development.;In this study, I examined how elementary school teachers in a particular accountability-pressured school decided to teach mathematics. Drawing on multiple interviews and ten classroom observations per teacher, I created portraits of the mathematics instructional choices of four second-grade teachers, including their use of instructional materials such as textbooks. I drew on an analytical framework adapted from Stein, Grover, and Henningsen (1996) to assess various features of the lesson, in order to note the interaction between the materials and the teachers' decisions about how to use them. I developed a "lesson signature" for each teacher, a visual representation of the typical organization of the teacher's lessons and how materials were used within them. |
