The ACCLIME project investigates teachers' uses and adaptations of CMP, an NSF-funded middle school curriculum. The project comprises three nested series of case studies involving school districts that are long-term CMP implementers and that have provided substantial and ongoing support, and 16 middle school mathematics teachers within these districts. The study seeks to better articulate: (1) the ways that teachers adapt CMP over time and how they develop professionally as a result of using the curriculum materials; (2) the connection between district policy, resource development, and teachers' curriculum processes; and (3) the dynamic nature of districts' long-term curriculum implementations.
ACCLIME, a CAREER grant, explored teacher learning and practices associated with successive enactments of units from one of the NSF-funded Standards-based curriculum programs, the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP) program. A major goal of the study was to identify the conditions and practices associated with effective use of innovative curriculum materials. The results show that teachers who engaged in advanced forms of inquiry into student thinking developed the most robust understanding of how instructional sequences in the materials developed student reasoning. Furthermore, the teachers used that understanding to adapt materials in ways that further enhanced opportunities for students to learn mathematics. These results suggest that effective use of innovative curriculum materials is associated with what teachers learn in their own classrooms, and, consequently, teachers need to be supported to engage in inquiry in their classrooms. ACCLIME resulted in a number of publications that highlight different aspects of these findings. In Choppin (2009) [Curriculum Inquiry], I show how a teacher adapted tasks in ways that afforded opportunities for students to generate and attend to multiple strategies. Her adaptations facilitated diverse student strategies and discussion around those strategies; furthermore, the teacher used the differences in the strategies to help students focus on key mathematical concepts. In the same study, the data showed that not all teachers develop similarly transformative knowledge. Two teachers who emphasized procedural mastery adapted tasks in ways that did not generate multiple approaches or attention to student thinking, and instead focused on a narrow range of connections related to developing and manipulating symbolic representations. Furthermore, these teachers reported little new understanding of how students made sense of the mathematical concepts. In other articles, I explain how teacher attention to student thinking, framed as inquiry or professional noticing (Choppin, 2011) [Mathematical Thinking and Learning], helped teachers develop an understanding of students' learning trajectories and informed how they adapted tasks. This is a major finding in that helping teachers develop an understanding of potential learning trajectories has been a key but elusive goal in helping teachers develop effective student-centered forms of mathematics instruction. In Choppin (2011) [Mathematical Education Research Journal], I relate teachers’ understanding of learning trajectories to local theories of instruction, which stand in contrast to more abstract notions of learning trajectories. These local theories provide teachers with actionable ideas related to how students’ reasoning develops over instructional sequences. The data show how these theories inform adaptations of tasks that are responsive to students, are based on evidence developed in prior enactments, and facilitate production of and discussion around student strategies. I term such adaptations as learned adaptations (Choppin, 2011) [Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education] or productive adaptations (DeBarger, Choppin, Beauvineau, & Moorthy, in press). These findings have major implications for policy makers and mathematics teacher educators. First, teacher learning from the use of innovative curriculum materials takes years, even in well-supported circumstances, so policy makers and district leaders need to develop stable and sustained resource commitments if they wish to help teachers use innovative materials productively. Second, policy makers need to support teachers' efforts in new ways. Professional development typically focuses on familiarizing teachers with innovative materials or approaches. In addition, policy makers and district leaders need to provide resources to facilitate teacher inquiry into the ways students engage with instructional sequences and to help teachers use the results of their inquiry to inform their practice.
