How Curriculum Supports the Instructional Core

We’ve been thinking a lot about high-quality instructional materials lately — and more specifically, about how to make the curriculum actually work to support students, and teachers, in classrooms.

Richard Elmore gave us a useful frame for this: the instructional core. Learning happens in the relationship between teacher, student, and content. This has been referred to as the “instructional triangle” and it’s within this triangle that everything that really matters in schools plays out. And when we think about what high-quality curriculum materials can do, it’s not just about improving the math that students have access to, but it’s also about supporting the connections among students, math, and teaching.

Built for All Students — and Flexible Enough for Each One

Here’s something we find really interesting about well-designed curriculum materials: they’re engineered for all students and no single student at the same time. They set a common, ambitious bar, which is giving every student access to grade-level content, while building in flexibility so teachers can respond to the kids actually in the room. Kids deserve this.

That means the materials aren’t designed to just hand over a lesson plan to teachers and call it done. They anticipate the range of learners teachers are working with. They offer supports for language development and suggestions for students who need a different entry point. And enrichment for students ready to go deeper. The content stays the same. The support structures vary. That design choice sends a clear message: high expectations for all and real support to get there.

Coherence Across Classrooms and Grade Levels

One thing that individual teachers working in isolation simply can’t create on their own is instructional coherence — and this is where shared curriculum materials become a genuine school-wide tool. When teachers across a grade level are working from the same materials, they share a common language. When the materials are designed thoughtfully across grade levels, students get a connected experience where concepts build on each other year after year. And when they work together to develop common instructional practices, this is where coherence can really impact student learning.

That’s not about teachers doing the exact same thing at the exact same moment. But it is about ensuring that students have access to the same learning across classrooms; that what they encounter in second grade, for example, connects meaningfully to what’s coming in third. All students should be guaranteed rich grade level learning experiences no matter which classroom they’re in.

Giving Teachers Room to Actually Teach

This might be one of the things we care most about: what good curriculum materials give back to teachers. When the tasks are strong, coherent, and mathematically rich, teachers don’t have to build everything from the ground up. That frees them up to focus on the harder, more human part of the work: figuring out how to use those materials with these students, on this particular day.

Good materials help teachers identify the learning goal, spot the critical moment in a lesson where understanding really hinges, and think ahead about where students might struggle and what they want to hear students say. They also do something less obvious but just as important: they develop teachers’ own mathematical knowledge for teaching. Guidance on how to elicit student thinking, how to build on it, how to make it visible to the whole class — that’s built into the materials themselves. Teachers get a really strong starting point from the materials, and then they bring their knowledge of their students into their planning.

Rich Tasks and Purposeful Practice for Students

For students, what matters most is the quality of the experience itself. Rich tasks invite genuine sensemaking; they use multiple representations, connect to what students already know, and ask students to actually think rather than just execute a procedure. And deliberate practice, in the best materials, isn’t arbitrary. The activities and games are connected to key content goals. Students aren’t practicing for its own sake; they’re solidifying understanding of particular mathematical ideas that the lesson opened up.

When the tasks are this good, student thinking becomes visible, which is exactly what teachers need to respond well.

The Triangle Holds

One of Elmore’s point was that you can’t improve learning by touching only one corner of the instructional core. Great curriculum materials work all three: they deepen the content students engage with, support teachers in responding to student thinking, and create the conditions for students to do real intellectual work. That feels worth getting right.

The ideas in this post are influenced by the following: Deborah Ball, Jessica Calabrese, David Cohen, Richard Elmore, Elham Kazemi Peg Smith and Mary Kay Stein.