CORE President Robert Sheffield on California’s New Math Framework – Part 1 (November 2021)
Robert Sheffield:
Well, I believe the new math framework is both visionary as well as highly aspirational. It’s visionary in the sense that it is centering equity within a very strong curriculum assessment and instruction conversation about the ways in which we need to be thinking about math instruction at scale as a state. So that is the first time that that has happened, and to my knowledge, as I look across states, I don’t think I can pinpoint another state that has tried to center equity in a similar kind of way. So in that way, it is truly visionary.
In terms of its aspiration, we do have to think critically about, once again, where are teachers relative to what we are aspiring for them to do relative to the framework. So the same type of challenge that we had in 2013, 2014, where we released what was an aspirational framework for that time period, and many teachers still were not ready to move into that space. I do believe now because of the vision and the level of aspiration of this framework, that gap space is even broader at this point.
And I do wanna just kind of call that particular point out because I work in the realm of teacher development, so I do have to think critically about how do we get teachers prepared adequately and meet them wherever they are on their own journey to be able to reach this place now where we’re aspiring to as a state with this very visionary framework.
So overall, I believe that it is a great resource that should be driving the ways in which we are going to go forward with math instruction in the state. I believe it has the right kinds of elements of instruction within it. And now it’s really going to be a matter of how do those of us that work in the teacher development space and the capacity building space grow the capacity to be able to support teachers in this very visionary and aspirational way.