CORE President Robert Sheffield on California’s New Math Framework – Part 2 (November 2021)
Robert Sheffield:
I also believe this is a really critical moment for instructional leadership. Every time we transition into a new set of standards, it is a new opportunity for leaders to communicate to teachers what we expect or what we hope to have happen relative to the changes that we’re all experiencing. One of the things that did occur with the rollout of the previous set of standards is that leadership professional development actually followed teacher and coach professional development, and those of us that were talking to teachers during that time period were hearing very loudly that teachers were wishing that their leaders would’ve been trained first.
So, what I do hope that happens out of this moment is that we do apply that lesson going forward. And as we’re looking to roll out this new framework, we need to have very robust, and I would say rather deep, conversations with leaders about what these changes mean to the overall instructional culture of their classrooms and of their buildings, because what we’re trying to do via this new framework is actually make math instruction more equitable. So, there’s a cultural element to that work that leaders have to attend to, and they have to be absolutely sure that that culture is spreading throughout their campus. For leaders to be able to do that, they need the time to be able to make sense of what this framework means in terms of day-to-day instruction for teachers and for children, but also what type of leadership do they need to enact in order to make sure that this type of learning takes place within their classrooms.
So, based upon what we now see within the framework, there are some very key high level conceptual changes that leaders need to understand at that conceptual level, but they also need to understand, at a very practical level, what should this look like in a classroom? So, as the work of rolling out the standards begins to take place, we do need to think critically about what it is that leaders will need, what do they need to know how to do, what do they need to know how to communicate to teachers, and what are those most important critical supports they need to be providing to teachers in order to make this transition? It will be more than just professional development. It will be time that teachers will need to make sense of the changes. It’ll be time that teachers will need to select the right types of curricular tasks or the right types of curriculum. It will also involve the types of assessments that leaders are choosing, and that assessment component is absolutely critical to the work of leadership because, if you’re choosing the wrong kinds of assessment, you’re actually going to produce the wrong kinds of instruction over time.
So, we wanna make sure that leaders know how to choose the right types of assessment tasks to be absolutely sure that they are going to be encouraging the right types of pedagogies from teachers. So, to kind of wrap all this point up, we need to make a very strong investment in leadership, and that is leadership from the top down, from superintendents down to those mid-level leaders, down to those building leaders. And of course we know that the leadership of teacher leaders and of coaches is critical to this, but we wanna make sure that all of those other administrative leaders understand the why behind these changes, understand what it needs to look like, and then understands how we need to grow capacity in order to make those changes happen.