Pacing in the IMP Curriculum

Fitting the Curriculum to the School Year

As you look at the IMP units, you will notice that they are broken down into "days." That is, each unit is organized into individual daily lessons, with a description of what should happen in class and what should be assigned for homework. Feedback from many teachers over the years has fine-tuned this breakdown; generally an IMP curriculum day will fit fairly well into a 50-minute class period.

You may also have noticed that, for example, each of the five Year 1 units contains about 30 days, so teaching the Year 1 curriculum exactly as outlined should take about 150 days--in theory. If your school year is 180 days, then it would seem that you have about 30 days to spare. Enter the realities of teaching high school--fire drills, shortened assembly schedules, field trips, school-wide testing, restructured bell schedules, and teacher inservice days, to name a few. Then there is the reality that sometimes your students may not accomplish in a day what you had hoped. All of a sudden some "day" expands to a day and a half. What you will need to do is make an overall plan for the year, and then make adjustments periodically. However, you can have confidence that the overall curriculum has been adjusted, based on feedback from hundreds of classrooms, so that each "Year" of the curriculum pretty well fits a standard school year.

Concept Development and Mastery of Skills

For many teachers starting out with this curriculum, a recurrent question "Do I need to spend more time on this topic? My students don't seem to have gotten it' yet. When will they see it again?"

In traditional mathematics learning, students work with each skill in isolation and are expected to master it before moving on to the next one. But students really learn in a more gradual way and the IMP curriculum takes that reality into account. It allows students to develop their understanding of concepts and their facility with skills over time and in many different contexts. The teacher's guide to each unit includes comments about the level of understanding to be expected from students at each stage of the unit's development.

Finding the Right Pace

With all that said, you still have some choices to make about the pace at which your class moves through the curriculum. Finding the right pace for your school schedule and your students will take time and experience.

You do not want to be so tied to the calendar that you breeze by topics that your students have not had sufficient time to play with and digest. If your students seem to have insight into a problem or activity, but do not meet the activity's goals, you may want to allot more class time for the assignment. On the other hand, you do not want to be drilling a topic when the goal of the unit is simply to give students an intuitive feel for an idea.

You will probably be best off if you follow the schedule for each unit fairly closely the first time you teach it. Make written notes of spots where students were quicker than the teacher's guide led you to expect, as well as of the places they were bogged down. Keep a record of things like

• how you would teach the same lesson next time
• what questions you would ask students to get them going
• how much time should really be spent
• what you could have done differently in a prior unit in order to facilitate learning in the current unit

As you pace your way through each unit, know that you and your students have the flexibility to stop and reflect on where you are in the unit and how the unit's goals are being achieved. Sometimes students tend to lose sight of the forest for the trees, doing each day's activities as if the activities were all independent of each other. By asking questions and having students reflect, you can help them make connections to the main problem or theme of the unit.

Until you have taught the four-year IMP sequence and know where topics are going, you should resist the temptation to interrupt the flow of a unit and supplement the curriculum content with your own materials. There will be times when not all of your students "see the light," as well as times that the "ah-ha" experience happens in the first 15 minutes of a two-day activity and you are left wondering what to do. If your students need more work on a concept or an added challenge in some part of the curriculum, use the supplemental problems at the end of the unit.

Nontraditional Scheduling

If your school does not have 50-minute-a-day, five-day-a-week math periods, you'll need to make some adjustments in order to fit IMP's "days" into your scheduling.

There is no simple formula for this, but the classwork/homework flow of the units should be maintained as closely as possible, especially because many in-class activities are designed with the idea that students will have each other's support as they explore new ideas. Moving a homework assignment into class time will cause less disruption of the development of the mathematics than vice versa. If you have any kind of restructured schedule, your best bet is to network with an IMP school with a similar schedule.