Chapter 4: Teacher Investment in Curriculum Adoption: The Role of Piloting Materials

In 1995, the Kirkwood School District was nearing a mathematics adoption year when we received an invitation to be part of the Missouri Middle School Mathematics (M³) Project at the University of Missouri–Columbia. This ended up being a professional development experience like no other. It helped us support our eventual decision, brought two middle school mathematics departments to the same page philosophically, and gave us the knowledge and research we needed to convince our school board, administrators, and parents of the need for a major shift in the way we taught mathematics in the district. The philosophy of the M³ Project was that important changes in middle school mathematics programs do not simply happen; nor can they be mandated or pushed upon unwilling participants. Rather, the project aimed to empower teachers to make informed decisions about curriculum and instruction in their classrooms. With support from our school district to seriously reconsider our middle school mathematics curriculum, provide resources to field test materials, and pay substitutes for release days for all mathematics teachers involved, we joined the three-year project. By the end of our second year of participation in the M³ project, we had adopted the Middle School MATHThematics program (Billstein & Williamson, 1999a). Our third year of participation in the project supported the implementation of these materials.