Montclair district goes with one textbook series
For the first time in nearly a decade, all of Montclair's elementary school students are going to be learning their basic math lessons from the same textbook series.
The Montclair School District has adopted a common set of mathematics instructional materials that will be used by the district's kindergarten-though-fifth-grade students.
Chief Academic Officer Gail Clarke said that starting in September, teachers in the district's six elementary schools will begin using "enVisionMATH," published by the Scott Foresman/Addison Wesley division of Pearson as an anchor textbook.
According to Clarke, enVision will replace "Everyday Math" that had been used by several district schools. The move will affect nearly 3,000 students and about 100 teachers.
"Students have already been seeing the books because we've piloted the series in the schools beginning this past fall," noted Clarke. "The teachers and the students will have all of the enVision materials in September for the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year."
District Director of Mathematics for K-12 Dana Rubin said the change was prompted by feedback administrators got from the district's math teachers.
Rubin said 88 percent of the 95 teachers surveyed preferred to utilize one anchor textbook series "rather than one building using one series, and another building using another series."
"We're not looking to take away the individuality of any of our elementary schools," he said, "but there really needs to be a consistent textbook offering that all students can pursue, regardless of what elementary school that they go into, so when they feed into our middle schools, they will have had a similar math learning experience."
The state Department of Education's decision to adopt the Common Core State Standards and the shift to the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC assessments, next year also gave teachers and school administrators an impetus to seek a common textbook choice.
"There is no holy grail of textbook out there that is in perfect text alignment to the Common Core," Rubin cautioned. "There are potentially areas that can be improved in every single text series."
But Rubin said enVision will provide a "strong math foundation for the more advanced math courses that they will take in high school.
"A strong foundation is a critical success factor for students who will be taking high-level math courses, whether in the high school or beyond," he said.
Watchung Elementary School Principal Joseph Schmidt said the new textbook has already made a mark in his school.
"Watchung hasn't had a new math textbook in nearly a dozen years because we always believed in teaching to standards and utilized a lot of different supplemental materials," Schmidt said. "And there never was a good math book which we believed was aligned with the standards.
"We're happy now," he said. "It's going to give us a good base that's aligned with Common Core, and also give us flexibility."
Schmidt said teachers will still have "flexibility to use other supplementary materials, which lends itself to creativity in the classroom and the artistry of teaching."
According to Clarke, the district will hold a workshop for parents before the end of the current school year to give them a preview of the enVision materials and discuss how they can use them at home.
District teachers will also get an overview of the materials during professional development sessions scheduled in June.
Contact George Wirt at email@example.com