Beyond the Script: How Curriculum Authors Communicate with Teachers as Curriculum Enactors

Abstract

This chapter introduces our approach to analyzing how curriculum authors communicated with teachers. Built on recommendations by Ball and Cohen (Educational researcher 25:6–14, 1996), Davis and Krajcik (Educational Researcher 34:3–14, 2005), and Remillard (Curriculum Inquiry 29:315–342, 1999, Elementary School Journal 100:331–350, 2000), we explored whether and the extent to which curriculum authors provided guidance intended to support teachers in their roles as curriculum enactors. The chapter reports on the coding framework used by the ICUBiT team to categorize different approaches of communicating with teachers in mathematics lesson guides and presents findings from quantitative analysis of these data. We found differences in the quantity of communication and the authors’ tendencies to direct teachers’ actions versus communicate to them about mathematics, student thinking, or design rationale (which we considered potentially educative). We also found that one program tended to combine directive and educative communication much more extensively than others. When looking across findings from previous chapters, we found alignment between mathematical emphasis, pedagogical approach, and approach to communicating with the teacher in the lesson guide. The findings in this chapter set up Chaps. 6, 7, and 8, which offer an in-depth analysis of communication within each type of support for teachers.

The findings in this chapter reflect the work of the entire ICUBiT team, all of whom were fully involved in conceptualizing coding categories and undertaking coding of the 75 lesson guides. These team members include: Napthalin Atanga, Shari McCarty, Luke Reinke, Dustin Smith, Joshua Taton, and Hendrik Van Steenbrugge.