How curriculum materials can contribute to implementing instructional innovations: The case of enactment of strategy instruction

Although curriculum materials are essential for implementing instructional innovations, little is known about how exactly they support teachers’ enactment of innovative approaches and how explicitly they must integrate their key components. The paper contributes to reducing this research gap for one instructional innovation: explicit strategy instruction for word problem comprehension strategies. In our qualitative video study, teachers participated in a professional development on explicit strategy instruction and experimented with it in their classrooms. We compared the teachers’ enactment of strategy instruction in two implementation conditions: in the strong material support condition, teachers received curriculum materials in which components of strategy instruction were explicitly integrated. In the weak material support condition, the curriculum materials only provided the sequence of word problems, but the teachers had to implement explicit strategy instruction themselves. In the qualitative analysis of four cases of teachers’ videorecorded enactment, we unpacked how one teacher with weak support provided only limited learning opportunities by non-targeted enactment, with limited measurable student strategic learning gains. However, in the same condition, another teacher provided productive learning opportunities by explicit and targeted strategy instruction in spite of weak material support. In the strong material support condition, learning opportunities were assured even in a case of partially non-targeted enactment (yet high measurable student strategic learning gains). The findings bear consequences for combining curriculum materials with strong support and professional development.