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Location on ILC:

Click: on 6-8 or AGA grade band tile and navigate to the Curriculum Guide

Click: Distanced and Unfinished Learning Resources

Use the dropdown menus to find the Adaptation Packs for your desired course

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Read about the approach to the Imagine Learning Illustrative Mathematics resources for adapting to distance learning and addressing unfinished learning as a result of COVID-19.

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Distance and Unfinished Learning Resources

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Read about the approach to the Imagine Learning Illustrative Mathematics resources for adapting to distance learning and addressing unfinished learning as a result of COVID-19.

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Location on ILC:

Click: on the 6-8 Curriculum Guide

Click: on the scope and sequence information

Find resource under Unit Dependencies (Middle school standard 3-year course) drop down

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Scope and sequence information | IL Classroom

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Find at-a-glance charts that outline course pacing and unit dependencies within and across courses

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Location on ILC:

Click: on the AGA Curriculum Guide

Click: on the scope and sequence information

Find resource under Unit Dependencies (High school) drop down

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Scope and sequence information | IL Classroom

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Find at-a-glance charts that outline course pacing and unit dependencies within and across courses

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Location on ILC:

Navigate to a course and then a unit landing page

Click: on Check Your Readiness Assessment under the section titled Lessons & Assessments

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This is the digital version of the pre-unit diagnostic assessment for Grade 7, Unit 1. Paper-based versions of this assessment are available in the Additional Materials tab. Most of the problems address prerequisite concepts and skills for the unit, a few items assess what students already know of the key contexts and concepts that will be addressed by the unit.

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Grade 7 Unit 1 Check Your Readiness Assessment Planning Table

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Grade 7 Unit 1 Check Your Readiness Assessment Planning Table

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Location on ILC:

Click: on the About this Activity tab across the top of the Check Your Readiness Assessment page

Click on the hyperlink to the "Check Your Readiness Assessment Planning Table"

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7.1 Check Your Readiness Assessment Planning Table

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Use this table to support planning decisions as you evaluate student work on the Check Your Readiness assessment for Grade 7, Unit 1.

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What Does IM Think About Unfinished Learning and Supporting Students with a Variety of Entry Points? (Grades 6–12)

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What Does IM Think About Unfinished Learning and Supporting Students with a Variety of Entry Points? (Grades 6–12)

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Key Discussion Points:

IM's approach to the diversity of student entry points.

IM recognizes that students approach new mathematical learning with different entry points.

Extensive remediation on below grade-level content is not productive.

IM is designed to provide access and challenge to all students within the entire, inclusive classroom.

Strategies for providing additional time on prior content -- support for whole class and support for individuals

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In a class of 25 students, there are 25 different learners with 25 different backgrounds. Students come into the classroom with varied experiences with school, with mathematical content, and with life. While this has been true for time immemorial, teachers may feel it more acutely since the onset of the pandemic. The IM Team would like to support teachers with planning for the variety of student entry points. In particular, what features in the curriculum support strategies for providing additional time on prior content?

IM's Approach to the Diversity of Student Entry Points

IM recognizes that students approach new mathematical learning with different entry points. Some teachers may have experienced a wider variety of entry points due to disruptions to the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school year. Other teachers may consistently experience a wide range of entry points, for reasons including disruption in formal education, lack of full access to content in prior grades, or because some students take more time to fully know, use, and enjoy content.

Extensive remediation on below grade-level content is not productive. When students have difficulties accessing grade-level work, the approach of giving students work from earlier grades is ineffective, and approaches that provide access to grade-level work are preferred. A recent study by TNTP showed that giving students work from earlier grades results in losing more academic ground and getting even less access to grade-level work in the future. In other words, "meeting students where they are" and trying to remediate learning deficits often results in having to meet them even further back next year. Those stuck in this cycle are disproportionately black and brown students, students experiencing poverty, students with learning disabilities, and students learning English.

Learning new ways to support students coming in with different entry points is challenging, but ". . . trying to give every child a real chance to do grade-level work, however imperfectly, will lead to far better results than picking and choosing who gets those opportunities-right now and over the long run." ( Steiner and Weisberg, 2020 )

IM is designed to provide access and challenge to all students within the entire, inclusive classroom. All students benefit from being part of the conversations and hearing multiple perspectives and approaches from their peers, and the curriculum is designed with a wide variety of entry points in mind.

Teachers take advantage of built-in features of the curriculum to respond to student thinking during grade-level instruction, including:

accessible tasks designed to invite a variety of responses and give students a chance to learn from studying multiple approaches

warm-up activities and activity launches designed to provide an invitation to the mathematics and activate prior knowledge in the service of accessing grade-level content

prompts in each activity to address misconceptions

IM has several built-in features to position each teacher to respond to student thinking in real time. There are suggested adjustments based on student responses to cool-downs and pre-unit diagnostic assessment questions. There are also additional resources, such as the Algebra 1 Extra Support materials. When a teacher is responding to student thinking during the lesson, each student's learning is being addressed just in time and not postponed until later with a separate experience.

Strategies for Providing Additional Time on Prior Content
Given the wide variety of starting points students come in with, teachers may find that some students need additional time and additional instruction to be ready for grade-level content.
Schools provide additional time and additional instruction in a variety of ways, depending on student needs and available resources.
Support for the whole class
When most students in a class need some additional instruction to access grade-level content, teachers might use an optional lesson already in the curriculum, or use the suggestions in a Curriculum Adaptation Pack to find an activity, lesson, or practice problem from a previous grade or unit to supplement.

Adding supplemental material from a prior grade so that students can access grade-level content should be:

Just in time, rather than preventative. Rather than beginning the year with a long diagnostic assessment and spending several weeks covering prior-year material, use the Check Your Readiness pre-unit diagnostic questions and Curriculum Adaptation Packs to determine interventions needed just before encountering grade-level content within the unit.

Limited to what students need to access the grade-level content, so that students have a chance to do the major work of the grade. For example, in Grade 8 Unit 2, students will recognize when two slopes are equal. An unproductive approach would be to stretch back to grade 4 work on fractions of a pizza, or fractions of a dollar, or other contexts focused on visualizing equivalent fractions-this is unhelpful for the purposes of comparing slopes. Instead, the work students have just been doing in Unit 2 on similar triangles will help them in Unit 3 recognize that, for example, the slope 4/3 and the slope 8/6 are equal, and they can use different arguments for explaining why. A quick refresher on equal quotients, such as extending the warm up from Grade 8 Unit 2 Lesson 10 to include some more examples and a discussion of different strategies, some references posted in the room, and having a calculator handy may be all that is needed.

Balanced with thoughtful prioritization. IM used the guidance from Student Achievement Partners to prioritize major work of the grade in recommending lessons and topics to cut if most students need significant additional time to be ready for the grade. This ensures that students get to experience instruction on major work of the grade and don't fall further behind.

Support for individual students

Unfinished learning is not the same as special education or having an Individualized Education Plan. Sometimes these two are conflated, but many students who have unfinished learning do not have learning disabilities, and many students with learning disabilities are ready for grade-level content provided there are multiple means of access and engagement. IM's support for students with disabilities is designed to provide those multiple means per the Universal Design for Learning principles so each student has access to the grade-level content in the curriculum.

Because of this, students may need additional time focused on math for multiple reasons:

A student with an IEP may have the prerequisite understanding and skills, but may need more time to process the grade-level content being worked on or more ways to explore the content.

A student may be able, generally, to learn in the amount of time and structure of their math class but may need to understand additional content or skills from prior grades in order to be successful with upcoming content.

A student may need to learn content that they need to access upcoming content and may need more time and more means of access and engagement, representation, and action and expression to learn that content and the grade-level content being taught in their math class.

Therefore, it is important to be clear in planning whether additional time outside of math class is designed to make sure students are ready with prerequisite knowledge, or to give students who are ready for grade-level content but need more time and a wider variety of means of accessing the content, or an intervention class is serving both needs at once.

The IM curriculum does not currently have an aligned intervention product. However, when there is time outside the math block for additional support for individual students, we recommend fortifying the representations and routines from IM rather than learning other representations and routines. Being introduced to too many strategies, programs, and representations causes cognitive overload and dilutes students' ability to focus on the math content. Extra time with what a student is seeing in math class, and with just-in-time prerequisite content, gives opportunities to be more successful in math class. For the Algebra 1 course, there is a set of support materials designed for this purpose. Read more about the Algebra 1 Extra Support materials.

In order to facilitate providing additional support outside of the math block with aligned routines, representations, approaches, etc., IM has resources that schools and districts can take advantage of:

pre-unit diagnostic problems (included in IM 6-12 Math as the Check Your Readiness assessment). These can aid in determining which students may need additional time focused on prerequisite content as well as identifying the most important prerequisite content

optional lessons and activities that often provide extra practice or review prior grade-level materials

notes for teachers in each cool-down with suggestions for supporting students including suggestions for reviewing prior learning to give more students access to the grade-level content. These can help teachers identify opportunities for both supporting grade-level content and supplementing with work on prerequisite content that may be impacting students' current work

Curriculum Adaptation Packs, available on the LearnZillion platform and in the IM Community Hub, which suggest prior lessons, activities, and sections to revisit to help students get ready for upcoming work in a "just in time" fashion

Next Steps

Reflect: how do you support various student access points during math class? What structures can you put in place outside of class to support student access during class, and what might these additional math blocks look like? What parts of the IM curriculum would you want to use or reinforce?

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What Does IM Think About Unfinished Learning and Supporting Students with a Variety of Entry Points? (Grades 6-12) - IM CERTIFIED® BLOG

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In a class of 25 students, there are 25 different learners with 25 different backgrounds. Students come into the classroom with varied experiences with school, with mathematical content, and with life. While this has been true for time immemorial, teachers may feel it more acutely since the onset of the pandemic.

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Differentiating Instruction with IM 6-12 Math

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Differentiating Instruction with IM 6-12 Math

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Key Discussion Points:

IM focuses on access and challenge

Differentiation plans should include:

adjusting to common interests using familiar concepts

using specific resources

individualizing practice

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By Max Ray-Riek, Director of 6-12 Professional Learning

In my role at IM, working with teachers and administrators, I am asked to help with the challenges of implementing an IM curriculum. We are often asked, "How can I differentiate instruction while using this curriculum?" or "What resources does IM offer to support differentiation?"

When we created the teaching guide for the curriculum, we chose not to use the word differentiation . This was deliberate, as differentiation is interpreted in many ways. One common interpretation is providing different instructional tasks for different students, either through differentiated student materials or by pulling small groups based on some diagnosis and providing different instruction to those groups.

We focus on and . IM K-12 Math is designed to give all students access to grade-level mathematics, by providing tasks that students can make sense of, reason about, collaborate to solve, and learn from without specifying the strategies students must use to solve the problem. The curriculum is also designed to give all students opportunities to go deeper with the content, and to make many connections between concepts. In fact, the curriculum is designed for and works best when students come up with a range of approaches (concrete, abstract, correct, incorrect, algorithmic, visual, etc.) and are given multiple opportunities to compare their thinking to peers and to the examples provided in the curriculum. All students benefit from hearing a range of ideas and connecting their ideas to the ideas of peers with different approaches.

We recognize that students come to us with a wide variety of interests, strengths, experiences with math and language, cognitive resources, etc. Providing access to grade-level mathematics does require that teachers make strategic adjustments in order for students to engage, make sense of the questions being asked, persist, collaborate with peers, share their thinking, listen to and understand each others' thinking, internalize and try on new ideas, and practice and apply what they are learning.

Educator and researcher Rhonda Bondie suggests that teachers plan for and use differentiated instruction before, during, and after a lesson as they

adjust common instruction: adjust the launch, directions, sequence of activities

use specific resources: offer a support such as sentence frames to students who need access for participating in conversation with their classmates

individualize practice: offer various practice assignments for students to choose from (2019)

What does this look like in a problem-based classroom? When we apply Bondie's suggestions, we consider what supports are already included in the curriculum, as well as how teachers can plan to support access and challenge for all students. Let's consider an example drawn from experiences with several teachers and coaches using IM across the country. The example is from IM Algebra 1 Unit 4: Functions, and we'll call the teacher Ms. Goodson.

Adjust common instruction: Use a familiar context

Ms. Goodson is preparing to teach Lesson 1: Describing and Graphing Situations . She knows that the purpose of Lesson 1 in each unit is to invite students to the mathematics of the unit and that students will have opportunities throughout the first several lessons to continue to work on these ideas. The lesson goals will help her decide what is most important for all students to consider. She reads the lesson narrative and the learning goals. The learning goals for the lesson are:

Interpret descriptions and graphs of functions in context.

Understand that a relationship between two quantities is a function if there is only one possible output for each input.

Use words and graphs to represent relationships that are functions, including identifying the independent and dependent variables.

Ms. Goodson next looks at the cool-down and student lesson summary. This gives her a sense of what she should be monitoring for as students work-she should listen to students talking about whether one variable is a function of the other, considering whether there is only one output for a given input, and either drawing graphs from descriptions of situations or describing situations based on graphs.

With that information in mind, she takes a look at the warm-up. It's about buying bagels from a bagel shop. There is not a bagel shop in her town, though many students have seen them for sale in prepackaged bags at the grocery store. Ms. Goodson considers whether this is a good opportunity for students having a window into another culture, but is concerned about the complex context and complex mathematics being too big of a barrier.

This problem features a non-linear pricing scheme, which reminds Ms. Goodson of heated conversations students had during this year's homecoming festivities where couples and groups got discounts for dance tickets. She also remembers that at the homecoming fair tickets for the carnival games were sold individually, by the half-dozen, and the dozen. She decides that changing the context from bagel pricing to ticket pricing will help her students quickly access the warm-up and maintain the mathematical intent: surfacing the idea of the output for a given input being ambiguous (for example 13 bagels could be sold for \$11.25, \$13.00, \$13.25, or \$16.25 unless the store owner always sells other quantities of bagels at the best price).

Use specific resources: Blank copies of the table

Based on previous lessons that involved completing tables of values, Ms. Goodson anticipates that some of her students might have a hard time getting started on the task of filling out the best price table. Some students may want to argue for different pricing schemes, others may feel overwhelmed by having to think about all the different possible prices for each number of tickets and narrow down to the best price. She doesn't want students to get bogged down in calculating; she wants them to see and understand the tables and graphs that represent the ambiguous situation versus the situation where price is a (non-linear) function of number of tickets purchased. Therefore she decides to print blank copies of the table of each person's pricing scheme from the activity synthesis to have on hand as needed for groups that are struggling to get started on the best price table.

Her goal is for all students to be ready after 7 minutes of group work time to participate in a conversation about why price is not a function of number of tickets purchased, but best price is.

Use specific resources: Manipulatives

Ms. Goodson also has an idea about Activity 2: Be Right Back! While it's unusual for dogs to be tied up outside of stores in her community, it's pretty common for a dog to be tethered in a yard. However, some of the emerging bilingual students in her class might still have a hard time understanding the descriptions of how the dog moves around the post. How could they engage in a conversation about what the graph should look like if they're having trouble visualizing or asking questions about the situation?

Ms. Goodson reads the suggested supports for English learners and students with disabilities, and plans to launch the task as written in the curriculum, demonstrating the dogs' action on Day 3 using a stuffed dog leashed to a spool of thread and inviting multiple students to use the toy dog to show how they interpret the story, and then share how they might sketch a graph of the dog's distance from the pole over time. She makes sure that she has enough toy animals and spools of thread to offer them to small groups as needed to support their sense-making and conversations. She is confident all groups will be able to get started after that launch, but that they will still have to work hard to both translate the words into actions and the actions into a sensible graph.

Individualize practice

As Ms. Goodson studies Activity 1.3: Talk About a Function, she realizes that there are multiple opportunities to individualize practice and give students different amounts of scaffolding to continue to move towards the learning goals. The task itself gives students the opportunity to make a choice about which pair of variables they choose, and she realizes that some pairs of variables might be harder than others. She also thinks about ways she could provide more access, challenge, and choice for students.

Assign some students an activity from the aligned Algebra 1 Supports lesson which gets to the same learning goals but involves matching rather than creating your own graph.

Assign students a particular pair of variables to focus on first, one that she knows will be accessible and will help them get started with confidence.

Create a worksheet for students to help them remember to answer each of the questions and include sentence stems to help students explain their ideas, not just write their answers.

Encourage students to brainstorm additional pairs of variables, and choose one pair to focus on.

Give students the challenge of making up their own story for a partner to graph.

Use a website such as graphingstories.com to find more examples, based on videos, which might give students more access than a written description. She notes that in the graphingstories.com handout time is already on the -axis. Since she would like students to make a choice about which variable to put where, and how to scale the axes, she would need to provide blank graphs.

Given what she sees in Activity 1.3, and what she knows about the cool-down and lesson summary, Ms. Goodson decides that while students are doing more individualized practice during Activity 1.3, she will monitor and note students who might struggle with the cool-down, which is very similar to the practice. She knows that students will have more opportunities in the next lesson to show what they know, so she decides to invite a few students to come to her desk to work on the cool-down collaboratively. Then they spend time reading and highlighting key ideas in the student lesson summary, so she can better understand what makes sense to them now and what they are still grappling with. She will continue to monitor these students' understanding throughout the next several lessons since the cool-down guidance states that students will have more opportunities to work on these mathematical ideas. There is no need to "press pause" until Lessons 4 or 5 if students are not yet able to evaluate and interpret equations given in function notation.

Whew! That is a lot of decisions to make, but Ms. Goodson has been watching and listening to her students and uses many of the suggestions and supports already built in the curriculum and the lesson plan. Ms. Goodson spends her planning time thinking about how she will make adjustments to support her students, rather than having to create lots of additional materials or come up with different standards-aligned activities for different students.

Next Steps

Consider an upcoming lesson.

1. What supports for access and challenge are already included in the lesson?

2. What can you ask, amplify, or adjust during common instruction to provide additional access or challenge?

3. What specific resources can you offer students who need additional access or challenge?

4. How can you individualize practice using:

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Differentiating Instruction with IM 6-12 Math™ - IM CERTIFIED® BLOG

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**Before accessing ILC links, first you'll need to log into ILC by clicking the ILC square in your SSO.

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Innovation Network & Opportunity Network Contact List

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Innovation Network & Opportunity Network Contact List

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Please add your course, name, email, and school name so that you can collaborate with one another in the future.

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If anyone needs help with pacing and specifically needs support with content, you can e-mail math@philasd.org

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Diagnostic Assessments (Check Your Readiness Assessments) | IL Classroom

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Read more about the unit diagnostic assessments and how to use them.