Each year our teachers find it more difficult to get through their mathematics curriculum and grade level expectations. This may be due to several factors:

• There are too many activities in the instructional program, including: warm-up problems, investigations or explorations, games, practice exercises, projects, written and oral reflections, assessments, and other components. Additionally, our state expects students to know more mathematics than they did in previous years. Our teachers need guidance on where to focus their efforts and help in deciding what to let go of in a grade level because the concepts get taught in subsequent grades.
• There is too much overlap in what gets taught from one grade level to the next. Multiple grades seem to cover the same content at the same level of depth of understanding. Our teachers teach concepts as though students have not learned them in previous years.
• Our teachers might be spending too much time on warm-up activities. Short tasks or problems that should take a few of minutes for students to complete end up taking much of the class period. As a consequence, the richer part of the curriculum gets short-shrift.
• There is a mis-match between what is expected to be covered in a grade level and the amount of time our district allocate for mathematics.

The strategies listed below may be helpful individually or in combination for tackling this challenge: