Empowering Math Success: The Curriculum Review Process at Seoul Foreign School

By Michael Lucchesi PYP Coordinator

Seoul Foreign School is continually striving to ensure students are growing and achieving socially, emotionally and academically. One way the school approaches this is through a curriculum review. In general, the curriculum is composed of a variety of subjects and outlines what and how they will be taught. Together they shape the educational experiences of all students at SFS. More specifically, the curriculum contains a standards-based sequence of planned experiences in each subject and grade level describing what is essential for teaching and learning such as the content and applied learning skills students need to practice with which to achieve proficiency.

Each curriculum has a natural cycle of existence. This curriculum review and development cycle is a systematic procedure involving the whole school to collect information necessary to make timely, data-based, best practices decisions about curriculum to meet the needs of students.

Schools around the world that set a goal of engaging students with relevant, significant and rigorous learning experiences will have a curriculum review cycle in place as it’s long been considered best practice and vital to a school’s core function of helping students grow and achieve. “I want to be as emphatic as possible,” notes Dr. Michael Schmoker, educational author and consultant, “the impact of the actual, taught curriculum on school quality, on student learning, is indescribably important!”

According to a meta-analysis of factors that affect student achievement, educational researcher Robert Marzano noted in What works in School: Translating Research Into Action, “...the number one factor that impacts student learning is what gets taught and how it gets taught… .”

For the past year, the Elementary School faculty and administrators have been analyzing our current approaches to teaching math as well as our math resources with the focus on positioning our students for math success by supporting their development of proficient number sense, a deep conceptual understanding of math practices, self-confidence in their math ability, and to enjoy the journey of becoming mathematicians!

To assist us in the review a math consultant was brought on board to lead the discussions, data gathering, faculty and parent interviews/surveys and analysis. Specifically, this process included reviewing a variety of math curricula, resources, and pedagogical approaches and best practice for numeracy teaching and learning.

At the end of our review process, Elementary School staff and administrators consulted a final report to guide our discussions and help us determine the best path forward with math. We are excited to share that we have decided on the following approaches and resources for math instruction with official implementation in August 2023:

• Adoption of ZEARN (further details below) as the core resource for math teaching and learning (this will replace Math in Focus)

• Supplemental resources include: Jo Boaler’s Mindset Mathematics, Sherry Parish’s Number Talks, Math Investigations by SAAVAS and Bridges in Mathematics by The Math Learning Center will be incorporated into our program

• Continued alignment to the Common Core State Standards

We have already started taking steps to ensure our teachers and students will have a smooth transition to Zearn, such as an early adoption of resources and components of the new program and professional development with our consultant to develop consistency in our approach to teaching math (similar to the literacy workshop approach).

Additionally, during our recent evaluation visit, these plans were shared with the WASC and IB visiting team. They congratulated us on a comprehensive review process and were impressed by teacher enthusiasm for the direction mathematical learning is heading in the Elementary School!