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District staff report progress and next steps for Imagine Mathematics implementation
Summary
District teachers-on-assignment told the school board the district's phase-4 implementation of the Imagine Mathematics curriculum focuses on multi-year professional learning, administrator support, disaggregated monitoring for student groups and sustaining instructional practices; trustees asked about multilingual learners, cohort effects and fidelity measures.
District staff gave the Redwood City School Board an update May 27 on phase 4 of the district's Imagine Mathematics implementation, emphasizing professional learning, administrator supports and monitoring to sustain instruction.
Kendall Klein, a teacher on special assignment for middle-school mathematics, and Anastasia Samatus, a K–5 staff-development lead, said the phase focuses on a coherent multi-year professional learning plan, deepening teachers' understanding of standards and progressions, building administrator networks to observe and support instruction, and collecting daily, weekly and unit data disaggregated by student groups to guide improvement. They described classroom routines embedded in the curriculum, including mathematical-language routines, universal-design-for-learning approaches, warm-ups and formative assessments.
The presenters said K–5 is farther into implementation (K–5 adopted in 2023–24) while grades 6–8 are in earlier stages. The curriculum vendor and county implementation toolkit were used to structure district professional development. Klein said the curriculum contains explicit notes on strategies for multilingual learners and that the district has offered targeted trainings; she reported seeing early, measurable improvements for some multilingual-learner groups on the state's dashboard growth metric but cautioned middle-school growth data are not yet fully available.
Trustees pressed staff on several points. One trustee asked whether emphasis on usage metrics from supplemental platforms—described in the presentation as "green light" days—might obscure true effectiveness; staff said the district recently reviewed fidelity guidance with the vendor and will share strategies to increase high-fidelity use. Trustees also raised a cohort concern: a fifth-grade cohort that began kindergarten during the pandemic showed persistent challenges in literacy and some math foundations. Staff attributed that cohort's outcomes to a combination of pandemic disruption and the timing of curriculum rollout, and said the district is targeting interventions.
Board members asked about student voice; staff said individual teachers have conducted classroom-level empathy surveys but the district has not yet run a districtwide student empathy interview on math learning and plans to consider it as a future measure. The presenters also described a Stanford-related Peer Teach supplemental program used in some classrooms as a support, not as a replacement for the core curriculum.
Trustees thanked the presenters and requested continued updates, particularly a forthcoming report on middle-school implementation and outcomes. The board closed the presentation portion of the meeting and moved on to consent items.
