In the last few posts in the series I encouraged you to:
✓ download your blackline masters and cool-downs and start your materials prep
✓ Dig in to IM resources to get the big picture of how this curriculum is built to be taught
If you haven’t read The Big Picture post, I encourage you to stop and do that first. Without a grasp of how differently this curriculum is put together, the specific planning you do will be less effective.

Pacing out the course

Finally it is time to answer everyone’s burning question – can I fit it all in? The best way to know is to sit down with a calendar of the year and start filling in squares. Everyone’s district calendar is a little different so this is something each site really needs to do for themselves. Before you begin, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Minutes Minutes Minutes

Not every lesson is written to take the same number of minutes. If you are in a self-contained classroom, this may not be a big deal. But for those who will teach 5 different sets of students per day, how things fit into a period is really important – even more so if your site runs a block schedule,where you see students in 110 minute chunks of time every other day. For you thinking about minutes per lesson is crucial.
In our district, 6th grade is self contained, but 7th and 8th grade students move classrooms period by period. To help get a grasp on the difference in lesson length, I made a spreadsheet for 7th and 8th grade. You can access this spreadsheet here.
Below find a picture of unit 1 from the 7th grade sheet.

A few important things to recognize –

• Not all lessons are planned to take the same number of minutes. Notice as you look at the second column in the table above, the number of minutes per lesson varies. Especially if you are planning for a block schedule, some lessons are easier to put together on a block day than others.
• The lesson synthesis is not included in the number of minutes. That lesson synthesis is where you lead discussion, drive home the important learning of the day, have students write down new vocabulary, orchestrate discussions, and tie ideas together. As you make decisions on whether you will include optional activities or discuss a previous cool down that students struggled with, you need to make sure you think about how long that Lesson Synthesis will take you. Most teachers say that for the first unit or so it took them longer than it did later in the year, when the they and their students were used to the structure and routines built into the curriculum.
• Some lessons are optional. For myself, I begin by calendaring them all, but marked optional lessons in case I got behind or really wanted to add a day of error analysis and practice. Fyi 8th grade has less optional lessons than the other two.
• Some activities are optional. We will worry more about choosing which activities you want to include as we plan individual lessons. For now, knowing you have some flexibility on those days will help you plan when you might have time to include any extras you are wanting to add (setting up classroom norms, error analysis, homework discussions, fluency games and review activities are all things that might be on my list.)
• Units are divided into sections. Notice in Grade 8 Unit 1 pictured below, there are 4 separate sections plus a culminating lesson that is not pictured. Lesson from the same section will fit together more seamlessly on a block period.
• Your previous experience If you have experience with the instructional routines embedded in the curriculum and with orchestrating class discussions that build on student thinking, the transitions to this curriculum will be easier for you that the rest of us. But for many, the transition will take some getting used to for both us and our students. Lesson synthesis time may just take longer at first. If that’s you, plan to move a little slower through the first unit.

Getting started

Chose a planning calendar you are comfortable with. Here are a few options you can download:
Year at a Glance – one page, back to back

I love that I can see the whole semester on one page with this calendar. There is room for 3 separate rows of text on each date, but two of them are pretty microscopic. Good for noting special schedules and lesson minutes.
2018-2019 traditional school calendar template

Handy for someone who likes to a little more space to write or who prefers to see only a month at a time.
Look up your own district calendar and put any holidays, staff development days or other special events on your document.

Some planning information and pacing guidelines to help you:

In our district, there is one teacher on special assignment supporting each grade level as they roll out the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. These are some rough calendars we made to assist our school site PLCs in pacing out their year.
planning and pacing info 6th, 7th, 8th
The grade level I support is 8th grade, and I have reworked and revised this several times. I think it would be ideal if we could finish unit 4 before winter break, but that leaves little time to go slower at the beginning or establish class norms. You will see both versions reflected on this document.
Here is an example of how I paced 8th grade using our district calendar. As you can see, it really does all fit. Yeah!
8th grade calender draft This map is color coded to match the workbook covers. That makes me unreasonably happy, so if you are into details like that, you might enjoy this one.
Did you sit down and try it yet? No time like the present . . . everything is right here.

A Good Start

Take a moment to enjoy the sense of accomplishment as you look at your completed calendar. You know there will be little adjustments as things come up during the year, but with the number of minutes and the optional lessons noted on the document, it will be easy to make those adjustments when the need arises.

Sharing the work

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) can be wonderfuls ways to share the workload and advance your practice. But it is easy to let them become bogged down in the details of calendars and the tasks that need to be done. This year, with this new curriculum, you are going to need to spend that precious meeting time on the math and the teaching. In fact, when discussing with school districts who used IM this last year what teachers needed most in the way of administrative and district support, they universally said time to talk and plan together. We encouraged out site leadership to be ready to provide substitutes so teachers could have this time to prepare. And as teachers, I encourage you to do whatever you can to take care of those routine tasks in advance or via email. Save meeting time for digging in and uncovering the mathematical purpose for each activity and warm up, so you can make sure your students get out of them what they should.
In support of that, there are some recurring jobs that will need to be done. Below I have listed a few tasks that your team might find helpful to delegate.You may able to be able to lighten your load even further by cooperating with the person that has a similar role at other sites. Check if there is someone in your district who can help facilitate this inter-site collaboration.

An aside about final exams

An aside about final exams. We are considering using this as the final retake opportunity. Since the curriculum is coherent and the practice problems are spiraled, student continue to have opportunities to improve their understanding of content from previous units. We want to honor their continued hard work at growing their understanding and computational fluency. If the final is loaded into our assessment program with questions grouped by unit, teachers can chose to replace a unit score with a higher score on that unit at final exam time.

But what about me?

If you are the only teacher on your site that is using IM, consider linking up with other users via the Facebook User Community Open Up Resources 6-8, by Illustrative Mathematics. It is a closed group, but if you ask to join you should receive acceptance pretty quickly.
Speaking of the user’s community, one of the hot topics there has been organization and storage. That would be another great thing to get set up before school begins. See a small piece of this conversation blelow:

And here are some other recent posts:

If you are on facebook, I encourage you to make this group a part of your year.

Next up – planning a unit, a lesson.