You Adopted High Quality Materials. Now What?

Adopting high-quality instructional materials is only half the work. The other half, closing the gap between what's in the curriculum and what happens in the classroom, is where most districts get stuck. This is the first post in a four-part series on what effective implementation support looks like, from first conversation to lasting impact. 

We’ve heard some version of this from nearly every district and school we’ve worked with. Districts adopt high-quality instructional materials; they are genuinely committed to implementing them, yet something is off.

What's missing is the bridge between high-quality materials and strong implementation, and that bridge doesn't build itself.

The Gap That No Adoption Process Solves

Districts spend immense amounts of time and energy selecting curriculum, but once materials are in place, a different set of challenges emerge.

Adoption processes are designed to answer whether the materials are high quality. But too often, they aren't crafted to answer these questions:  

• How will you know what good implementation looks like?  

• What should you look for in a classroom observation?  

• How will teachers know when they're drifting from the intended structure?

Without clear answers, small adjustments start to add up. A lesson shortened here. A routine gets skipped there. A discussion is replaced with something quicker and more manageable.

In some cases, those core elements never fully take hold, not because anyone is doing anything wrong, but because the system isn’t yet equipped to support the work as designed.

As Lainie Augensen, a Great Minds® Success Lead, puts it, “There is no time that we would ever just stick a teenager in a car and say, ‘Have at it.’ The same thing applies to curriculum.”

What Real Support Looks Like

When we first start working with a district, the first step isn’t jumping in with a plan. It’s knowing what to look for. We have learned, across districts, that what’s assumed to be happening and what’s really happening can be very different.

We’ve been in classrooms where leaders believed coaching cycles were consistent, but it turned out coaches could only reach a fraction of teachers. We’ve seen systems where pacing guides were in place, but teachers were quietly making trade-offs about what to skip, what to shorten, and what to modify just to keep moving.

These are patterns we’ve seen before, and we know how to surface them.

That dialogue is purposeful. It’s how we identify where implementation is holding strong and where there are gaps.

In some districts, that means strengthening the focus of coaching, so every visit is grounded in what matters most for student learning. In others, it means creating clarity with leaders about what strong implementation looks like, so feedback is consistent across the district.

Building Capacity, Not Dependency

Our goal is to strengthen staff capacity so that you can carry the work forward.  

As Dr. Monique Durham, a regional director on the Success Team, explains, “We always start with understanding the need, the goals that come from that need, and the outcomes a district is working toward.”

From there, the focus shifts to the leaders, principals, and coaches. They’re the ones who notice when something isn’t working. They’ll support teachers in making adjustments and help sustain the momentum long after support ends.

That mindset shows up across the districts our Success Team works with. One principal in Chicago identified this shift: “We have all these really great conversations when Great Minds is here. But we can't only have good conversations when they're here. We have to figure out how to do it when they're not.”  

That's proof of the work starting to stick—when the ability to spot challenges and work through them no longer sits outside the system, but within it. 

What This Series Covers

If any part of this feels familiar, you’re not alone.

Many districts do the hard work of selecting strong instructional materials and then find themselves navigating the far more complex work of bringing them to life in classrooms.

Post 1 | Post 2 | Post 3 | Post 4