6th Grade Report Overview

The materials reviewed for Grade 6 partially meet the expectations for alignment to CCSSM. While the Grade 6 materials passed Gateway 1's review of focus and coherence, the materials failed to meet expectations of Gateway 2's review of rigor and the mathematical practices.

For Gateway 1, the instructional materials meet the alignment expectations for focus and coherence. The material assesses only the content required for Grade 6 and previous grades. Grade 6 meets the threshold of 65% of the year being focused on major work of 6.RP.A, 6.NS.A, 6.NS.C, 6.EE.A, 6.EE.B and 6.EE.C. In Grade 6, there are a few times that the supporting work enhances the understanding of the major clusters. The program can be taught in 154 days. The program overview guide explicitly shows where the standards are taught and where previous standards are used to enhance new learning. The program has many components to give all students extensive work with grade-level problems. The CCSSM are visibly listed on the student pages and in the teacher edition. The work in each unit is specific to that unit's topic. There are few connections made between units and concepts.

For Gateway 2, the materials reviewed for Grade 6 do not meet the alignment expectations for rigor and the mathematical practices. Conceptual understanding isn't attended to thoroughly to set explicit expectations for understanding or interpreting. Each lesson is launched with a real-world situation but they are often application problems that do not support building conceptual understanding. There are insufficient problems designed to build fluency, particularly within dividing multi-digit numbers and adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing multi-digit decimals. The enrichment project for each unit is the major resource for application with multi-steps. Within the lessons there are many real-world problems, but few that are also multi-step problems. There is an attempt to balance conceptual and procedural work. The materials reviewed for Grade 6 do not meet the expectations for practice-content connections. While the MP are included and labeled in the launch of each lesson and the focus question, they are not identified in the in-class teaching notes and are missing in other areas of the curriculum. A teacher who is not familiar with the MPs would not be able to use the information given on the individual lessons to educate the students on how to use the MPs to assist in solving a math problem. On some lessons the MPs are used well, but other lessons are mislabeled as being aligned to certain practices. Materials have students constructing arguments through certain routine problems such as reasoning, reflecting, writing and error analysis. These problems appear in each lesson in the same manner, so the depth of the MPs is not able to fully develop. Students are prompted to construct arguments through some of the questions, but the students frequently do not need to analyze problems in-depth in order to make these arguments. The teacher notes do not indicate how they can assist their students practicing the skills in the mathematical practices. This series does not meet the standard to explicitly attend to the specialized language of mathematics. It often uses vocabulary that is not precise and does not allow for the student to be completely immersed in the language of mathematics.

Overall, the instructional materials partially meet the expectations for alignment to CCSSM.