LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Jefferson County Public Schools is implementing a school-wide literacy and math curriculum starting in the fall.

What You Need To Know

  • Jefferson County Public Schools is implementing a school-wide literacy and math curriculum
  • The new curriculum starts this fall

  • Middle and elementary school teachers spent Tuesday learning about Imagine Learning's Illustrative Math

  • 600 teachers trained on the new program

It’s called Imagine Learning. Middle and elementary school teachers spent Tuesday learning about Illustrative Math.

Inside Atherton High School, fifth-grade math teacher Felicia Green spent some time going through her coursework.

“This math program, IM program, is allowing kids to be more of a thinker instead of a teacher making them think for them,” Green said.

She compares how it’s different than when she grew up watching her teachers.

“What this program allows us to be facilitators and the kids to be able to come up with their own thinking in the teacher comes in behind them and says, ‘yes, great job.’ Now you ask them some more questions to get them to think deeper into the program or deeper into the problem,” Green said.

She joined 600 other elementary and middle school teachers doing active and collaborative exercises on math and reading. They’re getting trained on Imagine Learning this week, explained Curriculum Design and Support Specialist Elisabeth Read.

“It starts with real-world application problems. All the way from counting things in kindergarten up through looking at environmental questions in the older grades and into middle school and a variety of topics in between,” Read said.

The district administrator said this curriculum, for example, will help students see math concretely.

“We give them tools and manipulatives so that they build things before they draw things and think about it, and everything is within context. And that’s good for all of our learners. Our learners who maybe have struggled in the past with math and maybe are a little bit behind where their peers are two kids who are learning English as a new language to them. So we’re really providing an equitable and engaging experience and mathematics for all of our learners,” Read said.

Learners that Green will educate this school year.

“[It’s about] Empowerment because now it’s not so much ‘oh, the teacher has taught me this. I taught myself this and the teacher just said yes,’” Green said.

JCPS said the training will continue with 2000 teachers getting trained on the new curriculum by the end of the week.

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