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You’re rolling out a math resource across your district—but you’re noticing that some classrooms feel scripted and disconnected from student thinking. What’s going wrong?

In this episode, we reflect on a powerful insight from Dr. Crystal Watson’s summit presentation—one that’s still resonating with us weeks later. We dig into the difference between fidelity and integrity in math instruction, and why rigidly adhering to a curriculum as written can actually limit student thinking, teacher agency, and culturally responsive practices. Together, we explore how a shift toward integrity—teaching with purpose, understanding, and flexibility—can help educators honor the design of high-quality resources while still responding authentically to their students’ needs.

Listeners will walk away with:

• A clear distinction between curriculum fidelity and instructional integrity in math
• Real classroom examples that show how “fidelity” can stifle or support learning
• Insights on supporting teacher autonomy without losing coherence
• How to use staff meetings and PLC time to build shared understanding of math instruction
• Language you can bring back to your team to deepen instructional conversations

Tune in as we reflect on what it really means to lead math improvement with purpose, clarity, and respect for the expertise in every classroom.

Attention District Math Leaders:

Not sure what matters most when designing math improvement plans? Take this assessment and get a free customized report: https://makemathmoments.com/grow/ 

Ready to design your math improvement plan with guidance, support and using structure? Learn how to follow our 4 stage process. https://growyourmathprogram.com 

Looking to supplement your curriculum with problem based lessons and units? Make Math Moments Problem Based Lessons & Units

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Yvette Lehman: One of the advantages I find from the summit is that I always walk away with new ideas that leave me pondering for days and weeks. So we’re about a week out of the summit right now and I’m still reflecting on a presentation that I saw from Dr. Crystal Watson. And I wanted to kind of unpack something that resonated with me on our episode today.

Kyle Pearce: Ooh.

Jon Orr: Hmm.

let’s do it, let’s do it, because I think we are gonna be chatting about how do we find the balance between supporting educators as leaders and leaders of mathematics improvement, leaders of mathematics, leaders at schools, systems, districts, without, say, losing the response in the classroom, because there is this push and pull about should we provide the script and the pacing guides, but then also like, but we’ve got

Kyle Pearce: Mm-hmm.

Jon Orr: We got quality, thoughtful teachers in classrooms and how much guidance do we really need? And some teachers are like, I need all the guidance. But that’s like, well, how much actual fidelity are we looking at? Because I think we can go from one side to the other where you prescribe what fidelity is exactly, or where’s the nuance between helping teachers find in a way their own fidelity. So let’s get into it.

Yvette Lehman: If you’ve ever heard Dr. Crystal Watson present, always say, I think she is a champion for culturally responsive pedagogy and ensuring that all students have an identity within the math classroom. I know she just recently finished her doctorate around engaging black girls in fifth and sixth grade as math learners and contributors of a rich math community. And so I always walk away thinking about myself, you as a practitioner and as a leader and as just a human, you know, how am I creating space for everybody to that?

they feel confident and they feel good and they see themselves as capable within our math spaces. And so she had a few words that she was almost challenging. So one of them was differentiation. She was like, I don’t love differentiation. I prefer this idea of like creating learning pathways for all students. And it’s like sometimes there’s just words that we use and they have a particular feeling.

Jon Orr: Right, you, you’re getting the sense like she’s like, whoa, this word is, was appropriate when it first, you know, made its way on the scene. And, but now it’s like through the course of history evolved into some, you know, there’s, you know, I think sometimes when teachers, educators hear this word, they’re like, Ooh, but even though they shouldn’t, you know,

Yvette Lehman: Right.

Kyle Pearce: Maybe evolved into something else.

Yvette Lehman: Right. And so the one that I wanted to unpack today is she talked about this idea of implementing a practice or curriculum with fidelity. And she said, I’d rather us say, let’s implement with integrity. It’s just a subtle shift.

Jon Orr: Right. Because I think fidelity becomes that one

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, I like that.

Jon Orr: that that word lately, right? Like, it’s like you hear it everywhere, and every leader is using it. And teachers are like, I don’t even know what that like what you’re really saying. And, and we do, but you keep using it.

Yvette Lehman: thought about it after because I use it, right? I talk about implementing things with fidelity and right. then, but when I, when I was challenged to think about the word integrity rather than fidelity, I actually just after attending that session, I had a meeting with two of our district leaders. And so I said, you know, this was my big learning. And we talk a lot when I meet with them and I coach them about implementation with fidelity. And I said, what’s the difference between fidelity and integrity?

Jon Orr: Right, right? You’re like, hey, it describes what I want to say.

Mm-hmm.

Yvette Lehman: You know, when I hear those two words and the leader said to me, actually, just yesterday, I saw where the idea of fidelity is actually hindering learning in our spaces. She said she’d been into two kindergarten classrooms and they were on the same lesson, working through the same task. But one class was taking it a lot farther and students were rising to the occasion. You know, when students were

were demonstrating skills that were beyond maybe what was exactly in the book. And so when she went to the second classroom, it was more narrow. It was more specific. And this was a literacy example that she shared. And she said, you know, in the first class of kindergarten, students were writing whole sentences. They were explaining their thinking. They were using visuals to communicate their ideas. And the other class, they had sentences already written and they were just filling in the blanks. They were writing the words.

And so when she approached the teacher, she was like, do you know that by this point of the year, do you think your students are ready to write out the sentences themselves? Do you think the students are ready to communicate their own thinking or create the sentence without the structure? And the teacher said, but that’s how they show us how to do it in the book. That’s what it looks like. And so that’s what I’m doing because you told me I had to use this curriculum as it was written.

Jon Orr: Mm-hmm.

Kyle Pearce: Hmm. And you know, to me, that’s exactly in my mind how I was picturing this potentially playing out, right? And that’s one of the push and pull, the difficult situations that we find ourselves in when we want to make sure that, you know, we’re giving everyone a bit of a roadmap. But I think like when you’re on any trip, you know, in that journey, there’s going to be modifications that need to be made.

Jon Orr: Hmm

Kyle Pearce: The road’s closed or right lane’s closed, we’ve got to stop for lunch, we’ve got to do all these different things. And therefore it doesn’t always come out exactly as we may have planned. And I think this is a really important discussion for us to be thinking about because when we say fidelity, clearly two different teachers who are teaching the same grade, probably right next to each other, two classes side by side, had a very different interpretation.

of what fidelity meant or what was intended when that word was being utilized. And this is where I think, you know, no matter what word we replace or we introduce over time, it really comes down to having a clear understanding and making sure that everyone, we come back to coherence and vision, that everyone has the same idea of what it means and what it might look like and sound like. And…

this is a really, I think a really important piece for all of us to be understanding because, you know, we could go all in on fidelity and all in on sameness, but then what happened to that word we talked about earlier, differentiation? How does that fit into things, right?

Jon Orr: Well,

think about it like this, like the idea of saying, this is the way you should do it, follow the script, follow the guide, follow the textbook, or completely understand the why, and having more understanding of why that tool actually helps us do this, like the integrity part, like keeping true to the real purpose. And if you zoom in one layer, we all want our

like we all talk about what math learning needs to look like in our classrooms with our students, and we’re in this battle. If you’re listening to this podcast, and you’ve been listening for a long time, you’ve known that we’ve been trying to share that we want more understanding, more thinking, more why we do what we do in our math class as learners, instead of just sticking to the math script for kids to be like, follow the procedure, follow this. Like we want to…

Find the balance, find the shift, find the shift between from one side to the, you know, towards the other. And when you take that step backwards, so like, no one’s, no one listening right now, especially math leaders right now who are listening, they’re like, yes, like that’s what I’m trying to get all my teachers to do, but how are we doing that? Right, because that zooming out is really saying like, but I’m gonna show you what to do and not help you understand. Because guess what all the arguments in the math class

people are putting up against doing that type of work. It takes more time. I could have done it faster if I just told them what to do. And that’s really what we’re up against in math improvement planning and supporting educators is like, wouldn’t you rather help our teacher understand the true purpose of why this move, why that curriculum, why this so that they can stay true to the integrity

and make appropriate decisions versus, let’s make sure we’re being, there’s fidelity around the curriculum. Follow the curriculum, make sure that you’re doing it the way that it was intended and not understanding the why because that’s what, if you’re saying those words, that’s what you’re doing in your classroom of educators is you’re saying, just follow the script and stick to it, come on. Instead of taking the more time, because it will take you longer to help everyone understand the why behind it.

Yvette Lehman: Mm.

Jon Orr: because you’re gonna have to utilize your PLCs, you’re gonna have to utilize your staff meetings, you’re gonna have to utilize all this to fully unpack. Why is that curriculum, you know, asking us to do it that way versus that way? Like that’s the bigger idea that we really need to focus on in terms of supporting our educators and not saying let’s just teach it with fidelity.

Yvette Lehman: That reminds me, we have a few districts and schools who are currently adopting Eureka Math Squared. And what many of them are finding, and this would not surprise you, it follows a three-part math lesson structure, is that many teachers are replacing the launch with explicit teaching. Right? So it’s like, we’re not going to do the investigation or spark curiosity. We’re just going to replace that launch with

Jon Orr: There’d be basic guide. That’s what happens.

Yvette Lehman: I’m gonna show you the procedure and now go and use that procedure to solve the task. And so that’s where the lack of integrity to the design of the curriculum is lacking, right? We were missing that integrity, but that’s not to say once you’ve, as you mentioned, John, we’ve deeply internalized the why, we’ve understood the key questions that we’re trying to elicit through the, they call it the land. So the consolidation of that particular lesson that I couldn’t.

Kyle Pearce: Right.

Yvette Lehman: make it more multimodal or I couldn’t bring them outside to do the investigation because it’s around measurement and it’s we’re doing track and field right now in phys ed and I want to create a more experiential learning opportunity for them. Like it doesn’t mean that I can’t be creative or engage my students by through adjusting the particular context to be more culturally responsive to make them feel more you know connected to the work but it’s that idea of but am I losing the integrity of the design of the curriculum.

Kyle Pearce: Well, and I think the only way that you have that is exactly kind of coming back to what John was saying is like, if I don’t have that understanding, I can’t, you know, maintain integrity when I veer off the script, right? So if I’m not seeing it, I might skip over the experiential portion of the lesson and full disclosure, I’ve said it billion times on the podcast, my old textbook, the…

Jon Orr: I did it too.

Kyle Pearce: barely color textbook that I first used, where they would only have like three different colors in the textbook. They all had investigations at the beginning of every single lesson. And as a high school teacher, I skipped over that because I did not understand, right? And someone could have possibly come into my classroom and said, you’re teaching this curriculum with fidelity because I was on track.

Jon Orr: All of them. 30 years ago.

Let’s just get to it.

Kyle Pearce: to get through everything that we needed to get through, but my students missed a massive opportunity to actually understand the math. And at its core, it was because I didn’t actually understand what was important about that mathematics specifically either, right? So again, zooming way out and saying, you know, this work is so incredibly important.

And we just have to make sure that if we’re asking teachers to, whether I want to use the word fidelity or integrity, I think at the end of the day, we probably are after the same thing, which is teachers understanding the why so that students can understand the why and so that all students have an opportunity to learn at their readiness level in order to push them further from where they were before they sat down in the classroom.

Jon Orr: Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Now I want you to imagine also, like let’s say I zoom out another level in thinking about the fragility that we have in our systems for math improvement. you know, in the work that we do with our districts and our teams and our schools and our systems, know, the bigger systems of education as we try to help them solve for big problems. And one of those problems is a sustainability problem, which is typically the math.

rests on one, two people’s shoulders, and when that person leaves or when that person decides to do something different, like the wheel, you know, halts and they have to get it going again, or the new person coming in is like, I don’t know what, like, I know what you were doing before, but now I have to start everything from scratch, and it’s like, this is why momentum never kind of builds in math improvement. So when you think about why it’s so important to focus on this integrity of understanding

why this curriculum is designed this way or why we’re doing what we’re doing here in terms of this instructional routine and spending time helping teachers and educators and leaders understand and focus on coherence across the board. You’re helping solve the sustainability problem. You’re helping the next round of leaders also come up and step into those roles and going, I know why we were doing that. That’s one of the.

you know, the pillars of the work that we’re trying to do, that supports our vision for math instruction, that supports some of our big goals, and it’s been clear because you’re taking that time in the work, in the opportunities, in the structures you have to communicate that because you’re saying that’s important, like opening the doors, like not closing those doors to the educators that you’re supporting, you’re opening those doors to unpack those reasons so that

Yvette Lehman: Hmm.

Jon Orr: you’re helping solve that sustainability problem and not perpetuating this wheel that will halt every couple years when people step into roles and they have to start coherence all over again.

Yvette Lehman: Now we have leaders listening who are saying yes, that, but now let’s get specific about the moves that we could make. Right? So if this is what we are striving for in our district is we want to, we have a high quality instructional material. We want it being used without, with integrity, but without, you know, pulling away the opportunities or making it less responsive or even just not allowing the teacher to have their talents.

Jon Orr: Now what? All right. Let’s do it.

Yvette Lehman: If I’m an amazing art teacher and I want to bring art into the math space or I have a really interest or my students have high interest in science, I want to create opportunities for people to have their talents leveraged within the math classroom, but I can’t lose the integrity of the way the curriculum was designed. So now the question is, what does this actually look like? I’m a leader.

I’m a principal, I’m an instructional coach, I’m a coordinator, and I want to do this work, and I need an idea of what this could actually look like in reality in a system.

I have an idea. Yeah, I really love, actually messaged you the other day too. I sent you a quote from one of our principals and he said, things started to change for me when I stopped creating agendas for staff meetings and I started creating lesson plans. And so imagine, because I know there’s limitations, right? This isn’t an ideal system where we have

Jon Orr: Yeah, I knew you had. This is why we’re here on the podcast.

Kyle Pearce: I

⁓ love it.

Yvette Lehman: Everybody has a ton of teacher collaboration time and there’s built in professional development in the school day and PLC is running. But imagine all you have is a staff meeting. That’s it. That’s the in many of our elementary schools that we support. That is it. They do not have any other structures. They do not have a coach.

But imagine if every staff meeting you chose a lesson and maybe it’s not the principal, it’s a lead teacher or you’re looking for you and you’re like, we’re going to actually experience this lesson from start to finish as students. We have to actually experience it and live it and talk about why.

Kyle Pearce: Exactly.

Yvette Lehman: did the launch happen that way? And how did that help us get to the consolidation? And right, you have to describe all of your moves as you’re doing them and reflect back on, you what did you do to plan for that lesson? What went into the facilitation of today’s lesson, right?

Jon Orr: Right, you have to be very meta.

Yeah. And why? Like…

Kyle Pearce: Right.

And would we articulate as doing this work, would we say that we were able to consider this being, keeping the fidelity of the curriculum or the integrity of the curriculum without necessarily following word by word scripted procedures, right?

Jon Orr: Well, right, that’s why you focus

on that integrity component, right? Because yeah, the roadmap is there, but if you focus on the integrity of that when you’re unpacking it with the educators in the room, then the question now is, the question that I’ve been giving is to say, where could some of the choices have been made differently? What could I substitute the launch with?

that sticks to, because someone made that choice. Like someone said, hey, there’s a million choices we could here because we know the integrity. We wrote the curriculum. But what could you do instead that holds the integrity of this work and of the learning goal that’s actually gonna come out here? What could we do in replace of? Because what you want, like the real power here, right, is that when you get to the end, the learning goal is still there.

teachers can assess kids on that learning goal, but they also know the pathway and the reasons that that curriculum originally led to that and go, you know what, I can swap that for that, and that helps us reach all the same goals. And even though I’m not following it exactly, I’m reaching the same end goal, and when we have that, that’s when you’re like, we’ve got confident, we’ve got flexible teachers, that it doesn’t matter anymore.

what curriculum swaps in and out. Because we’ve spent time unpacking what’s really important, and that is, I think, worth the time at your staff meeting.

Kyle Pearce: not to introduce another, you know, edgy term here, but like this is in my opinion, this is what it really means to be utilizing your professional judgment, right? Like when we, when we’re using professional judgment, there has to be a reason behind why you did what you did or why you changed what you did. It’s not because I didn’t feel like it. It’s not because I didn’t maybe understand. If I didn’t understand it, I should ask for help. I need to, you know, talk to my colleagues and try to, you know,

Jon Orr: Exactly.

Kyle Pearce: better understand like, is this here? Like it’s gotta be here for a reason. I’m not seeing it. But if I’m modify and if I’m gonna, you know, take a different route on that journey, I should be able to articulate why I feel that that route is going to be more helpful in coming back to again, the big ideas, the goals, and essentially stay aligned with everyone else within our school, within our district so that we can still.

get towards that larger goal. So I guess, as we have many leaders listening right now, my wonder for you is to sort of reflect to yourself and think, are we utilizing some terms? Whether it’s fidelity, whether it’s integrity, whether it’s some other terms out there, do all of our colleagues understand what we mean by that? And is there any maybe big takeaways that you might be able to take from?

today’s episode, which again, was inspired by Crystal Wilson, Crystal Watson’s session at the summit. And we encourage you to go back into the virtual summit to check out her session, maybe some other sessions that catch your eye and think about how can we take some of that information and put it into play, put it into action in our own worlds, in our own leadership lens.

Jon Orr: For sure, for sure. And when you think about, when we talk about zooming in and zooming out and thinking about making use of your PLC or your staff meetings, because like Yvette said, the only thing we had was the staff meeting. teachers also get together in terms of PLCs or grade levels. So it’s like, how do we, should that time also be utilized for that purpose? It’s like, yes. It’s like, we need to make sure that we’re creating.

alignment and coherence across the subsystems of improvement and access that we have. then, so zooming out, like that’s the important work is to say like where should we make focus, like make that coherence focused and how do we align all the pieces? And what are we really aligning to? And when I zoom out one more time, like that’s the work that we help teams do. Like all teams need to create.

coherence and alignment around what it is that they’re trying to achieve across, you know, one year, two years, three years, four years, five years, like what does math and instruction look like? Sometimes that’s hard. Sometimes we don’t know the roadmap ahead, or sometimes we don’t know how to put all these pieces together because there’s a lot of pieces. And how do I build the puzzle that everyone was working towards? That’s the work that we do every day. As we, like you mentioned, we met with a team to talk about this as we help those teams.

create coherence in using the structures so that they can build capacity so that they can solve the sustainability problem. We call that that math improvement flywheel. That’s the work we do every day. And now one more, Kyle mentioned the summit, but one more summit you might want to think about is that in February, coming up February, 2026, we’re holding a one day summit for leadership. And we’re going to be teaching you specifically how to build your math improvement flywheel, where we brought in some guest speakers.

We’ve got a team that we’re ready to teach you about how to put all these pieces together so that you can create coherence, so you can talk about integrity versus fidelity on the work that you’re trying to do. if you haven’t yet registered, then please register over at leadership.makemathmoments.com.

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