It seldom allows students more than 2.5 days on any particular section but most are between a day and a day and a half. The lessons begin with an exploration, vocabulary, notes, practice and then the assignment. Most of the explorations take my students at least 20 to 30 minutes instead of the allotted 10 minutes.
Unfortunately, the author's idea of differentiation is to assign different problems depending on a person's level of performance. Every lesson is the same and none of the lessons are designed to really help students who are behind. The year before I arrived, the district insisted teachers follow the pacing guide as written. If a teacher got behind, they had to meet with the principal to determine what could be done so they got back on pace. Last year, they didn't push as much and when the pandemic hit, everything fled from their minds.
I've known for a very long time that when we follow any pacing guide, we are just forcing them through a class with no regard to their actual learning. The lessons are not designed to take time out to help students work on weaknesses, and really learn. It doesn't really follow the practice of breaking information down into small, understandable chunks. If you have students who are classified as English Language Learners (ELL), the pacing doesn't give them a chance to work on vocabulary or learning the language of mathematics.
How can we expect students to learn and progress if we do not include time for meaningful exploration, a chance to develop visual representations for various concepts so we can take students from concrete to abstract. It's like the pacing is designed to get students through the whole book rather than learning the concepts. It makes students feel as if they just need to make it through lessons, put the "right" answer down without transference of knowledge. This may be why students often see each problem as something new.
I think it is also responsible for students not seeing the connections between basic topics and their applications to various situations. That may be due to the pacing because it doesn't give students a chance to develop relations between one topic to another. In addition, most lessons still rely on material and methods from when I was in school. It's almost as if everyone is brainwashed into believing one has to teach students everything in the book. It just seems to me that if we expect students to learn, we need to either cut significant amounts of material , or we have to throw out the pacing guide.
Rather than following a pacing guide, I would rather have a list of the most important material students should learn, and the time to present it in small chunks with additional time to provide differentiation, scaffolding, and a chance to let students work on any missing skills at the same time. I've been at schools where the mantra "We are here for the kids" resonated around the school but we still followed the pacing guides rather than looking at where the students were and deciding ways to help them gain their missing skills.
On Wednesday, I want to share a few ideas from a book I am reading that makes so much sense. It is totally in opposition to following a pacing guide yet provides a proper way to help students fill gaps and move forward. Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear. Have a great day.
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