By Dylan Dechant, Senior Vice President, Product Engineering and Innovation
A decade ago, a math teacher’s year was largely shaped by a textbook and a pacing guide. A student moved through a year of math that was, for better or worse, the product of a single instructional vision.
Today, students encounter mathematics through an entire ecosystem of tools: curriculum platforms, practice systems, assessments, dashboards, and increasingly AI-powered tutors and assistants. Each carries assumptions about how mathematics should be taught and learned.
As someone who leads product and engineering at Illustrative Mathematics, my job is not to design curriculum or write lessons. It’s to ensure that the products, platforms, and partnerships we build faithfully carry IM’s instructional model to every student and teacher who encounters our content.
From that vantage point, I see a challenge that is getting harder to ignore: What holds math instruction together when the tools shaping it continue to multiply?
Every Tool Carries an Instructional Model
A practice platform that drills procedural fluency in isolation assumes one thing about how mathematical understanding develops. An AI tutor that immediately provides step-by-step walkthroughs assumes another. An assessment system that measures only what is easy to measure assumes a third.
When these tools are aligned, students encounter mathematical ideas in ways that reinforce one another across contexts. When they are not aligned, learning fragments, and students experience mathematics as disconnected pieces rather than a coherent body of ideas.
Consider a classroom where the curriculum is designed around productive struggle and mathematical discourse. Students are expected to grapple with a problem, compare strategies, and explain their reasoning before formal methods are introduced. Later that evening, the same student opens an AI tutor that immediately provides a step-by-step procedure for solving “this kind of problem.” The next week, the assessment system rewards speed and answer accuracy above all else.
None of these tools are intentionally working against each other, but together they communicate conflicting ideas about what mathematics is and how it should be learned. The fragmentation is not loud, but it pops up as confusion, disengagement, and a gradual erosion of students’ mathematical identity.
This fragmentation can also be hard for school districts to detect during the procurement process. Features, pricing, dashboard functionality, and usability are visible and comparatively easy to evaluate. Determining whether a tool reinforces mathematical reasoning and conceptual development requires a deeper examination that districts do not always have the time or information to undertake.
What Coherence Is Built On
At IM, the work of building a TK–12 math curriculum forced our experts to answer questions that most ed tech products aren’t always able to, or inclined to ask:
- What counts as understanding rather than simply producing the right answer?
- How do mathematical ideas develop across grades, and which of these ideas are foundational?
- When a student struggles, what does the struggle reveal, and what is the right next step?
- How does a sixth grader’s work with ratios connect to an eighth grader’s work with linear equations and an eleventh grader’s work with functions?
The answers to these questions form a coherent model of how mathematical understanding develops over time. Our curriculum is one expression of that model, but the model is the underlying structure. It lives in the progression of concepts, the designs of activities, the framing of student and teacher discourse, the instructional routines, and the philosophy of assessment that connects the TK-12 experience.
That model also has to support teachers, not just students. Tasks, activities, and lesson structures only carry their weight in the classroom if teachers can see the design behind them: why this question and not a different one; what a particular student misconception may reveal and what to do next.
This is why professional learning (PL) and implementation support are not accessories to a curriculum. They are the layer that turns an instructional model into something teachers can actually use, connecting what happens in class on a Tuesday afternoon back to the broader goals the curriculum was designed to achieve. Without that support, a strong curriculum risks becoming a stack of materials feeding into a different model or no coherent model at all.
Teachers are the most valuable asset we have in helping students know, use, and enjoy mathematics. Any instructional model serious about coherence has to support teachers as fully as it supports students. Here at IM, this means the products and partnerships we build must carry the instructional model faithfully, not simply deliver content. That is as much a technical and design challenge as it is a pedagogical one.
Why AI Makes This Harder
AI is beginning to mediate a larger share of what students and teachers experience in education. Some of that mediation is invisible, baked into existing tools. Some are explicit, in the form of AI tutors, content generators, and assistants for teachers, coaches, and districts.
In every case, the AI is shaping decisions about how mathematics is presented, supported, and learned. Those decisions are either grounded in a coherent instructional model or grounded in whatever its training data happened to represent.
An AI math tutor built on an arbitrary mix of internet content will teach from that mix. An AI system grounded in a coherent instructional approach is more likely to reinforce that approach consistently. Districts may not always be able to tell the difference immediately, but students will experience the difference over time.
In conversations with partners building on IM’s content, I have seen this distinction play out directly. IM Certified® partners build on IM’s instructional model, creating tools that reinforce and extend what students experience in the classroom. Other companies that layer their own pedagogical assumptions on top often pull instruction in a different direction, not necessarily intending to.
As AI becomes more integrated into instruction, the gap between those two approaches is widening.
A Question Worth Asking
The mathematics that reaches students in your district is not only the curriculum you adopted. It is the curriculum, plus the practice platform, plus the tutoring tool, plus the assessment system, and increasingly whatever AI systems your teachers and students use on any given day.
Together, those layers form the actual mathematical experience of the student.
That raises a question worth asking of every tool your district is using: What instructional model is this built on, and does it align with the one we chose when we adopted our curriculum?
Coherence is not automatic. It’s a design choice, made tool by tool, platform by platform, and policy by policy. The districts that get the most from their instruction investments over the next five years will be the ones that treat coherence as a core consideration in procurement and adoption, not an afterthought.
At IM, we have been building toward that standard for years, and we continue to invest in it. Our mission is to create a world where all learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics. The coherence we build into our curriculum, and the standards we hold for our IM Certified partnerships and their platforms that carry it, are part of how we deliver on our mission.
The coherence question is coming up in conversations with partners and districts more often now than even a year ago. It’s a conversation we welcome, and one we believe the field increasingly needs to have.
Dylan Dechant
Senior Vice President, Product Engineering and Innovation
Dylan Dechant is Senior Vice President of Product Engineering and Innovation at Illustrative Mathematics, where he leads the product strategy, product design, and engineering teams. He came to IM from a background in software architecture and technology leadership, drawn by the mission to make high-quality math education accessible to all students and educators. His focus is on designing scalable solutions, driving technology modernization, and applying systems thinking to connect product, platform, and content. Dylan holds an M.Arch from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and that design-driven perspective continues to shape how he approaches complex problems.
