Is ADI a Curriculum or a Supplement? Our District Has to Pick One.
A curriculum director asked me this on a call last spring, and she was not asking out of curiosity. She had a procurement form in front of her with two boxes on it, and the box she checked determined which budget the purchase came out of and which review process it went through.
I will give her the direct answer, because I think a straight one is more useful than a careful one.
Today, our books are investigation books. We built them that way on purpose. Each one is a set of complete, standards-aligned investigations, and they are designed to work alongside whatever program you already own. On a procurement form, that is supplemental, and I would rather say so than stretch the word.
We are also building a full core curriculum on the SOLID framework, where the investigations sit inside complete units with the reading, the concept development, the vocabulary work, and the assessment already assembled around them. That is coming, and I will say more about it at the end.
Before either of those, though, there is a word problem worth clearing up.
SUPPLEMENTAL DOES NOT MEAN OPTIONAL
In most buildings, supplemental has come to mean the thing you get to if there is time. Enrichment. The folder of good activities somebody bought three years ago. And there is never time, so the folder stays closed.
When an ADI purchase does not take hold, this is often why, and it has nothing to do with the materials. A district buys the books, teachers like them, and then February arrives behind pace and the investigations are the first thing cut, because they were never on the calendar in the first place. They were available rather than scheduled.
The distinction that matters is not supplemental versus core. It is whether a resource is carrying a standard. If Bark Beetles in Central Oregon is your lesson on population dynamics, and it gets cut in March to make up time, you did not lose an enrichment activity. You lost a standard, and you will find out in May.
So the rule I would give any district starting with us is this: before you order anything, decide which days of your calendar belong to these investigations, and write those days down where your pacing guide lives. Not the unit. The days. A supplement with days assigned to it behaves like core instruction. A supplement without them behaves like a closed folder, no matter how good it is.
That is really what the rest of this post is about. Here is what giving it a place actually looks like.
ONE UNIT, TWENTY DAYS
Here is a middle school ecosystems unit covering MS-LS2. Any unit would do for this, and yours will look different. I picked this one because it puts both halves of the answer in one place: four standards our investigations carry, and one they do not.
Day 1. Give the Phenomenon-Driven Task Predators in Yellowstone as a formative. Do not grade it. Read the parts aloud, let students talk between them, and sort their responses into ways of thinking rather than right and wrong. You now know what your class actually believes about population change before you teach anything.
Days 2 through 6. Bark Beetles in Central Oregon. This is a five-day investigation and it carries three standards on its own: resource availability and population size, patterns of interaction among organisms, and how changing conditions shift populations. Students figure out the beetle die-off from the data. They do not read about it first.
Days 7 through 9. Now your existing program earns its place. Assign the reading on food webs, competition, and symbiosis. Students have spent a week generating questions they cannot answer yet, and the text answers them. This is the same reading you always assigned, landing in a completely different place.
Day 10. Give Predators in Yellowstone back, the same task, now with written feedback instead of a score. Not "incorrect," but something a student can act on. Attach the reflection part that asks how their thinking has changed.
Days 11 through 15. Elk in West Virginia. Five days, and it carries the matter and energy flow standard, which is the one students most often memorize and least often understand.
Days 16 through 18. Biodiversity and ecosystem services. We do not have an investigation for this standard. Your program covers it, and I would use the task Proposals for Salmon Populations as the discussion anchor rather than pretending the gap is not there.
Day 19. Argument cards as a warm-up and review. Students rank four sample arguments about an ecosystem claim and defend the ranking.
Day 20. Predators in Yellowstone a third time, scored against the performance expectation. You compare it to day one and you can say something specific about what changed.
WHAT THAT UNIT SHOWS
The investigation carries the standard rather than decorating it. Bark Beetles is not an activity that follows a lesson on population dynamics. It is the lesson on population dynamics. If you drop an ADI investigation in after you have already taught the content, you have spent five days confirming something students were told, which is the most expensive way to run a lab.
The reading works better on the other side. Days 7 through 9 are the part teachers are most skeptical of and most surprised by. The textbook is a good tool for building background and consolidating vocabulary. It is a poor tool for making a student curious. Put it after the investigation and it stops competing with the phenomenon.
Count the days honestly. Two investigations in that unit is ten days out of twenty. ADI is carrying half the instructional time and four of the five standards. The other half is yours. That ratio holds pretty well across grade levels, which is why a full year of ADI investigations lands somewhere around ninety-five to one hundred fifteen days rather than one hundred eighty.
Name the standard you still own. Days 16 through 18 exist because I looked at the five MS-LS2 standards and found the one we do not cover. The districts that get the most out of ADI all do this exercise before the year starts. Go standard by standard, at the performance expectation level, and mark each one as ADI, as your program, or as something you still need. A curriculum team can get through a grade in about half a day. Once every standard has a name next to it, the plan holds for the whole year, and nothing depends on an assumption about who was covering what.
One task, three times, is what makes it feel like a program. The biggest difference between a classroom using ADI investigations and a classroom running an ADI unit is the assessment thread. The same task on day one, day ten, and day twenty gives students something continuous to hold onto, and gives you three genuinely different kinds of information without adding three testing events.
Do that once per unit and you have written your curriculum. A one-page plan per unit showing the investigations, the standards each carries, the day count, and what your other materials cover. Six or seven of those pages is a year. That document is the thing that turns the label question into a non-question.
THREE WAYS DISTRICTS SCALE THIS UP
Replace the labs.
Your program keeps the sequence and the pacing, and investigations go wherever the program currently has a lab. Seven or eight real sensemaking experiences a year, no scope and sequence rebuild. If your teachers are new to argumentation, start here.
Make the investigations the spine.
This is the unit above. The investigation comes first and the text becomes reference material. More work in year one, and where the research gains show up most clearly.
Run it as the core and name what you are adding.
Some districts do this now, and the ones who do it well have done the arithmetic in key three and deliberately filled the remaining days with reading, review, and local content. What does not work is assuming the gap fills itself.
WHAT IS COMING
The reason the third pattern takes real work today is that our books hand you investigations and leave the assembly to you. The SOLID framework is our answer to that. It puts the investigation inside a complete unit, with the supporting concept development, the procedural practice, the vocabulary work, and the three-point assessment cycle already built and sequenced, so that a district choosing the core pattern is not doing the assembly themselves.
We are building it grade by grade. If your adoption timeline is a few years out, it is worth a conversation about where your grade band sits in that build.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
If someone needs one word for the procurement form, the word is supplemental. That is what our books are today, and I would rather be accurate than clever about it.
But supplemental is a weak word for a resource that carries four of five standards in the unit above and half the instructional days in a year. What ADI is not yet is assembled. The investigations teach the standards. Somebody still has to decide what happens on the days between them, and right now that somebody is you.
Which brings it back to the same place. Whatever you call it on the form, give it days on the calendar. The districts that thrive with ADI are the ones who made that decision on purpose, in writing, in July, and then defended those days in March when the pacing guide got tight.
WANT TO BUILD ONE?
Start with the standards alignment documents at argumentdriveninquiry.com/standards and do the standard-by-standard exercise for one grade. See how other districts have answered this at argumentdriveninquiry.com/district-implementation. Or send us the unit you are worried about and we will map it with you at argumentdriveninquiry.com.
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