It's a story that is all too familiar. A school district has a majority of students reading below grade level. The district adopts a new English language arts curriculum anchored in complex texts and analytical writing tasks. As they began to teach with the new curriculum, teachers adapted materials in an effort to meet their students at their current reading level, and at the end of the year, student test scores showed no increase. As this illustration demonstrates, the implementation of quality curricular tools isn't as easy as completing a purchase order. Working with educators over time, Emily Freitag has learned from educators trying to implement quality curricular tools is that teachers need frequent and ongoing professional development to understand, internalize, and effectively use curriculum. Freitag writes in this article that implementing new curriculum will likely result in shifting time and focus for both teachers and leaders. Teachers move from writing their own plans to preparing, internalizing, and adjusting materials. Leaders change what they monitor and where they focus. Knowing that these shifts are often challenging, Freitag and her colleagues launched an action research project to study the curriculum implementation stories of districts across the United States. They wanted to understand the common stumbling blocks to effective curriculum implementation so that they could create tools for schools to anticipate, and overcome those obstacles. In the article Freitag details the four common culprits that are common when curriculum implementation fails to live up to expectations. Freitag also provides replicable actions school districts can take to avoid those common pitfalls.