Student’s at my school, as I am sure is the case in many other schools, generally lack problem solving skills and higher order thinking skills. In my school, I believe this to be due to the fact that we don’t emphasize these skills as much as we computational skills. One of the reasons I believe we don’t emphasize these as much, is because these are the skills that take the longest to develop, and often times the activities that go along with are more time consuming to plan and implement. However, these skills are important. The End of Course Exam contains problem solving questions, and more importantly, students are going to take problem solving skills with them beyond high school, so it is imperative that we devote more time to them.

As teachers, it seems like there are always activities, projects, games, etc. that we want to do, but often don’t do to lack of time to plan. Furthermore, in a district like mine, everyone teaching the same subjects needs to stay on pace with each other. If I take a couple of days to do an activity, it means that I need to catch up in order to get back on pace with my colleagues. The “Big Idea” that I would like to collaborate and work on improving within my math department, is putting some of these relevant and engaging activities to use in all of the classes, so that we may stay aligned, and individually, not have to put a lot of extra time in to planning the activities.

My thought is this: For each chapter in our book, teachers that teach Algebra 1 could take turns coming up with one well planned activity. We only get through about 8-9 chapters during the school year. With 4 teachers teaching Algebra 1, we would each only have to put together about 2 activities. This saves each of us from a lot of extra planning, but it also gives all of us the chance to implement the activities, which can be engaging and informative for our students. Furthermore, it keeps us on track with each other so that no one falls behind in the pacing. We would be able to measure student progress by seeing if the results to these activities improve over time, and also whether quiz, test, and EOC scores improve. This sounds like a great idea in theory, and in my department I can think of one person who would definitely be on board with me. However, there are a few others who I think might be hard to convince. So I do have a few questions:

1. How do I convince my colleagues?

2. If I cannot convince them, and I still want to devote some time to these types of activities, what are some things that have made planning activities stress-free for you?

Remember, Educational Change Takes Place in a Culture

This question can not be answered without looking at the culture of mathematics education.  Both parts of this question culturally loaded with beliefs, cultural norms, social expectations, and financial limitations.  The book  Experiencing school mathematics address many of these issue and helps us look at what really matters in our classrooms.  The research is of two schools in England but the issues are the same for mathematics education in the US.  Alan Schoenfeld’s forward is a great start if you don’t want to read the whole book on-line.

Assessment of Teaching is an Essential Part of Planning for Teaching Improvement

One of the best ways to learn how to assess and document what improves student learning is to read articles on this topic.  Attached is an article addressing the issue of formative assessment (assessment for learning), it is often claimed that the pressure in schools to improve the results achieved by students in externally‐set tests and examinations precludes the use of formative assessment.  ResearchAssessmentMathEd is a report of our six schools studied the effect of formative assessment methods.

There is a new fad in education accountability called Value-Added measures.  This is a business measure adopted by many in education administration for the purpose of measuring the impact teachers have on student learning.  The following webpage has many articles you can read on the topic  Measuring Teacher\’s Impact on Student Learning .  Jerry Becker has his ear to the ground and finds leading educators that put issues like this into perspective.  Here is an article from his list serve, Our thanks to Henry Borenson for bringing this piece to our attention.  A look at ways to create a fair teacher-evaluation system by Alfred S. Posamentier, Westchester [NY] Journal News, Friday, June 24, 2011  http://www.lohud.com/article/20110626/OPINION/106260350/1076/OPINION .

Most teachers are against value-added formulas for rating teachers http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/education/01teacher.html?th&emc.  There are many issue that are not talked about in the editorials and at the school board meeting in reference to value-add measures.  It is wrong to use score changes on normed reference tests to measure “value added”, because most test scores are ordinal data and not ratio data. Bob Stein in Jerry Becker’s list serve on September 23, 2011 points out, the improvement in performance needed for, say, a ten point gain, might vary widely. For example, the improvement needed to go from a score of 40 to a 50 may be very different from the improvement needed to go from a 60 to a 70. The only time you can correctly infer that improvement in one class is greater than that of the other is when one set of scores brackets the others. Thus, the improvement from a 35 to 55 is surely greater than that from 40 to 50. Reporting the test results not as raw scores but in some other way, such as percentiles, cannot overcome this difficulty. Similarly, it makes no sense to conclude that the improvement needed to go from 50 to 70 is twice as great as the improvement needed to go from 40 to 50. Such comparisons make sense with ratio variables, such as weight, but they make no sense with ordinal data.

Enough looking at the problems in education and issues being debated, how can we plan for improving and documenting our effectiveness as mathematics teachers?  First, it can not be done in a vacuum, an plan for teaching improvement must have research and wisdom as its foundation.  This also goes for documentation of a teaching effectiveness–information about what a teacher does or how a teacher impacts their students must be connected to ideas that have been proven to be important.  A good presentation that explains this connection was given by Hull of the Dana Center  DanaCenterHull.

Documenting Teacher Effectiveness

After we having made a positive impact on our students’ learning how can we document our work and impact?  Here are some documents with a few ideas http://sydney.edu.au/business/learning/staff/funding_and_recognition/documenting. DocumentingTeachingEffectiveness

Math teachers explain how you will improve the ways you use technology media in your classroom.  Make sure to include your classroom setting, your specific teaching change, expected change in student performance, your implementation plan, and your plan for measuring changes in student performances.

Watch the following video as a premise for what role technology should play in the mathematics classroom. Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers

Share your plans for improving the mathematical thinking of the students in your classroom. When sharing this plans please explain your: 1) Classroom setting, 2) Need for the change, 3) How much change in student performance you expect, 4) What instructional change you plan to implement, and 5) How you plan to measure the change in student performance.

Watch the following video about a math teachers for New York (Dan Meyer), who has a plan for getting his math students to think. Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover

To get teaching ideas similar to those referred to by Dan Meyer: Go to his blog at dy/dan.