Viewing math achievement from a National level shows the U.S. has dipped in fluency in recent years, especially in rural and suburban communities over the span of 2013-2015. The average scores have only dropped a few points in both 4th and 8th grade assessments (according to NAEP), but it is hard to stay confident with a downward trend such as this. At the state level the data does not paint a better picture. The trend is on par with the National average, down a few points. Often times when talking 1:1 to students about there experiences in math, a lot of anxiety, confusion and even hatred emerge. These same students share stories of feeling "that they are stupid" in the math classroom because other students can answer more quickly and more accurately than them. This data and past student interviews leave me with a lot of questions about our math education. Is math fluency dependent on speed? Accuracy? If these are not important, what is? Are we truly adhering to the 8 standards of Mathematical Practice that we as a nation have laid out with the adoption of The Common Core? How can we look to places such as Singapore, Finland and Japan to for advice in how to restructure our math programming?
Bringing this to our district and site level is a work in progress. Our district is in place to serve the needs of those that were not able to have their needs met in a traditional environment. This could be do to different learning abilities, conditions or other life/personal factors. Having spent seven years teaching in a traditional school system, the move to an alternative setting such as this was a leap. A lot of strategies that I came in with just didn't work in the alternative setting. Last year as a site we struggled with daily attendance, student buy-in and engagement as well as other factors that can render education useless to the eyes of our parts of our population. We are fortunate to have a very talented and dedicated teaching and supporting staff and we knew that we could all do better, for our students and our own sanity. At the end of last year (the second year of a new administration) we came together as a team and tried to problem solve how we could do better by our students. We developed specific skills classes to act as interventions for reading, writing and math to support students that were below grade level. We implemented cross-content, project based models of co-teaching to support students in the integration of material, kickstarted our CTE (career and technical education) Program through business partnerships and focused in on job ready skills such as collaboration, communication and critical thinking. With this, my focus for my "Driving Question" is very much Project Based Learning Focused.
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As we have been asked to reflect on our driving questions and the specifics of our passions/interests, these become of great use when beginning to dig into our IRB. The first questions asked on the IRB form involve stating your summary of your driving question and your reasoning for conducting this research. Through our blogs we have begun to tease these questions out.
Another major aspect of the IRB is the ability to think through the repercussions of conducting this research on human subjects. This thinking hits home with the site work our instructional team is going through currently. Our site has begun the shift from teacher-centered learning to student-focused instruction in various degrees. This is a major shift with our population who have mostly experienced a traditional classroom, involving note taking, lectures, right and wrong and the "I do, we do, you do" model. As we end our first week of classes, there is a lot of student push back with the block scheduling, open-ended questions and larger task expectations. Even though our site is working though a scaffolded approach, this shift can be seen as cataclysmic to the students. There are groups of students that expressed excitement with the shift, but overall the consensus is, for lack of a better term, frightened. The trend that we have seen within our student population is the constant validation required, with the most common statement being "Am I right or wrong". With our scaffolded tasks taking form, there is little that we can say is right or wrong or want to for that matter. Instead, we encourage the students to use resources, research tools, communication with others and various other means to come to their own conclusions to create their product. Is what we are trying to do benefitting or harming the students? Our instructional teams opinion is that it will lead to improved engagement, higher levels of rigor and more emphasis on the 4 C's, but will the students see this? It is these questions we must keep at the front of our work, because ultimately we are altering, flexing, collaborating and adapting to meet the needs of our student population but if it doesn't meet the needs of our students, why are we doing it. |
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