PROJECT

// Purpose of This Professional Development Program // The overall purpose of this professional development program is to equip teachers with the skills, concepts, and strategic capacity necessary to create classrooms where students can build a transferable, conceptual, skill, and strategic base in mathematics. A transferable and balanced base will enable students to understand the purpose of the mathematics they are learning in school, put that mathematics to work, and ultimately demonstrate college readiness. // Mission // This professional development is designed to support the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s ambitious goal of having 80 percent of low-income/minority students graduate from high school college-ready by 2025. This professional development program will further the mathematics assessment tools that the Foundation has funded for development at UC Berkeley and the Shell Centre. Specifically, this initiative will “ready” mathematics classrooms in selected districts, states, and school networks for the Foundation’s classroom and curriculum-embedded mathematics investments currently being developed at the Shell Centre. // Background // In response to a mathematics class, students are often heard to ask: When am I ever going to use this? This question usually arises when students are struggling desperately to learn a piece of mathematics that strikes them as difficult. In response to incoming freshmen, college personnel are often heard to ask: When am I going to get some students who are ready for college? This question usually arises when college personnel are struggling to deal with droves of freshmen they must remediate rather than enroll in credit-bearing courses. The desperation that unites both sets of questions often represents different sides of the same coin. This desperation expresses the unfortunate and demoralizing nature of the school mathematics inherited by our current math teachers. The focus of high-stakes tests on disparate aspects of mathematics—which stresses skill over concepts and ignores strategic competence—has led to the evolution of mathematics courses bursting to the brim with fragments. Our high school mathematics teachers, in particular, have inherited an untenable situation. Because of this, the professional development described here is designed as a core part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation strategy to reach the 2025 goal // Components of the Professional Development Program //  A.  Identify Aligned Performance Tasks That Call on Students to Put Math to Work High-quality performance tasks provide students with the opportunity to learn how to demonstrate success on cognitively demanding and worthwhile mathematics tasks. A recent headline in an education publication stated: Underachievers Overcome Frustration to Succeed: Math Test Scores Soar If Students Are Given the Chance to Struggle The research, carried out by Dr. Roberta Storr at Rutgers-Newark Department of Urban Education, reports that for students to learn math they must be assigned challenging work. Her work underscores the importance of engaging and motivating students in ways that they can experience as a productive struggle. Our own research has shown that students desperately need to feel they are learning something challenging and mathematically important. This is because such an experience leaves them feeling smart, capable, and generally positive about themselves, and it communicates to them that they can learn and that mathematics is worth learning. In turn, this experience motivates students to learn additional challenging mathematics. For these reasons, we have placed challenging and worthwhile performance tasks at the core of this professional development. Our central goal is to train teachers how to enact these tasks in the classroom in a way that engages students in a productive struggle. The cognitively demanding performance tasks will be aligned to the common core standards and will provide students with opportunities to do the following: 1. Read and Understand the problem; 2. Formulate their own approaches; 3. Implement their own solutions; 4. Draw their own conclusions; 5. Edit, review, and revise their solutions in response to feedback from peers, teachers, family, and friends; and 6. Communicate their own responses to an appropriate audience.  B.  Five Strategies Culled from Assessment-for-Learning Research to Secure a Productive Struggle Many teachers are aware that challenging and worthwhile mathematics tasks that require students to apply a balance of skills and concepts can be frustrating to struggling learners, causing them to give up early and feel inadequate. For this reason, this professional development will train teachers to use the following five strategies (from assessment-for-learning research) when embedding worthwhile mathematical tasks in the curriculum: • Clarifying and sharing learning intentions and criteria for success; • Designing and facilitating effective classroom discussions; • Providing feedback that cognitively and emotionally moves learners forward; • Activating students as the owners of their own learning; and • Activating students as instructional resources for one another. These five strategies are not new to the field. They were identified by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam in their extensive work on formative assessment and became the core of the effective teaching resource Keeping Learning on Track (KLT). In KLT, teachers were guided in the use of these strategies across all learning domains rather than with respect to a given discipline. In this project, we will marry these five strategies to the implementation of mathematical performance tasks. We will train teachers how to use all five strategies, performance task by performance task. These strategies are the foundation of effective teaching and, coupled with challenging performance tasks, they offer a coherent path to college-readiness in math.  C.  Addressing Mathematical Literacy A crucial factor in students’ readiness for college and the job market is their ability to read and comprehend mathematical text. Time and time again, teachers tell us that they are reluctant to give their students multi-step mathematics problems because they feel their students cannot read and parse the tasks independently. High reading comprehension requirements restrict many students’ access to worthwhile mathematics tasks and render such students not ready for college or the workplace. In this professional development program, we will address the issue of mathematical literacy through the context of complex performance tasks. We will train teachers how to use the five strategies listed above to scaffold the literacy demands of the tasks without inadvertently perverting their cognitive demands.  D.  Youth Academic Development This professional development program will enhance college- and workplace readiness by building on advances in understanding underlying meta-cognitive issues related to student motivation and engagement. It will draw upon recent advances from developmental and social psychology in understanding the factors that shape students’ engagement and commitment to academic success. Of particular interest to this project is the work of Carol Dweck, which examines the self-conceptions people use to structure the self and guide behavior. Her research looks at the origins of these self-conceptions, their role in motivation and self-regulation, and their impact on achievement and interpersonal processes. We will train teachers to pay attention to the way in which performance tasks, coupled with the five strategies, positively impact students’ self-conceptions and achievement by fostering self-regulation. We will stress the importance of rendering the math to be learned as reasonable—that is, something about which one can reason. When students can reason with a piece of mathematics, they will never ask: When am I ever going to use this? This is because they know they are using it. The mathematics taught in a classroom that is to be a hot-house for college-ready students must be practical, promote possibilities, and feel meaningful. When math is fragmented, students find it hard to understand, to use, to reason with, to get their arms around, or put to work. They fail to get the big picture. When math is fragmented, students are not likely to use it to demonstrate college-readiness. Therefore, we will focus on “chunking” the mathematics to be learned so that students are spurred on by meaningful connection and insight rather than stymied by disparate fragmentation.  E.  Shaping the Leadership Thinking of Teachers and Supporting Teachers Through Change This professional development program will focus on supporting teachers as leaders embracing change in their classrooms, where the need is greatest and the impact will be most profound. With college- and workplace-readiness as the goal, students will be expected to read and respond to complex math performance tasks in order to figure out what to do when they do not know what to do and to demonstrate the habits of mind associated with college and workplace success. This goal will cause a major shift in the ”contract” between teachers and their students because there will be important changes in what is done in the classroom, as well as in how it is done. These changes will be challenging for all teachers. Research suggests that supporting teachers through change is one of the top school-related factors that influence student learning.  F.  Alignment to the College- and Workplace-Ready Standards In September 2009, the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released a set of literacy and math standards for college and workplace-readiness. These math standards indicate what college- and workplace-ready students should know and be able to do by the end of grade ten. Each aspect of this project will be aligned to the new common core standards.
 * Mathematics for Learning Phase One Project **