Virginia Mathematics Teacher Fall 2016

Along with in-class activities, the teachers had the opportunity to reflect on all the problems that they worked on each day. The teacher reflections enabled us to focus on the understanding, reactions, and feelings of the individual teachers. While the posters showed how people in a group approached problem solutions in a variety of ways, the reflections gave us insight into how the individual teachers were feeling about the sessions, about their own competence, and about their classroom practices. Several themes emerged including the value of the struggle, the joy of using conceptual thinking, the importance of clarity, the advantage of building, the benefit of collaboration, and recognizing that there are multiple valid ways in which to approach problem solving, which leads to viewing student work with new eyes. In the institute, there was also a focus on formative and performance based assessment and error analysis to improve student learning. Following this, in the fall semester the teachers worked on Lesson Study as a team with K-12 math teachers, special educators, LEP teachers led by a mathematician, a mathematics educator and a math coach (Suh and Seshaiyer, 2014a, 2014b). The follow-up lesson study was one mechanism used to sustain the learning and keep the focus on the content, helping teachers understand how the tasks they are using in their classrooms are intended to contribute to student understanding.

Figure 8. Sample of student work 2

included baseline data on participating schools, teachers, and students including the numbers served, qualification levels of teachers, proficiency levels of students; program results for teachers related to changes in content knowledge and highly qualified status and for students related to changes in academic achievement. For the teachers’ content knowledge, a pre- and post- assessment of teacher content knowledge was administered before and after the summer institute and following the final follow-up meeting. Special efforts were made to create these assessments to reflect VA SOLs at various grade levels. A pre- survey solicited information regarding their opinions, their preparation, their teaching practice, and the quality and impacts of their professional development experiences. To assess the project’s impact on classroom instruction and student achievement, data such as student assessment and artifacts of student work was collected during the academic year at the follow-up Lesson Study sessions. Examples of student sample work from a Lesson study is illustrated in Figures 7 and 8 where students demonstrate their thinking of solving problems using techniques in proportional reasoning such as unitizing. These included having teachers develop and implement assessments of their students learning. These assessments were aggregated as part of the report of impact on student achievement. To assess impact on classroom instruction, teacher reports and activities related to their dissemination plans was aggregated during the follow-up sessions throughout the school year. The primary indicator of student

Program Evaluation and Assessment

Data collected from the MSP programs

Figure 7. Sample of student work 1

Virginia Mathematics Teacher vol. 43, no. 1

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