When I began this work, I felt passionately that in order to make improvements on our math systems at our school, it was vital to deeply understand the systems themselves. I did this by conducting informal interviews with various teachers. In these interviews with teachers, I uncovered a desire to change their math curriculum or pedagogy, but a lack of time to put in the work. Being an elementary teacher myself, I am all too aware of the pressure teaching all subjects puts on someone, particularly when he or she is creating everything from the ground up. In order to continue to address this primary driver of pedagogy, but also begin work on the driver creating a common adult vision school wide, I led two professional development meetings. In order to target this, we felt it necessary to understand on a deeper level how the staff felt about their current way of planning and implementing math instruction.
The "WHY"
We asked teachers to complete a survey that contained questions varying from how they viewed themselves as a math teacher to how happy or confident they were with their current math curriculum. This survey, much like the interviews with teachers, indicated that teachers desired more time change their math workshop and structures for better measurement of student growth. The survey was given to the staff in December, prior to our first professional development session and again about a month and a half after. Our goal was to measure a change in teachers mindsets around their math instruction after the professional development session.
During the professional development sessions, we looked as a staff at the staff at various change ideas other schools and teachers have implemented in math, such as: warm ups using academic language, a year long scope and sequence with common core standards, benchmark assessments, and exit cards. Teachers were then given time to create a change idea that would benefit their students and would contribute to better measurement of student growth and progress. We asked that teachers work in grade level teams, during the time allotted to create something they could implement in their classrooms. A month after this work time, I gave the same survey a second time.
The "HOW"
The "WHY"
The "WHY"
Change idea: STAFF PLANNING TIME
While the growth between the two surveys is minimal, it is important to note that growth in teacher mindset around math curriculum is being made. I wonder how more time with their change ideas will help to raise contentedness with the math plan created. Many teachers reported that they found the time to develop a change idea for immediate use in their classroom to be extremely helpful. Almost all teachers reported adopting and implementing what they worked on inform their math instruction for the remainder of the year.
The charts on the left show how teachers responded to two questions from the survey after a small amount of time to create and implement their team’s idea.
preliminary findings
