Oregon’s math success: Scale back and go deeper
“High School Teacher” kindly sent me this math story in the Oregonian newspaper by former AJC education writer Betsy White. (She is now Betsy Hammond.)
Betsy reports that Oregon math teachers have moved middle schoolers so far that the typical eighth-grader now can do math at nearly the same level as many high school sophomores.
Oregon is having success with a scaled-back approach to math that allows teachers to go deeper. Are Georgia students learning in a similar way?
She reports that Oregon middle school students in every racial, ethnic and income group show greater mastery of mathematics — including algebraic reasoning, statistics and geometry — than they did three years ago.
The secret, according to Betsy, is scaling back the number of math topics covered in each grade. She writes:
At the same time, more Oregon middle schools organized teachers into teams that meet regularly to discuss their students’ progress and learn from one another’s teaching successes and failures.
The result: Math lessons are more engaging and more thorough — and test scores show more students understand and retain what’s taught.
“We push for students to understand and make sense of math, and in a concrete way … and they are actually enjoying it,” says Tillamook Junior High math teacher Jill Sumerlin, president of the Oregon Council of Teachers of Mathematics
With fewer concepts to cover, teachers take the time for more hands-on lessons, more visual cues and more real-world examples. They also do more to check that all the students have a topic down before they move on.
“Middle school teachers knew they were spending 80 percent of their time teaching things that students had already been shown in previous grades but have never mastered because the curriculum never stayed on it long enough to go deep,” says Shannon McCaw, a high school math teacher who consults with districts across Oregon to improve their math results. “Kids were hating math because nothing was ever new and they never got good at anything.”
Our new Georgia math is also supposed to go deeper earlier.
Is there any resemblance between what Oregon is doing and what we are?
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10 comments Add your comment
mystery poster
November 10th, 2009
10:27 am
I am always wary of anything that shows such great gains in such a short amount of time.
I’m just saying’ …
SallyB
November 10th, 2009
11:21 am
This is not a new concept…Teaching to Mastery. { WHen one has been around as long as I have, it’s pretty much “everything old is new again”.} At least twice in my teaching career that was the “cure du jour”….not that I don’t agree with the concept…I definitely do!
Also, I am wondering if these improved abilities were the result of pre and post tests OF THE SAME STUDENTS. or did they do the typical educrat comparison of 2 entirely different groups of students..i.e. did they test 8th graders in 2005 and compare them to 8th graders in 2008? Makes a lot of difference if you’re looking to show that it was instruction/strategy ONLY that made the difference.
teach1
November 10th, 2009
12:02 pm
We need new math in elemnetary grades. When I only have 2 weeks to cover money, 8 lessons to cover shapes, 10 lessons to cover time, and 8 lessons to work on measurement, how can I cover anything to mastery. If you divide the school year up into topics just in the first grade math, you find we fly by everything amd master very little. Why do I have to teach 6 year olds fractions or work on counting change back or dollars to 20.00? They just need to know how to count coins well and add and subtract. I would love to work on a topic and do it for 6 weeks and get it really mastered, then try something new.
Been there a while
November 10th, 2009
12:34 pm
Absolutely “NO resemblance” to Oregon at the elementary level. There is no time to teach anything to mastery. Students continue to move up to fifth grade math without mastery of the basics so they struggle in fifth grade.
Reality 2
November 10th, 2009
2:30 pm
teach1,
I somewhat agree. I think we should throw out money and time from elementary math curriculum. If anything, those topics should go into social studies.
Having said that, who said we need to spend 2 weeks to cover money and 10 lessons to cover time? Don’t teachers have some flexibility in deciding the pacing of the curriculum or what to emphasize or de-emphasize?
Oh really???
November 10th, 2009
2:33 pm
Been there a while,
Have you actually seen the Oregon math standards? I am just as wary of people who make such a blanket statement as those who claim that such a huge improvement happened in such a short period of time.
ScienceTeacher671
November 10th, 2009
7:35 pm
Reality 2, the reality is that teachers in most districts no longer have any flexibility in deciding pacing (state or district or school pacing guides must be followed) or what to emphasize (the state standards, the topics emphasized on the state tests, and the district and school curriculum coordinators see to that).
teach1
November 10th, 2009
11:55 pm
The numbers I threw out were examples of approximate time actually spent covering the topics by first grade teachers. There really is not specific number of lessons. However, in order to cover all first grade standards in math it does leave some very small windows for some topics. We can choose which topics get short changed -I guess.
Reality 2
November 11th, 2009
7:07 am
The decision to “short change” any topic should be made with mathematics in mind. From a mathematical perspective, money and time are so unimportant. Yes we can do arithmetic in the context of solving some problems involving money and time, but spending days and days on these topics for just that purpose seems to be pointless. What the GPS does not do is to indicate which topics are really important mathematically and deserve days or even weeks of attention while others may be much more trivial that several can be treated in one lesson.
When teachers make haphazard decisions to what to skip, that creates a lot of problem later on – particularly because many elementary teachers don’t have deep mathematics understanding necessary to make sound curricular decision. Unfortunately, so many of “curriculum” specialists don’t know math that much better, either.
irisheyes
November 12th, 2009
10:50 am
The problem with that is that money and time are vital lifeskills. If they get shortchanged in the early grades, when do the kids actually learn how to tell time or make change? Thinking over my math curriculum, it seems like there isn’t much we can take out. Maybe fractions so early and cutting measurement down a lot, I guess.