The math department I met with consists of a variety of teachers from various backgrounds, education experience, and years of experience. At LGA our teacher see ongoing professional learning as a high priority. Amongst our staff, there has been a rise in teachers continue higher education with more than half of ours teachers holding at least one Master’s degree. Our faculty consists of twenty-eight teachers with eight of those teaching making up the math department. The majority of our staff consists of veteran teachers with fifteen or more years of experience in the professional. Within the math department, three of the teachers are relatively new to the profession. While teaching is unusually an overwhelmingly caucasian female occupation, …show more content…
By reviewing these two sets of data we were able to create long-term and quarterly short-term goals. At LGAM we use formative assessments during instruction to help gather feedback in order to adjust ongoing teaching and learning to improve students’ achievement. This process emphasis on focus and coherence. The Common Core Math Standards require us to incorporate a balanced approach between procedural skill, fluency, and conceptual understanding. As we can see in the 2016-17 CAASPP results, our students are struggling to reason, defend and debate their thinking when solving problems. Only 37% of our students are meeting math standards on the CAASPP. When we compare this results to the benchmark data we see that between 60% to 68% of students are passing. Do to the gap in student achievement between these assessments, the math department will be engaging professional learning around instruction strategies to address the needs of students performing below grade level. As a team, we recognize that effective professional development must be sustained, ongoing, content-focused. Math colaboration will be embedded in professional learning communities where we will be able to strategize on instructional math tools to address the problem of practice we identified. Too often math instruction and assessment are inconsistent from classroom to classroom, by …show more content…
If successful, the core math program will meet the needs of at least eighty percent of our students. Since a majority of our students identified as needing high levels intervention services, we will be utilizing small group instruction to deliver mastery based lessons on foundational skills. A student who is severely behind in math will be placed in MATH 180. MATH 180 is a comprehensive system of curriculum, instruction, remediation, and assessments designed to equip struggling middle school students with the knowledge they need to thrive in algebra. As the team begins to identify instructional strategies that increase student achievement we looked to the work of John Hattie. In his research, Hattie explains the importance of sharing learning intentions and success criteria. The basic premise of Hattie's work is to allow students to have the same information as their teacher regarding what they should be learning. As a team, we begin developing learning intentions and success criteria for each module. A learning intention is a statement, created by us, that describes clearly what we want our students to know, understand, and be able to do as a result of learning and teaching activities. Success criteria are linked to learning intentions. They are developed by the team and describe what success looks like. The use of learning