Spa City teachers take development course
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » At various national conferences in recent years, Juli Dixon — an author, professor and math professional development provider — opened the eyes of the Saratoga Springs City School District’s STEM director, Joseph Greco.
Greco knew math teachers needed to see Dixon up close. This past Wednesday and Thursday, nearly 100 elementary school math teachers and coaches learned different strategies to be implemented in their classrooms.
“We’re looking at making sense of mathematics for teaching and instructional shifts to support students to engage in the mathematical practices,” said Dixon, who teaches at the University of Central Florida. “Mathematical practices describe how students should make sense of mathematics and learn mathematics.”
Dixon, who has provided these lessons for nearly 20 years, stressed the importance of making sure teachers intentionally address the standards, so students learn them and succeed through a TQE process. TQE stands for Tasks, Questions and Evidence.
Nancy VandePas, who serves as an AIS math teacher at Division Street and Dorothy Nolan elementary schools, appreciated Dixon’s approach to how students make sense of mathematics.
“It’s not so much a teacher-led model, but instead the teacher is a facilitator, which allows the students to come up with their own strategies, and then [the teacher] can help to guide them towards an efficient strategy that’s student generated and help them to then practice that strategy more so,” said VandePas. “Because it comes from the students it has a lot more validity for other students and they are a lot more invested in their learning.”
The TQE Process asks teachers to select appropriate tasks to support identified learning goals; facilitate productive questioning during instruction to engage students in the mathematical practices and collect and use student evidence in the formative assessment process during instruction.
Lauren Hastings, a math coach for six years at Division Street, said she looks forward to using what she learned over the two days into classrooms.
“This facilitates some really great discussions that have been needed to have been had for quite some time,” said Hastings. “It also allows for collaboration among special education teachers, general education teachers and support personnel.”
VandePas agreed with her teaching peer, calling the instruction a “phenomenal learning experience.”
“We have been able to have an open dialogue and ask questions that we’ve all kind of had, but this is a comfortable forum to voice them and we are really getting concrete answers from someone that we really respect and who is really kind of a math guru,” said VandePas. “She’s just a great resource for us, so it’s really nice to get some of the answers to questions that we’ve all had for a long time, and I think it’s going to improve a lot of our teaching.”
Dixon will return to the district this fall to work with sixth- through 10thgrade math teachers.
Greco said it’s a systematic approach the school district has instituted to become even better.
“It’s really important that we get our teachers to start looking critically at what they are doing, why they are doing it and then build upon that,” said Greco. “Having this expert here kind of helps validate some of the good things, and also challenges us on some of the other things: how can we take a good program and make it great?”