Mathematics at Work™ Plan Book - Sarah Schuhl

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equitable quality interventions that this tool will significantly impact every student’s mathematics learning.

      Formative feedback requires intentional team planning to determine the essential learning standards to be assessed and create common unit assessments that reveal student thinking and learning. From the data revealed through student work on the assessments, your team can plan for students to reflect and set goals for continued learning. You can also plan for how your students will re-engage in learning through the shared intervention opportunities your team provides.

      The intent of students analyzing their performance on the end-of-unit assessment is to help each student build responsibility for his or her own learning. Although each student takes ownership of his or her individual progress toward each of the essential learning standards, students may still work together to meet those standards. Students can work together when your team provides equitable feedback to students, regardless of which teacher students have.

      Student goal setting during and at the end of each unit helps them to see what they learned well and what they still need to learn. Such collaboration with peers and this ownership of learning engage students more deeply in the learning process and provide evidence for each student that effective effort built on the reflect, refine, and act cycle of learning leads to improved mathematical understanding and success.

      Use the self-reflection team assessment protocol as a survey for each member of your team. Then, use your responses for a subsequent discussion with each member of your grade-level or course-based mathematics team. Share your personal unit-by-unit assessment practices and routines with one another. You can use each team member’s responses to find initial common ground for your collective mathematics assessment work. Discuss your responses and, as a collaborative team, reach consensus and determine how you will build your common assessments and how you will use those assessments to support formative student learning routines.

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      A great place to begin your initial work as a professional learning community team in mathematics is the collaborative design and writing of your common unit assessments. DuFour et al. (2016) describe the importance of using common assessment instruments this way: “One of the most powerful, high-leverage strategies for improving student learning available to schools is the creation of frequent, high-quality common assessments by teachers who are working collaboratively to help a group of students acquire agreed-on knowledge and skills” (p. 141).

      Creating common assessments to use during and at the end of each unit ensures equity in the rigor of the mathematics problems used for the assessments. It will also help your team to backward-map your instruction during the unit as you prepare the students for the expected and required rigor. Ideally, your team should create these common unit assessments before the unit begins.

      You can use the eight criteria in this evaluation rubric to determine the quality of your current common unit assessments. A rating of 1 has a description attached and would be considered poor performance with these test criteria. A rating of 4 indicates your current common assessments act as an exemplar in these criteria we could all learn from. Regardless of your self-rating, make it a team goal to keep improving the quality of your unit-by-unit mathematics assessments.

      You should also note that, if you do not collaborate to become a 4 in each category, the first four mathematics assessment design criteria listed here often create places of great inequity in your mathematics assessment process and professional work. Perhaps the most important are the identification of and emphasis on essential learning standards, the balance of higher- and lower-level-cognitive-demand tasks, the variety of assessment-task formats and use of technology, and the appropriate scoring rubric. Yet, these are also the most limiting aspects of many mathematics unit assessments—both during and at the end of a unit.

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      The third critical question of a PLC at Work expects your team and school to develop a robust response to the question: What will be our response when students do not learn the expected standards for each grade level or course? You can use this evaluation tool to rate and evaluate the quality of your response to intervention and learning using evidence based on a recent common unit assessment.

      How do your current mathematics intervention programs score? You should expect to develop an intervention program that scores 4s in all five of the intervention criteria. Which of the five criteria for a high-quality mathematics intervention program are currently part of your collaborative team practice? What do you need to do to strengthen your mathematics intervention program?

      Each of the five criteria is necessary for continued student learning when a student has not yet learned an essential learning standard, as evidenced by the end-of-unit common mathematics assessment. The challenge is to create an effective system that allows students to engage in the intervention, while simultaneously practicing the essential learning standards for the next unit.

      The questions on this page aim to help you and your team understand one another’s perspectives related to your systematic Tier 2 interventions as a team. In other words, how does your team respond when common assessment data, during or at the end of a unit, reveal some students have learned the essential learning standards and others have not? Your professional response as individual teachers and as a teacher team reveals your current beliefs about the need for interventions and the plan for making those interventions effective.

      The intent of your mathematics interventions should be to provide students with the additional time and support necessary to learn your grade-level or course-based essential learning standards.

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      The true purpose of any mathematics lesson is to maximize student engagement, communication, and perseverance during the lesson based on the tasks you have chosen. The tasks you choose must help students learn the essential learning standards for the current mathematics unit of study.

      Your daily lessons should provide an opportunity for your students to reflect, refine, and act during the lesson. You should expect your students to use the mathematical tasks you have chosen and the formative feedback you provide during the lesson to refine their errors in the process of learning the mathematics learning target or standard each day.

      You and your team can use this lesson-design evaluation tool to evaluate the quality of your current mathematics lessons. It will help you identify areas of strength and areas for lesson-design growth as you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your current instructional planning for mathematics. These six research-affirmed lesson-design elements also provide an instructional framework for highly effective mathematics lessons every day. Some of these elements may already be present in your daily planning; you just need to work with your other team members to brainstorm and share creative ideas about how to most effectively implement the criteria.

      Other criteria may not yet be present in your lessons and only score a 1 or 2 using the evaluation tool. You can decide how to adjust your daily lesson design to better impact student perseverance and learning in your mathematics classroom by improving on these non-negotiable aspects of the mathematics lesson. Your daily lesson-design preparation throughout the school year has a certain rhythm to it, and these six lesson-design criteria can serve that.

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