New Design Math Department

CCSS Chairs in Hall (High School) from Math Department on Vimeo.

There are multiple challenges facing the Math Department at New Design High School. The first challenge is the discrepancy of skills of entering students. Students often lack the fundamental skills needed to be successful math students in high school. Those lacking skills include strong math basics, the ability to problem solve and the inability to contextually think about math. Middle school math, and for that matter, elementary school math, does not set-up students for success in high school and college. A dominance of test prep, a culture of completing worksheets without being challenged to think deeply math and poor instruction contribute to a culture of negativity regarding math. The end result is that students often feel discouraged, unmotivated and apathetic about math instruction. The second challenge is the widening of the performance skills gap while students are at New Design.  Instead of the performance gap decreasing between high achieving and low achieving students, the gap widens for students while enrolled at New Design.  Challenges facing the department right now include: 

• New Design students are in constant need have their fundamentals reinforced while learning new content. 
• The New Design curriculum is not yet aligned, vertically and/or horizontally. 
•  Differentiation with students at different levels is especially challenging.  
• There is a lack of agreement between math department members on what they value and what should be integrated into the curriculum.  Members have different approaches and philosophies toward teaching math and the disconnection between the grade level curriculums is a direct representation of the lack of common agreement among department members.   

Design Challenge:  How do we teach math to develop youth in cognitive and non-cognitive areas that can ensure their happiness and success in life? 

Exploratory Stage:

•  Illustrative Mathematics
• GAIM
•  The Work of Dylan Williams:   
• Six Secrets of a Happy Classroom
• Innovate NYC Math Challenge Video 
• Kipp Middle Schools:  Impacts on Achievement
• Crossing the River with Dogs Book  
• Vertical Math Progressions from the  University of Arizona
• Common Core Standards
• Partnership for Assessment of Readiness and College and Career Readiness
• Mathematics Common Core Toolbox
• Power Point Common Core
• Mathematics Assessment Project:  Assessing 21st Century Math
• Ted Talk:  Dan Meyer Math Curriculum
• Interview with NYU Professor Mark Saul
• Mr. Meyer's Blog
• Mark Driscoll and his books
• National Research Council's Ten Research Findings from Adding It Up 
• Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin Academic Youth Development Initiative Summer Bridge Program
• Impact Analysis: Youth Development and Student Learning in Math and Science 
• MitC and the work of Cathy Fosnot
• Deborah Ballat
• Barbara Debitsky at Bank Street
• New York Times article on Blue Engine

Phil Daro - Against "Answer-Getting" from SERP Institute on Vimeo.

Math Department Members Summary Paragraphs 

Karissa Gonzales (Student Teacher)

I agree that students at New Design are in need of having their foundational skills strengthened in order to succeed in Math.  New Design needs a new way of teaching that focuses on real life problem solving and connections, constant communication/feedback between teacher and student, Peer group learning and personalization in learning in order to motivate and support our students in learning mathematics.  I do believe that students learning should be paced to a certain extent depending on feedback from students but I do not agree that students do not need deadlines as deadlines are part of the real world and this is what we are preparing our students at New Design for.

Pei Jun Qu (Student Teacher)

I agree that students may enjoy math learning if it is presented at their level or related to them. As much as I love math, if students are not going to pursue a college path or career in the math and science fields, when are they ever going to need to graph a sine or cosine curve? It is possible to incorporate math into the students’ daily life, i.e. creating a budget or understanding bank rates. I think New Design’s Model Math class creates this opportunity. We should be incorporating personal skills that will be beneficial for students when they are out of high school. Though these “artificial deadlines” are a challenge to students, we should impose the importance of deadlines because in the real world missing a deadline means fees and ruining credit reports.

Cheryl (12th Grade Math Teacher)

Students should be successful first and then challenged in math.  Find a way to accomplish that we might not lose so many of our students "buy in" in math.  Change our students feelings about math, they will be independently motivated to succeed in math.  To do that we focus on problem-solving in the classroom.  Promote open-ended problem-solving.  In the math classrooms here at NDHS students should move onto new content and new challenges at a personalized rate.

Asia(9th and 10th Grade Math Teacher)

Math teachers at NDHS, at an optimal level, will experience difficulty supporting students in their cognitive and non-cognitive development due to the pressures of the ambiguous Common Core standards and state's required standardized testing that dictates whether students are ready to advance to the next level in their NDHS career.  Goal 1 and 2 of the math department definitely reflect that the non-cognitive student development component that ND desires to be priority is not at the moment on the top of our "things-to-do" list.  The fact is that we need students to pass regents exams and work on non-cognitive development. The decision on which of these items hold more weight depends on who is reading the data and how it is being interpreted. With that being said, I ask where and what is the focus of the department, individual teachers, and school administration?

Julius (9th and 10th Grade Math Teacher)

There is a need for a goal setting process that involves a feedback loop.  Specifically, we need to develop and get good at using learning goals that are based in the common core, use a backwards design process (e.g., UbD), and provide the opportunity for feedback to move students forward.  Once we have well defined goal posts and can articulate them - both for ourselves and in a way that students are able to internalize - we can endeavor to provide feedback to students that is useful.

Dr. Phil (Founder and Math Teacher)
In addition to ensuring that our entering students do not lack the basic skills required to engage meaningfully in HS mathematics, NDHS needs to refocus our efforts away from standardized testing and back to problem solving and group work. By empowering our students to become good problem solvers they will naturally do better on tests.  Explicit instruction in problem solving has been shown to not only increase students ability to solve problems but also their ability to achieve procedural fluency with various procedures as well as increase their ability to solve multi-step problems (some interesting research has been done on this specifically in the context of algebra by Jon Star at harvard).  Focusing on group work in the classroom will help us in a nunber of ways. Research suggests that groups are more effective at solving problems than individuals, and that when members of the group have to solve subsequent problems without the group, they perform better than those without the group experience (Barron 2000). Group-work also enables a more student-centered classroom, gets students doing more math and facilitates differentiation within the classroom.