Activities Overview:
This report has been prepared by Thornton & Barrett (Co-Principal Investigators), and updated on November 1, 2002.
Annual Overview, 2002
PRIME is a collaborative effort involving Illinois State University's Mathematics Education faculty and all 337 K-5 classroom mathematics teachers, their administrators, parents, and community partners in Peoria District 150, a $1.5 million project that received initial funding in March, 2000. As a local systemic change effort the project responds to teacher needs and their request for professional support in phasing in Investigations in Number, Data and Space. The teacher enhancement efforts of the PRIME Project are helping to fill a 20-year void in systemic professional development in mathematics teaching and is expected to impact performance of students on state math assessments, which has never risen above state averages.
Major project goals:
- Improve teachers' mathematical content knowledge, including knowledge of the technology used in Investigations.
- Extend teachers' understanding of the pedagogy underlying effective implementation of the Investigations program.
- Mentor teachers by promoting their reflective analysis of mathematics teaching and learning.
- Foster the development of teacher leaders and communities of learners within and across schools.
- Encourage and support teachers' outreach efforts to communicate with families and the broader community about ways of improving mathematics teaching and learning.
Long-term goals include:
- Improving student achievement in mathematics through an emphasis on problem solving, reasoning, and numbers sense and on the comprehensive development of conceptual understanding of mathematics;
- Fostering better grade-to-grade K-5 program coordination leading to more successful entry into middle school mathematics; and
- Developing structures necessary to sustain and extend the momentum of the PRIME Project beyond funding by working with individual schools to create a mechanism to insure continued growth. This effort complements the district's coordinated follow-through program.
Year One Project Activities:
Our program began with an intensive summer session in June focused on improving teachers' understanding of geometry and measurement content and teaching practices related to these topics in the Investigations program. Systematic follow-through included a series of three seminars and extensive classroom-based support from PRIME staff. A Mathlinks Committee of 32 lead teachers from the schools participating in the Project met in September and in November to monitor grade-level coordination and implementation of Investigations, and to provide local input to PRIME staff for project activity.
The PRIME Advisory Board met with district and university staff on September 14. The staff supported the Core Evaluation activities required by Horizons.
ANNUAL OVERVIEW, 2001 (Year Two Project Activities):
Major project activities, as outlined in our original proposal, were a natural extension of Year One activities. We held grade-level seminars in February and in March involving all 337 Project teachers. In June, senior staff collaborated to host a special session for principals. Later during June, 332 teachers participated in one of two week-long PRIME sessions focused on Developing Number and Operation Sense from the standpoints of both mathematics content and mathematical pedagogy. Ideas developed during these sessions were reinforced during August back-to-school grade-level seminars. Between mid September and mid October, on-site K-3 and Grade 4-5 meetings were held to reflect on students' performance as measured by state-level mathematics exams given the prior spring. A targeted goal of these sessions was to identify weak areas and devise strategies for working as a team to improve student performance in areas of need. Two grade-level seminars, to focus on assessment as requested by principals, are scheduled for fall semester.
Throughout the year, on-going site support has been provided by Project staff. Each semester each teacher is visited at least 3 times. Coordinating teachers in each school met as a group 2 times during spring semester. In May we submitted a request for supplemental funding to sponsor a Mathematics Leadership Institute aimed at developing a cohort of peers capable of coaching other teachers in their building. The original proposal stopped short of providing specific leadership development and we have subsequently found a need to provide such leadership. We believe it is critical for supporting project initiatives now and for sustainability beyond funding. Pending funding, staff associate Jo Olson (Presidential Award winning middle school teacher with prior staff development experience), has coordinated initial efforts. Her work, begun May 10, included a week-long session in August and monthly dinner meetings this fall.
The PRIME Advisory Board meets with district and university staff on November 9. The staff has supported the Core Evaluation activities required by Horizons.
ANNUAL OVERVIEW, 2002 (Year Three Project Activities):
Major project activities, as outlined in our original proposal, were a natural extension of activities in years 1 and 2. We held grade-level seminars in February involving all 337 Project teachers. In June, senior staff collaborated to host a special session for principals. Later during June, 331 teachers participated in one of two week-long PRIME sessions focused on Data Analysis and Probability, Patterns and Algebra. These sessions targeted mathematics content and mathematical pedagogy related to the themes. Ideas developed during these sessions were reinforced during August back-to-school grade-level seminars. Between mid September and mid October, on-site K-3 and Grade 4-5 meetings reflect on students' performance as measured by state-level mathematics exams that were given in the Spring of 2002. A targeted goal of these sessions was to identify weak areas and devise strategies for working as a team to improve student performance in areas of need. Two grade-level seminars are scheduled for fall semester.
Throughout the year, on-going site support has been provided by Project staff. Each semester each teacher is visited at least 3 times. Each time, teachers are asked to plan a problem-centered or hands-on mathematics lesson which allows us to team with them as they interact with pairs or groups of students. Our professional development goal is to reach the teacher by asking them to predict and verify students' strategies/thinking. We also prompt teachers to develop questioning skills with increasing cognitive demands for thinking and reasoning. We also help teachers reflect on appropriate next steps for instruction.
Throughout the project our staff has collaborated with teachers on school sites to design and carry out for school-sponsored 'Math Family Nights.' The liason between schools and parents, as strengthened by PRIME project work merited a 1.5 page feature layout in the Peoria Journal Star in Spring, 2002.
One of PRIME's doctoral graduate assistants, Jo Olson, has developed and implemented a Mathematics Leadership Institute which is developing a cohort of peers capable of coaching other teachers in their building. Jo (Presidential Award winning middle school teacher with prior staff development experience), met monthly with these teachers during the Spring of 2002. During these 3-hour-long evening meetings, she oriented teachers to the lesson-study model for PD. These teachers are now beginning to use with small groups of their peers. Threaded through the Spring and the week-long summer session with these teachers, she emphasized ways of addressing higher levels of cognitive demand and questioning in mathematics instruction. During the PRIME Summer Institute in early June, with the support of the grade-level mentors, each of these 12 teachers led one pedagogy session for their peers. Lead teachers are continuing to attend evening meetings during the current semester, and are planning: 1) to lead a staff-development session at the November 2003 seminars; 2) to make a PRIME presentation at a state or regional NCTM meeting; and 3) to design a program for staff development in mathematics for district K-5 teachers that will be supported by the district beyond PRIME's funding.
The PRIME Advisory Board met with district and university staff on September 20. The staff has supported all Core Evaluation activities required by Horizons.
Findings Overview:
Findings for PRIME project, Peoria, Illinois
Reported: November 1, 2002
Carol Thornton & Jeff Barrett (Co-Principal Investigators)
Throughout the project, anecdotal evidence has supported extremely positive attitudes toward teacher participation. With differing levels of success, teachers have implemented reform-based Investigations (Investigations in Number, Data and Space) activities in their classrooms. As the project has progressed, we have become more knowledgeable about the problems and challenges that face us and have developed better approaches for addressing these. In our case, as in many other locations, teachers' content-knowledge is generally weak, teachers struggle to shift the focus of classroom discussion onto student thinking, and they struggle to identify or create worthwhile mathematical tasks. Consequently, we have focused on higher levels of questioning, on finding and implementing good mathematical tasks like those exemplified in the Investigations curriculum, and on other techniques to engage students to think mathematically. This work has been supported by ongoing, regular classroom visits (3 visits per K-4 teacher per semester) by PRIME staff. The District is crediting our teacher enhancement efforts for increases that have occurred in student achievement.
Student Achievement Gains
Mathematics scores released in August of 2001 for Peoria's Grade 3 and Grade 5 students on the annual state mathematics assessment showed achievement gains after the first year of PRIME. The Gr. 3 increase in PRIME math ISAT scores (10% above last year's scores) doubled the average state increase (at 5 %). Measured one year after the start of our project, 65% of Grade 3 students (including special education students) met or exceeded state standards, compared with 55% performance during Spring, 2000. For the first time in Peoria's history, Grade 5 had more students above than below the state average, with 52% of these students (including special education students) meeting or exceeding state standards. At both grades 3 and 5, students generally did better on mathematics than on either reading or writing assessments. The district has attributed most of the credit for this increase in math performance to the PRIME project.
Mathematics scores released by the state of Illinois in August of 2002 for Peoria, District #150 document that improvement in student achievement for Grade 3 students continued to increase markedly. 73% of students at Grade 3 exceeded or met state mathematics standards in Spring of 2002, after two years of PRIME. Grade 5 scores had a marginal increase to 53% meeting or exceeding state standards. Since the beginning of PRIME, 14 of 15 elementary schools have shown shown overall gains in mathematics achievement on this annual state test. At the fifth-grade level, 8 of 14 schools have shown increased mathematics achievement scores; one school has maintained 100% perfect scores. (Please See Attached Excel Tables, entitled: Third Grade ISAT Results and Fifth-Grade ISAT Results).
Teacher Response/ Case Studies of Teachers
Anecdotal accounts and staff journals indicate that teachers have grown in their commitment to the spirit and ideas in the Investigations modules. Teachers have moved from a 'willingness to try' to more conscientious efforts for organizing and implementing Investigations ideas in their classrooms. 5th grade teachers, for example, initially saw no reason for questioning the adequacy of the standard multiplication algorithm. After the sessions in Summer 2001 teachers welcomed the Investigations approach for developing number sense and mathematical understanding as a base for teaching multi-digit multiplication. This attitude is paralleled among teachers at other grade levels. While teachers are beginning to succeed in their efforts to set better tasks such as those modeled in the Investigations curriculum and to integrate more and better questions into their instruction, they don't always know how to build on student thinking.
We are carrying out five longitudinal case-study accounts of teachers' practice to document changes in their practice and knowledge over the duration of the project.
We have also conducted three formal research studies with project teachers.
The first, 'Confronting Constructivist Pedagogy:
Interpreting Two First-Grade Teachers' Conceptions of Innovative Pedagogy for Arithmetic.' This investigation is a case-study that examines how two first-grade teachers in our project negotiated their deep beliefs on teaching and learning mathematics during the first year of PRIME.
This research report was published in the PME/NA (Utah, 2001)
Proceedings.
The second study is a quantitative analysis of how teachers shifted their practical concerns for implementing Investigations in their teaching. This research report, 'The Change of Teachers' Concerns While Participating in a Systemic Professional Development Project,' will be presented in Athens, GA at the PME/NA Conference as a Poster presentation and will appear in the 2002 Proceedings document.
The third investigation, Working With Novice Teachers:
Challenges for Professional Development,' is a study comparing two different types of beginning teachers as they have implemented a reform-based curriculum. In this study we identified two different profiles for novice teachers working in our urban setting. Our study of younger vs. older recent graduates of teacher ed programs confirms existing accounts that younger novice teachers are flexible to a fault. In our case study, we have found that the more mature novice teacher holds beliefs about traditional mathematics teaching more strongly. Our interventions have had to be very different with these two types of teachers. An older novice teacher responded much more positively to being asked to describe the thinking of her students.
In our intervention program such an approach proved effective in shifting dialog to the different ways students are thinking about the mathematics. This provided a natural pathway to ways of implementing an innovative curriculum (Investigations) since this curriculum focuses directly on student thinking about mathematics. This research report has been accepted for publication in an international mathematics education journal, Mathematics Teacher Education and Development. It will also be presented at PME/NA in Athens, GA, during Fall, 2002.
