Shifting the Paradigm in

High School Math: CONTRIBUTED BY

How We Implemented Common Luke Dilger

Core in the Classroom

Teacher & Math Departmen
Chair, Soledad High School

Posted in Evolving Ed | July 06, 2017

Our journey to implementation of CCSS started about 6 years ago. We looked at the new
CCSS standards, which represented a major change in how math is taught and how math is
learned, especially the standards for mathematical practice.

It was immediately apparent that mathematics instruction had to change. We could not rely
on supplementing textbooks written for the old California State Math Standards, nor just
show our students how to select the best of 4 multiple-choice answers on the
end-of-the-year state test. We would have to get them to think and reason mathematically!

The Lay of the Land: A Little Background About Us

I teach at Soledad High School. It is a medium sized school, about 1,300 students located in
the center of the lettuce fields in Monterey County, California. This region of California
produces most of the lettuce grown in the United States and agriculture is a multi-bil-
lion-dollar enterprise in Monterey County.

Most of our students are the children of the people who work in the fields, mostly of Span-
ish speaking cultural descent, and while the parents care very much about the education of
their children they have, on average, less than a high school education themselves. Over
90% of our students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

Nonetheless, our students are hardworking and focused on the possibilities for their future.
As a mathematics teacher in my 16th year of teaching I feel privileged to work with these
wonderful kids.
 Criteria for Implementing Common Core:
Letting Students Take the Lead
Recognizing the need and with the help of our local County Office of Education, we devel-
oped a set of criteria that our mathematics department team would use to evaluate a new
Math Curriculum.

We were looking for a curriculum that provided Focus, Coherence, Balance, and Rigor. We
wanted it to follow the lesson structure recommended by Phil Daro, who served on the
writing team of the Mathematics Common Core State Standards. Each lesson should consist
of a task that students work collaboratively and alone to develop, solidify and practice
important mathematics. The tasks should:

Be rich, real-world learning tasks that create the problem-solving skills necessary for
our students to be college and career-ready.

Prompt students mathematical thinking, develop understanding, and foster intuitive

approaches to problem solving.

Allow for multiple experiences of the same standard and promote access to the
standards in multiple ways.

Have a low-threshold and high ceiling; meaning that there are access points for all
students and opportunities for extensions.

Mr. Daro explained that by working through tasks, students will experience the conceptual
understandings and use those to acquire the specific problem-solving skills necessary for
mastery. He also said that the instructor needs to launch the task giving students enough
information to access the work, but not so much as to make the task boring. Mr. Daro
referred to this as making sure students have enough tools in their kit to do the work, but
NOT to do the work for them.

The other key activity of the instructor is to monitor student work and select and sequence
student work for presentation at the end of the lesson. Every day, in one way or another,
each student shares their work and compares it with that of others.

We decided that the integrated pathway was going to be more academically effective for
our student demographics, and in line with how secondary math is taught in other countries,
where students are performing at a higher level than in the U.S.

Using OER Content for Our High School Math

Common Core Curriculum
After a good deal of research and discussion around the criteria we developed, the best
integrated option for our district was the Open Education Resource (OER) curriculum availa-
ble online from the Mathematics Vision Project (MVP). We especially liked how the ideas
from Dr. Margaret Smiths book Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical
Discussions were incorporated into the teaching cycle by MVP.
 -
Since MVP was an OER, we could leverage savings to reinvest in the development of teach-
ers and our school leaders in how to use the new curricula and the new teaching methods
required to go along with it.

Our Strategy for Rolling Out a New High

School Math Curricula
The integrated pathway of Math I, Math II, and Math III has been fully implemented over a
period of three years, allowing the teachers and students to make as smooth a transition as
possible.

Starting with our freshmen, we started with MVP Integrated Math 1. The following year we
added MVP Integrated Math 2 for all sophomores who had taken Math 1 as freshmen. By
the third year, we were fully implemented with all freshmen taking Math 1, all Sophomores
taking Math 2, and all Juniors taking Math 3.

Two Keys to Successfully Implementing

a CCSS Math Curriculum
Make Professional Development Ongoing and On-Demand
To effectively teach a rigorous high school CCSS curriculum, many teachers need to
strengthen their understanding of the Common Core Standards, deepen their knowledge of
high school mathematics, and gain fluency in using the eight Effective Teaching Practices
put forth by NCTM in Principles to Actions (2014) that are high-leverage and connected
with essential learning outcomes for students.

While formal professional development from the publishers authors or math experts is
extremely beneficial, teachers should also work in their PLCs to share their learnings and
resources to accelerate and deepen their implementation.

The ability to access PD videos and presentations and colleagues work is especially impor-
tant when there is high teacher turnover. For us, our new teachers do not have experience
teaching MVP and need a way to get up-to-speed quickly.

Build Teacher Preparation into the Weekly Workow

It is essential for teachers to anticipate student responses as they prepare to facilitate a task.
Only by working the tasks themselves can teachers really find what students might struggle
with and which misconceptions might come up. Anticipating is best done with colleagues
through collaboration. Additionally, teachers and students need to engage in discourse and
the Eight Mathematical Practice Standards, which will likely not happen if time is not spent
doing the task prior to teaching it.
 -
The CCSS Curriculum materials are written at grade-level, which presupposes students
coming in with the knowledge that they should acquire in a K-8 CCSS curriculum. If a district
has been slow to implement at the K-8 level, then students will not have the prerequisite
skills; likely teachers will need to prepare just-in-time scaffolding to ensure that their
students have the prerequisite skills to access to the grade-level curriculum.

Furthermore, the CCSS Math materials require grade-level reading ability and many
students need help in that area too. Teachers may need to prepare how they will work on
reading comprehension specific to mathematics. We have developed several graphic organ-
izers that are used to enhance understanding of the core curriculum.

How Technology can Help Overcome the Challenges

and Accelerate Implementation of CCSS Curricula
New and experienced teachers need an efficient way to access all the core and ancillary
materials from the OER publisher. They also need a way to attach and share these materials
with their colleagues, including PD materials, their own and co-created materials (assess-
ments, remediation materials, graphic organizers, etc.) related websites, and lesson notes.
For MVP, we found a Curriculum Management Platform (CMP) called Lessoneer that meets
our needs.

Not only does Lessoneer help us organize and access our instructional materials, but their
Common Core Building Blocks helps us deepened our understanding of the CCSS Math
standards. With the Building Blocks, for each standard there are unpacked skills and con-
cepts, aligned academic vocabulary, sample questions stems and prompts, and sample
sentence frames. They also show us which tasks in MVP cover the standard.

Supporting Student-Centered, Differentiated Learning in High School Math

After finishing their weekly or daily preparation, teachers need to share materials with all
their students as well as specific material to certain studentse.g., for remediation or exten-
sion. If students are accessing the materials digitally, the most common way to share is via
an LMS. If a teacher is using a curriculum management platform, then they can pull the
material right into an LMS assignment via the CMPs LTI application.

Its not just a one-way street with teachers only pushing materials to students. For a
task-based curriculum like MVP, students will produce work in-class for a given task that
shows how they access the mathematics in various ways and intuitively take multiple
approaches to the task.

If students are creating their work on paper (e.g., a chart), they can take a photo of their
work with their phones or school-provided devices and submit their work via the LMS. If
students are starting with a PDF and they have a touchscreen device with a stylus, then they
can use Word or another document editor to write on the file, save it as a new PDF, then
upload their changes to the LMS.

This is not only useful for students to submit homework and to build up a portfolio of work,
but its also critical for on-going teacher training. It helps teachers understand gaps in
students conceptual understanding and what could be improved for next school year.
 Shifting the Paradigm is Challenging, but Its Possible
with the Right Content, Tools, and Strategy
Looking back at our journey, we have learned much about the challenges and rewards of
implementing a rigorous CCSS math curriculum. We find that all students can access this
material to at least some degree, so our goal of a heterogeneous classroom, mixing
students of all levels, is possible. Our highest achieving, hardest working students can think
deeply about the mathematics while those who are less willing to put forth the effort still
pick up a great deal.

We are moving in the right direction where our mathematics curriculum is accessible, high
quality, and available to all students regardless of whether they have a teacher with years of
experience or a rookie.

It takes a great deal of effort to promote high level thinking among 9th and 10th graders
but it is so rewarding when the Ah ha! moments come!