When I was told that we would be using what is essentially a scripted math curriculum this year, I felt a huge sense of relief. Knowing that this curriculum was pre-planned took away some of my planning for the future anxiety that I was experiencing this summer. I thought that teaching math would be the easier part of my job, because all I would need to do to prep would be to familiarize myself with the lesson and then deliver it. I realized that this wasn't quite the case at the end of the first unit. I taught the first unit of the curriculum with absolute fidelity -- I didn't omit any content or supplement any content. I thought that things were going really well, as students appeared to be grasping the material from my observations in class. However, when we got to the End of Unit Assessment and I discovered that I was quite wrong. In fact, the average on the test was only a 63%. Data-driven instruction is a process by which teachers modify their teaching based off of feedback they receive from their students' formative assessments. The low test scores I experienced during my first unit test in math made me realize that I needed to implement more data-driven instruction into my classroom, even though at the time I didn't know what that meant. I ended up doing substantial re-teaching and offered a re-test, and many students got their grade up. However, I knew that whole-class re-testing couldn't be an option for every test this year. I decided I needed to do something differently in my unit 2 for math. For Unit 2, I really analyzed what the End of Unit Assessment was testing kids on. Unlike the first test, which I just assumed they would be prepared for, I looked at specific questions that I knew students would find challenging and made sure to address them in class. I designed and gave numerous exit tickets outside of the prescribed exit tickets in this curriculum and used these exit tickets to help me figure out what to re-teach. I made my own differentiated practice problems, based off of the test questions, that were separated by challenge level -- so that kids could decide what they needed to practice during our math review time. We spent about an entire week doing this process of exit tickets followed by re-teaching of all of the concepts students identified as challenging for them in this unit, and today was our re-test. First glance at the students test indicates that following this data-driven instruction process has resulted in increased understanding for my students and improved test scores. Interestingly, students were more apprehensive for this test than the first one, but they actually performed better on this test. I think part of this might be due to the fact that they didn't know precisely what to expect on that first test, but on this test, thanks to the data-driven instruction, they actually knew what they were being tested on and what their strengths and struggles were with this particular content. There are many things I really like about this math curriculum, but this process has taught me that I can't take it for granted at face value. I need to dive into this curriculum and make it my own just as much as if I were making all of my lessons from scratch, in order to best serve my students.
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Emma BooneFirst year 8th grade PBL math/science teacher and graduate student, wondering a bunch and figuring a few things out here and there. Archives
December 2018
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