Math Steering Update: Making Sense of Mastery

Greetings, math nerds!  I hope you have all had a fabulous summer... Last spring, on the WCSU Math Coaching Blog, I left off with a discussion of mastery and number concept.  Obviously, we want mastery, but what does it mean?  What does it look like?  How do we teach for it?  The math non-negotiables give us a sense of what will be "covered," but to focus on mastery, we need more...


This summer the WCSU Math Steering Committee had the opportunity to spend a few days working collaboratively on a document that (we hope!) will be an excellent resource supporting WCSU math instruction.  We worked together on the format and content for kindergarten and first grade.  I will be working with individual Math Steering folks to fill in other grade levels as soon as possible starting with 5th and 6th grade (because much of the work was done last year as a focus of math coaching, but just needs to be curated).


In the meantime, whatever your grade level, it would be worthwhile checking out the kindergarten and first grade work since they include mastery of number concept.  Have you ever noticed a student in your class counting on his or her fingers?  (I used to see this sometimes when I taught Algebra 2!)  That is a symptom of weak number concept, and makes learning math feel like dragging an anchor uphill.  So, we should all be aware of how to teach it.

We are calling this document the WCSU Math Learning Progressions (a link to the document is embedded here and on the image above).   

A few things to note about the document:

• The format is tabular. It is a Google Sheet organized with a tab for each grade level.
• Each row on a grade-level tab represents one non-negotiable skill with links to the levels of knowing, unit plans and assessments and summaries of the non-negotiable instructional models for each non-negotiable skill included as separate columns within that row. 
• We have added ID numbers for each non-negotiable for reference (for example, 1.2 is the second non-negotiable for first grade).
• We have organized the non-negotiables in sequential order (for example, K.1 comes before K.2).
• It is a living and growing document, so please access it online (rather than in printed form) to stay current as areas are updated. 
• Please bear with us as we continue to add flesh to this document. The goal is to have all grade levels complete by January. As we make progress, I will send out updates using this blog.

We learned a lot participating in this work and are excited to share it with you! We welcome your feedback and input. If you would like to contribute to this effort, please send an email to me at edorsey@u32.org.

Additionally, I wanted to share out the 2015-2016 plan for math coaching.  Happily, my position has increased from .5 to .8 this year.  Also, rather than working with specific grade levels SU wide, we will be focused on expanding capacity for math leadership at the building level to use the math coaching resource more effectively.  I will be working with Math Steering Committee representatives and administrators to shape coaching to suit individual school needs.

For more information, you can check out the Prezi presentation that I created the WCSU leadership team and Math Steering folks.  If you have any difficulty viewing it, follow this link.




Please let me know if you have any questions, concerns, brilliant ideas, etc...  And feel free to comment below.

Stay tuned!  I am currently working on a post highlighting a great idea for the start of the year from Heather Robitaille who teaches at Rumney.