President's Message
February, 2012
Composing this message at 6:00 AM on a Sunday morning, the word that comes to my mind is convergence - a coming together from different directions – especially ideas or concepts or practices that were originally very different. Let me explain. The last ten years of my career were happily spent teaching middle school students with severe learning challenges. These kids entered my classroom with math or literacy skills that hovered, initially, between a first and second grade level. However, they were the kind of kids you could talk to over your back fence for a whole summer, and never know something was amiss until you said,
Read this, write this, or do this math.
My job was to get them un-stuck and help them move forward. With some students, generally misidentified curriculum casualties, the growth began almost immediately and they eventually transferred out of my class. Other students’ growth, however, was incremental…occurring in those small, yet discernible steps that confirmed the moving forward process. These steps were hard won by student and teacher alike. With their growth on state assessments being measured in terms of those hoped for, giant leaps of progression from unsatisfactory to partially-proficient, to proficient, and to advanced, my students rarely crossed the big divide into a more proficient category. This, despite their individual growth in academics as measured by other recognized assessments.
I considered myself to be a good to occasionally exceptional teacher, depending on the moment. I engaged in constant self-reflection of my teaching practices and loved my kids. However, if pressed in my teaching career, I would have struggled to clearly articulate what the qualities of effective teaching looked like and sounded like in an instructional setting. My struggle was further compounded when I tried to make sense of the conflicting results of my classroom assessments and the CSAP outcomes for my students. Today, my students would be evaluated on their individual growth, as per the recently enacted growth model in Colorado. Would I still be held accountable? Yes. Would the assessment outcomes, however, more accurately and definitively measure student growth? Yes.
Today, as a purveyor of research, I no longer struggle to articulate the qualities of effective teaching, from solid standards-based objectives to student engagement to effective questioning to descriptive feedback. Today, I readily know the answer to that question.
Finally, during my teaching career I often struggled to make coherent sense of all this math stuff. I knew math. I was good in math. But how could I best instruct to maximize the connections between math content strands? How could I teach in a way that would best facilitate transfer to related areas? How could I assist my students in accessing this wonderful world of mathematics? And finally, how could I genuinely know what my students knew and understood to best meet their needs?
Today, I would be much better equipped to make sense of all that math stuff through my understanding of learning trajectories. The empirically-based research in learning trajectories in mathematics encompasses the levels of thinking, knowledge, and skills that students go through as they learn math and the nature of instructional experiences that might best support students in reaching their goals. Today, as a self-reflective teacher and seeker of knowledge, I would be much better acquainted with my students’ thinking, effective formative and diagnostic assessment methods to surface that thinking, and instructional strategies best suited to meet my students’ needs.
Are our jobs difficult? You bet. Do we sit at dinner, contemplating the best way to approach an instructional objective tomorrow, while friends talk about the latest sports events? You bet. Do we, as committed, accountable, self-reflective educators, realize there is no finish line in the career of a truly committed educator? You bet.
As always, the Colorado Council for Learning Disabilities exists purely to help you in your endeavors to be the best you can be. This year, as part on the on-going professional development offerings through Math on the
Planes, we are proud to host two eminent researchers and practitioners, Dr. Jere Comfrey and Dr. Alan Maloney. Together, these highly-esteemed presenters will lead us through learning trajectories in mathematics, providing valuable information regarding student thinking, diagnostic assessments and real-time interventions. We hope to see many of our members there February 24 and 25.
Accountability, teacher efficacy, informed instructional practices that meet students where they are and help them to move forward…convergence.
Dr. Patty Meek, President
Colorado Council for Learning Disabilities