Partnership Spotlight: Lynnwood High School Aims to Tackle Critical Math Skills with Intensified Algebra I Course

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Math Leaders Aim to Tackle Critical Math Skills with Intensified Algebra I Course

sign that says Lynwood High school

Lynnwood High School’s story of success begins in their approach to 9th grade Algebra I. Agile Mind’s Intensified Algebra I course helped students not only learn necessary advanced math skills, but also learn to push themselves through points of struggle, while bolstering their confidence in their ability to learn critical math skills. Hear from students at Lynnwood High School about the outcomes they’ve experienced through our intensified math course.

 

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Educator Perspectives: Academic Youth Development Supports Algebra for All in New York City

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Social, Emotional, and Academic Development (SEAD) Essential for Success in a COVID World

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For educators and education systems, it is critical to support students’ capability, purpose, and sense of belonging in school—now more than ever. Communities, schools, and families are working through extraordinary challenges to create opportunities to learn—for both educators and students. Despite setbacks and rapidly evolving circumstances, they continue to create meaningful connections and learning experiences.

Students learn best when they are ready to learn—when they are relatively free of stress and anxiety, when they feel connected to their teacher, when they are part of a community and invested in its work, and when they know and understand what is expected of them. Creating those conditions presents entirely new challenges this year, but educators across the nation will attest that it can be done. And the work to do so has revealed that—while we confront new conditions, demands, and tools—best practices for teaching and learning remain.

Here we highlight key strategies shared by educators and experts that support students’ social, emotional, and academic development in 2020-2021:

The Aspen Institute, 2019

Integrate students’ social and emotional learning with academic work

SEAD describes the integration of social and emotional learning competencies and skills with academic learning. SEL skills can be explicitly taught and practiced. Integrating this work with academic learning helps students internalize and generalize new competencies to learning experiences across their school day and has significant positive impacts on the culture and climate of learning.

Create a strong culture of learning from the start

School is a safe, stimulating place for so many students. Amid disruptions and distance learning efforts, many districts have prioritized work to intentionally build safe learning spaces at the start of the year. Even remotely, teachers are applying strategies that help build a culture where each student has a voice, where everyone is valued, and where mistakes are expected, respected, and inspected.

A strong learning environment welcomes students into the community, promotes effective mindsets for learning, and gives students tools to manage their learning. When students feel they belong, believe in their ability to learn, and are equipped with effective problem-solving strategies, they work harder, persist longer, and achieve at higher levels.

Focus on equity

When equity is prioritized, we start with the expectation that everybody brings something to the table, everyone has value, and everyone belongs. Many educators are applying an equity lens to their teaching. They are learning how culturally responsive practices support high-quality instruction, and how strategies they may already use—such as posing purposeful questions and managing students’ productive struggle—enhance access to learning for all.

This year, of particular concern for the start of school are challenges with equitable access to technology. We see educators, families, and communities making exceptional efforts to serve students, yet many still face barriers. For remote learning, many teachers are leveraging technology to facilitate effective synchronous (live) sessions. However, students with limited access to technology can benefit from meaningful asynchronous (not time-specific) learning experiences to be completed independently, with windows of time available for individual or small-group support.

Develop and apply norms and routines

Though the work to develop and consistently use norms and routines might not seem transformative, it is essential for establishing and deepening positive, equitable learning environments. Routines and norms promote meaningful and respectful discourse that is organized around students’ shared work, and help teachers build safe spaces for learning.

Teachers have always valued norms, but this year they are particularly important. Most students have been away from school for an extended period, and in the beginning of the year, teachers and students may not be learning in the same place at the same time. Many educators are leveraging two types of norms: norms for establishing and managing a supportive community of learners and norms for using technology in remote or hybrid learning models. Establishing both sets of norms increases the likelihood that all students will engage and fully participate in their learning experiences.

Engage educators in the practices expected of students

The most effective professional development—particularly this year—both engages educators in learning that develops their capacity and also models effective practices they can bring to their roles. Teachers can more easily and rapidly apply new practices when they have experienced them in their own learning—whether for prompting and managing collaboration and discourse, developing and applying effective norms and routines, using roles in collaboration, or introducing, managing, and debriefing tasks and group work.

This year, Agile Mind’s teachers have benefitted from professional learning experiences that model best practices for remote learning, including how to build a welcoming, positive culture of learning when you’re not physically together, how to organize and manage students’ work individually and in groups, and how to leverage various technology and collaboration tools.

Finally, like students, educators can develop their learning mindsets. Teachers’ beliefs in students’ capacity are critical and can deeply impact students’ beliefs about themselves and their ability to learn. When so much is uncertain, we must ensure that all students know that the adults they encounter believe in their potential.

For information about how SEAD work is done programmatically, visit our Academic Youth Development (AYD) page.

For related information, visit:

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Learning on Smartphones: More Access for More Students

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Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Background

Closing the Achievement Gap in Mathematics

Black, Latinx, and low-income students disproportionately underachieve their better-advantaged peers in mathematics. Removing this barrier to upward mobility is our mission. 

What have we found in our efforts to close this achievement gap? Students using Agile Mind’s blended mathematics programs—that is, a combination of online and pencil-and-paper experiences for whole group, small group, and individual learning—are achieving at or above the levels of their more advantaged peers and are succeeding in Algebra at historic rates. How? We work intensively with our authors at the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin, and with other experts in instruction—both for adults and for students—and in assessment to challenge students with engaging but rigorous curriculum aligned to their state standards, and we support their teachers with tools and training that extend their reach beyond the classroom.

Problems Remain

Out-of-classroom work in mathematics exposes other challenges, however: not all students have equitable access to technology outside of school. Teachers know this and hesitate to assign online problems outside of class, even though practice with worthy tasks is a powerful tool for success. Instead, many teachers assign printed worksheets they have known for years—most created before the next-generation standards.  The result?

  • Students say they find the worksheets pointless and fail or refuse to complete and turn in assignments—in many settings, fewer than 30% of students do assigned homework.
  • When students do complete the worksheets, their work is not at the level of the standards by which they will be tested.
  • The grading workload for reviewing submitted pencil-and-paper homework assignments is unmanageable for teachers.

The Opportunity

What if we could broaden access of online assignments to include those without computers or Internet access at home? Would it benefit those students directly, and would it encourage teachers to assign online problems, thereby benefitting all students?

To find out, we reengineered our next-generation interactive problems for middle school, Algebra, and Integrated Math 1, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to make them accessible by smartphone.

To make the online portion of Agile Mind’s mathematics services available to more students outside of the classroom, we made the following improvements:

  • enhanced our user interface (UI) for mobile phones with adaptive layout and new navigation elements to support mobile test taking,
  • created new CSS styles and guidelines,
  • added accessibility tools such as zooming and text size adjustments,
  • re-architected, restyled, and resized existing dialogs (pop-up messages) and visualization
  • upgraded our video player to work on all devices with scaling, closed captions and HTML5 effects,
  • enabled smartphone capabilities, and
  • enhanced teacher reporting via dashboards to make it easier for teachers to understand how their students are progressing in real time.

We believe that, when teachers worry less about equitable access, they will not hesitate to assign online problems. Students will benefit from this change in teacher practice, and, if they find the problems more engaging, will spend more time on assignments. In the end, the more time students spend solving math and science problems that are worthy of their time, the more successful they will be. With only months, not years, of data, we are well down the road to proving out this logic chain.

Results

More Assignments Made and Completed

By enabling smartphone capabilities, Agile Mind helped educators in more than 200 districts remove barriers to high-quality homework experiences for 250,000 students. 

We saw dramatically higher percentage of teachers are making online assignments for their students—a 60% increase over the prior year. The increases were the greatest in schools where the greatest percentage of students use smartphones for homework. 

We also saw the percentage of assignments completed by students has also increased significantly. In a significant number of schools, 95% of students are completing assignments, up from as low as 30% in some schools.

The data clearly suggest that increasing equitable access to Agile Mind through smartphone capabilities correlates with a change in teacher and student practice in use of the assignment features, and therefore to increased access for students to meaningful learning opportunities. 

Analysis

To better understand these data, we conducted interviews and surveys with representative teachers, teacher leaders, and administrators. Teachers report the following benefits of smartphone access to Agile Mind assignments:

  • Most students at these grade levels who lack computer access at home have smartphone access.
  • Because of this, teachers’ use of online assignments has increased.
  • Student completion of assignments has shot up.
  • Students find the problems more engaging to work on and don’t really notice that they are more challenging, because of the graphics and interactions.
  • Teachers are benefiting from automatic, real-time grading.
  • Teachers, students, and parents are benefiting from real-time reports that identify progress and challenges.

Building on Success

Distance Learning During the Pandemic

These data suggest smartphone work provides more students access to high-quality math learning resources and problem-solving tasks. At the end of this school year, which was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, these tools became critical in supporting student access to distance learning opportunities.

Expansion

To continue this work, we aim to make even more curriculum content available to students via smartphone and to allow students to access that content directly, whether or not a teacher assigns it. We are also working to improve aspects of the user interface design for more of our courses.

Professional Development

We are eager to support teachers in how best to use these powerful tools. We aim to build multi-pronged communications and professional development outreach to support teachers in how to use new capabilities, such as smartphone access, to work them into their instructional practice, and to introduce them to their students.

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What’s the Best Way to Address Unfinished Learning this Fall?

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Author: Dr. Massie McAdoo
Regional Director of Professional Services

The challenge of addressing unfinished learning has always been with us, but the 2019-2020 school year disruption due to COVID-19 has moved this challenge to the top of the list for planning this fall.

Districts are considering a variety of strategies for addressing unfinished mathematics learning with many taking a “prerequisite” approach—spending precious instructional time in the beginning of the new school year addressing last year’s missed content before teaching the new course content. As well-meaning as this may be, we know from experience that it often creates cascading cycles of unfinished learning, causing many students to fall farther behind.

Agile Mind supports an alternative approach called intensification. Grounded in work pioneered by our partners at the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, intensification is designed to support students’ gaps in learning while they master grade level content, and help them get back on track in their mathematics pathway.

Intensification has a number of characteristics, but the one most critical to this year’s challenge is the notion of ”co-requisite” support. This model has students engaging with the content of the course they are enrolled in from the beginning, with unlearned content from the prior course brought in “just-in-time” at the moment it is needed. This approach is consistent with what a number of state departments of education and national organizations–including NCTM and NCSM in their joint position statement–are recommending.

The co-requisite approach encompasses three steps:

  1. Identify unfinished learning and related standards and forward map that learning to the first course in which it will be needed.
  2. Identify specific learning resources from prior grades key to students’ success with needed prerequisite skills.
  3. Develop a plan for efficiently integrating the lessons and practice within the flow of the current course “just in time” to support new learning.

The Dana Center authoring team and Agile Mind have been focused on what additional tools and supports are needed for meeting the challenge of unfinished learning from this year using a co-requisite model. To support these steps, we have developed customized tools including:

  • Modified scope and sequence documents for each course indicating the front mapping work
  • Detailed instructional guidance on how to modify specific lessons to include the co-requisite resources
  • Access to the course resources from prior grades that will be needed to attend to unfinished learning using the co-requisite model

In addition, our professional services teams are offering virtual summer learning opportunities focused on using these tools to help teachers prepare for back to school. Once school is underway, our advisors and coaches will be available to help teachers with their plans, as well as to think flexibly about delivering instruction in a changing environment that might include in-person, remote, or a hybrid model of instruction. If you would like to learn more about Agile Mind’s approach and professional support for teachers, please contact our team at info@agilemind.com.

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