Agile Mind’s Integrated Mathematics Receives Top Ratings from EdReports.org

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High-quality curricula, fully aligned to the depth and complexity of next generation standards, are essential to help students access rigorous mathematics instruction and achieve at high levels. By helping districts identify such resources, EdReports has played a valuable role in furthering these goals.

As program development manager for Agile Mind’s high school course programs, I am gratified that EdReports has evaluated our integrated high school series as meeting expectations in all three gateways—placing it among those they consider the best in the nation. This review makes Agile Mind one of the only publishers with top ratings for middle school math and for both the traditional and integrated high school math series.

Developed in a pioneering collaboration with the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin, our core math programs are grounded in research on educational practices that produce meaningful learning gains for all students—from those facing the greatest barriers to those achieving at the highest levels. Agile Mind’s programs provide daily job-embedded support for teachers with lessons that connect abstract concepts with students’ everyday realities in ways that are powerfully engaging, motivating, and effective.

I am proud that through independent evaluation processes such as this one by EdReports, Agile Mind programs continue to be identified as high quality programs that can transform the teaching and learning of mathematics.

RafterAlisa Rafter
Program Development Manager

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When Math Goes Right: An Architecture of Intensification

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Experience in the Classroom

On my first day of instruction in my first year of teaching, I rolled out the sparkling, standards-aligned, backward-planned lesson that I had agonized over for weeks to my Algebra 1 students in Ewa Beach, Hawaii.  During practice, students sat motionless, staring silently at their worksheets and avoiding eye contact with me.  In the back, I noticed one student writing something on her paper.  I hurried over to her, but just as I arrived at her desk, she covered her paper with both hands.

“It’s wrong, Miss.”

“How do you know?  Can I see it?”

“I know it’s wrong.  I’m bad at math.  I hate it.”

It had taken 17 minutes into my teaching career to hear it: “I’m bad at math.”

I realized then, and am reminded again and again as a Professional Development Specialist, that our charge as educators is more than to teach the content standards—for many students, we must help them redefine their academic identities.

Looks Like/Sounds Like

In an Intensified Algebra (IA) classroom, teachers and students know that they are on a mission to advance 2–3 years in a single academic year. As a result, when you enter an intensified classroom, there is a palpable sense of urgency. You notice students bowing their heads over an assignment, occasionally popping up to collaborate with another group across the room. You hear students pushing their peers for clarification and conversations that center on conceptual understanding as opposed to “getting the answer.” Teachers model these high academic expectations, acknowledging effective effort and highlighting key strategies while also pushing students to expand their thinking.  “Can you show me using a different representation?”, “Is this true in all cases?”, and “How do you know?” are common questions in an IA classroom.

During one classroom visit in California, I observed a teacher masterfully pause the collaborative Consolidation Activity, an integral part of the intensification process, to address a common misconception. After gathering everyone’s attention, she called up a student to show his work under the document camera. This action, in and of itself, takes trust: trust on behalf of the student to show his working understanding of a concept, and trust on behalf of the teacher that relinquishing control to a student can be an effective use of class time. This demonstration of trust was returned ten-fold when the student was given the responsibility to explain his work and field questions from his colleagues— a dynamic discussion between students ensued that reinforced everyone’s understanding!

Reshaping Academic Identities

In order to prepare students who may come to us with unproductive academic identities to be successful in a rigorous, intensified course, we must support them with just-in-time explorations of relevant, noncognitive skills. Intensification gives students more time, rigorous curriculum, and targeted interventions. Woven throughout the content topics are studies in malleability of intelligence, brain growth and research, and metacognition, which are often purposefully revisited before particularly challenging tasks. These topics equip students with specific language for discussing the often uncomfortable process of learning. By the end of the year, these students share that they are thinking about math—and their abilities related to math—with renewed confidence.

Nationwide, this architecture of intensification is the catalyst for districts finally seeing a breakthrough in their Algebra scores. But most importantly, more and more middle and high school students are excited about, enjoying, and thriving in mathematics. As this work continues and grows, we will hear “I love math” with more and more frequency. And I know that soon enough it will take fewer than 17 minutes to hear it.

Kayla Gephart
Director of Professional Services

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Reclaiming Lost Ground: Intensification vs. Remediation for Underprepared Algebra Students

Across the country, educators are grappling with how to improve outcomes for students who enter Algebra I or Mathematics I one or more grade levels behind their peers. Many of the existing approaches are based on a deficit model—a focus on remediating real or perceived weaknesses in students. Remediation fails to produce academic gains, and frequently produces the consequence of low student engagement and motivation.

In contrast, use of an asset-based model called “an architecture of intensification” has proven to result in major academic gains and renewed self-confidence among participating students.  Unlike many traditional models of remediation, an intensification approach builds on students’ competencies, explicitly teaches effective learning strategies, and develops skills such as productive persistence and sense of belonging to a community of learners. Intensification addresses gaps in prior learning while enabling students to learn on-grade level content. The result? Students who are 1-3 grade levels behind catch up to their peers – and in many instances outperform them – earning their Algebra I or Mathematics I credit within a single year.

Are your district’s remediation interventions for struggling students failing those students, causing them to fall even further behind? How might a comprehensive intensification strategy allow your students to thrive?

Just-in-time instruction vs. Just-in-case instruction

Re-teaching, reviewing, and drilling students on pre-algebra material often bores and frustrates them, especially when the pedagogical approach is similar to what failed the first time.  Frequently, this approach also causes students to fall further behind their peers.  When students aren’t progressing, their motivation and self-confidence declines.  Intensification introduces students to grade-level content, while simultaneously exposing and addressing misconceptions to ensure that students are reinforcing their foundational knowledge as they learn new concepts.  This is achieved through just-in-time support that develops enduring understanding.

Using additional time to speed up vs. slow down

A number of strategies for adding time are used with struggling students: supplemental support periods, double-block periods, or courses sequenced over two years.  Typically, this time results in slowing down or repeating instruction, which is ineffective and can be discouraging and tiresome for teachers and students alike. Intensification models carefully plan a cohesive use for extra time in order to accelerate learning.  The time is used to provide supportive scaffolding, additional representations of concepts, real-world applications of mathematical situations that help students maintain cognitive engagement and master key ideas and relationships.

Conceptual development and deliberate practice vs. repetition

Rote memorization and repeated drilling of skills alone often serves as a short-term substitute for the development of conceptual understanding and related problem-solving and reasoning capabilities. Repetitive, drill-based practice is often demotivating, can reinforce bad habits, and rarely leads to long-term understanding.  In contrast, intensification assists students in developing strategic competencies, problem-solving abilities, and mathematical communication skills, while providing deliberate and distributed practice opportunities. Key to this approach are explicitly-taught problem-solving strategies as well as strategic routines and supports that help students draw connections, organize information, and make their mathematical thinking “visible” to them and to their teachers. Intensification combines the development of foundational understanding, and problem-solving and reasoning skills with ample practice opportunities designed to help students increase fluency and automaticity.

Social-emotional skill building vs. lowered expectations

Struggling and below grade level students are frequently identified only by their deficits – by themselves and the adults around them. Remediation often does not address the social and emotional challenges such as lack of motivation and engagement, and negative beliefs and behaviors at the root of poor academic performance.  Intensification fosters positive academic identities and develops students’ ability to struggle in productive ways, with immediate opportunities to practice those skills with on-grade level math content.  This approach transforms the way students think about themselves as learners, develops their motivation and commitment to high achievement, and fosters skills that sustain students’ productive engagement and persistence in challenging academic work.

An architecture of intensification can be implemented in any district, but it requires instruction, pedagogical content, and professional supports to be cohesively and carefully aligned.  Agile Mind, working closely with leading researchers at the Charles A. Dana Center, have been partnering with school districts enacting intensification for years.  

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Four Ways to Strengthen the Impact of District Social and Emotional Learning Initiatives

Failure to succeed academically is often not about deficiencies in students’ content knowledge or their ability to learn. Explicitly addressing educator and student beliefs, and their resulting actions in academic settings, are key to better system-wide outcomes.

Powerful research suggests that developing students’ social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies and learning mindsets can dramatically impact student success. This research, strengthened by the experiences of educators across the nation, has spurred new federal law (ESSA) and an increasing number of states to establish standards for SEL, particularly for adolescents.

The path from research and promise to effective practice in classrooms and schools is not always clear. Agile Mind, in collaboration with the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin and districts across the country, has been applying SEL and learning mindset research in practice for over 10 years. Based on that experience, here are four things to consider when integrating SEL and learning mindset work into your district’s plan.

Find a different solution when the problem is not just about the math.

Gaps in students’ content knowledge are common, but many fail to thrive in school for very different reasons. Adolescents face numerous barriers to success in school—academic, economic, psychological, and social—and current research shows that students’ beliefs about themselves, and how those beliefs affect their academic behaviors, are critical to their achievement. As a result, more or different subject-matter instruction can have little impact on student success. In addition to students’ beliefs and behaviors, educators’ beliefs about their students’ capabilities influence expectations and instructional practice. Providing relevant professional development for educators and explicit instruction for students to develop SEL competencies and learning mindsets often prove more effective than traditional academic interventions.

Address multiple strands of learning research with a cohesive program. 

Developing specific competencies in isolation, such as growth mindset or grit, often fails to have lasting impact on students. However, when these and other learning research concepts are taught together, more students benefit in more enduring ways. The most effective programs cultivate competencies in parallel, such as: developing a learning mindset, tapping individual motivation, applying effective effort (grit), using self-management strategies to overcome challenges, collaborating and communicating effectively, and setting and achieving academic goals. Addressing multiple competencies goes far beyond a book study. It requires a carefully designed and tested program and yields significantly greater results.

Increase long-term effectiveness by integrating SEL strategies with rigorous and relevant academic content.

Educators and students can benefit from developing a conceptual understanding of SEL and learning research, but it is a very different thing to know how to put them into practice. The best way to develop these capabilities in students is to teach them in the context of rigorous and relevant academic content, giving them opportunities to immediately apply what they learn to real and relevant tasks. By doing so, students are able to try on new ways of thinking, apply and refine new approaches, develop a toolbox of new skills and strategies, and ultimately make the new knowledge stick.

Integrate these new capabilities into the district curriculum within your existing schedules and structures.

The most efficient way to bring these new mindsets and learning competencies to a district is to use an existing scheduling structure. For some, summer school provides a powerful opportunity: instead of focusing exclusively on remediation or credit recovery, districts can use summer school to proactively prepare students for success. Advisory or study skills periods are another way to reach students: by adding structure and purpose to that time, students can develop these capabilities while also accelerating their academic work. Focusing a set of professional development days on these concepts is a third approach that will help educators apply new ideas and strategies to their practice. By identifying an existing scheduling opportunity, districts can easily bring these concepts to students and educators more quickly and without disruption to the standard academic schedule.

Educating adolescents presents unique challenges, and academic content is only part of the picture. Everyone can learn. Everyone can improve. And with a carefully designed plan, developing students’ attitudes, beliefs, and social and emotional learning competencies can transform their potential—in school and beyond.

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Intensification – What Educators Should Know

“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”
-Alexander Den Heijer

Brian has the privilege of leading the teaching and learning of 6-12 Mathematics for Pasco County Schools in Land O’ Lakes, Florida and is an education consultant with Dixon-Nolan-Adams Mathematics and Solution Tree.

Courses Taught: Grade 8 Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1, Algebra 1A, and Algebra 1B
Years of Experience: 10
Teaching Philosophy: You do not have to be sick to get better!

There are some universal truths that educators will agree upon, one of which is all students learn at different rates and some need additional time and support to learn. If this is common knowledge amongst educators, why do we constantly find ourselves in a reactive state? Knowing some students will need additional supports, how can we be more proactive?

I have taught in schools that have tried many things to create additional time to provide remediation to students – re-teaching content they don’t understand coming into our classes, before we get to our own material. I have started a before school tutoring program that was open to any student needing additional support. I have helped create a homeroom/intervention period three days a week where students could get the help they need during the school day. I have taught remedial math courses such as Algebra 1A (1/2 of Algebra 1 in year 1) as well as Algebra 1B (the other ½ of Algebra 1 in year 2). Providing additional time has real promise, but it is only the first step. It is what you do with the time that really matters!

A tougher question for educators to answer is “Do you believe all students can learn mathematics at a high level?” I do! I also believe that the supports we provide our students who have struggled with mathematics need to be targeted, proactive, and intensified!

To me, intensification and remediation are different. Intensification focuses on differentiating the way in which instruction is delivered to students so that all students can meet high expectations, as opposed to lowering our expectations for some students.

When intensifying our instruction for Algebra 1, we are delivering on our promise to students and parents that their child will receive a guaranteed and viable curriculum – whatever it takes. Educators are helpful by nature, and it is difficult for us to resist the urge to focus on remediating students’ mathematical deficits by re-teaching and rehearsing process skills. When intensifying instruction, we need to identify what is the most essential prerequisite knowledge students must have to learn the mathematics we are about to teach, then we need to teach it, conceptually!

With intensification, students can get messy with the mathematics, make sense of it, articulate their thoughts, test conjectures, represent mathematics in different ways, and make connections between the different representations in order to learn mathematics at a deeper level –sometimes for the first time in their academic careers!

When working with students who struggle academically, the mathematics is undoubtedly important, but we would be selling ourselves short if we did not look at the whole child. During my first days teaching Algebra to students who struggle, I heard a lot of “I hate math!” and “I’m not a math person.”  We must break this mindset that has often been instilled in students who have struggled in mathematics throughout their academic career. My response is typically a variation of, “I am sorry you have not had the opportunity to really learn mathematics, yet…” packaged with “I know that together we will be able to help you start to make sense of mathematics so you can become better at it each day and see the value it has to offer you in your life.” We have to be cognizant of student’s social and emotional needs before we can tackle their mathematical deficits. We need all students to believe in themselves as much as we believe in them! This is such an integral part of intensification – first, we change a student’s mindset and self-belief and then we give them real opportunities to put it into practice with mathematics. It has made all the difference for my students and continuously makes me thankful that I have the opportunity to work with them.

Brian M. Dean
@PascoMathNinja
#PascoMath
#DNAMath

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Will 85% of Your 9th Grade Students Pass Algebra This Year?

Congratulations to our partner, District of Columbia Public Schools, for the 18% increase in the number of students advancing to tenth grade. This achievement was recently featured in US News and World Report, and we are honored that our partnership contributed to such success. Here’s what Chrisanne LaHue, Director of Ninth Grade Academies, had to say about our work together:

“Agile Mind’s Intensified Algebra course provides clear learning routines that support students in building conceptual understanding of algebraic thinking, using multiple routes to solutions and multiple ways to represent answers. This design fits with our Ninth Grade Academy components of consistent routines, clear expectations, and close learning relationships between adults and students. Algebra is a gateway courses to promotion, and we are happy to say that 85% of academy students passed algebra in SY 14-15. We know this contributed to our increase in students promoted to 10th grade this year, which was at a high of 75% this year.”

Read the full US News Article HERE.

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Before We Can Address the STEM Crisis, We Must Solve the Confidence Gap

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From EdSurge opinion – “I’m not good at math.” It’s routine to hear an adult utter these five innocent words while doing something as simple as calculating tip at a restaurant. It’s striking that self-doubting one’s ability to succeed in math has become par for the course for both adults and young people in our country. Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) are exactly the subjects …Continue Reading>>

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Summer School: Preparation and Prevention

Researchers at the RAND Corporation have been particularly interested in the educational risks and opportunities presented by summer break. Over the last few years, RAND has explored both the loss of knowledge and educational skills during summer months, and the impact of high quality summer programs. Augustine and McCombs (2011) found that, by the end of summer, students perform, on average, one month behind where they left off in the spring. In a more recent study (December, 2014), they found that, students who attend summer learning programs returned to school in the fall with an advantage in Math.

With increased rigor in standards and accountability measures, summer programs have become increasingly important for decreasing summer learning loss and ensuring that students are ready for grade level work in the Fall Semester. This is particularly true for students making the transition from middle school mathematics to high school Algebra I content.

Academic Youth Development (AYD) aims to increase the number and diversity of students who succeed in school, and more specifically in STEM courses. Based on research regarding student mindset, motivation, engagement, and learning, Academic Youth Development readies students to excel in high school, and arms them with noncognitive skills and strategies to persist through more rigorous content.

The following interview explores the experience of teaching Academic Youth Development as a summer program used to prepare students for success in Algebra I.

Peter Savanelli shares his experience with Academic Youth Development.

Name: Pete Savinelli
Title/Courses Covered: Summer Start Academic Youth Development; 9th grade Science: Physics; Earth and Space; Natural Disasters
School/District: Rio Rancho North High School- Rio Rancho School District, NM
Years at school/Years Teaching: 5 years
Teaching philosophy: “Teach to learn—if students can teach the material to their peers, they definitely know it.”

Q. What initially drew you to the field of education?

A. I previously worked for IBM; teaching is my way of giving back to my community as my second chosen career.

Q. Did you teach summer school without Academic Youth Development?

A. No, I always wanted to teach summer school, and was lucky enough to start with Academic Youth Development in the district. My draw was really to be able to answer the question of, “How do you get students to be more engaged?”

“If you dumb it down, you’re cheating them.”

Q. How has the use of Agile Mind changed your instructional practices?

A. Knowing some of my students before they’ve even gotten to my class in the fall –developing student allies prior to the start of the school year helps me immediately set the tone in my classrooms.

Establishing a common language—this really helps alleviate my students’ concern about the challenges of new material ahead. They understand that they will be productively persistent and their brain will be growing dendrites through it all.

Rigorous content I can trust—if you dumb it down, you’re cheating them. Increasing the difficulty and rigor has been an amazing benefit because my students are putting forth more effort and so they are being more successful than they ever have before.

Q. How has Agile Mind’s embedded professional support influenced or supported your lesson planning strategies?

A. I know that the material and the content are solid since the programs are authored from the Charles A. Dana Center.

Q. What difference have you seen in your students since transitioning to Agile Mind curriculum?

“My students work harder, by themselves and with each other.”

Q. In what ways has the dynamics of your classroom culture changed?

A. This having been my 4th year using Agile Mind, I continuously see growth in what I do, and growth within the program. My class has a much more positive atmosphere. I’ve learned the students respond better to the positivity. They know that when they struggle, they’re building skills.

The material is challenging so it’s almost like there are built in touch points for them too struggle and that’s when I think, “Yes, right on time, this is perfect!” Then they come back the next day and they’ve found a way to work through it all.

Q. What was your initial opinion or reaction to your Agile Mind program? How has that changed since you’ve been utilizing it in the classroom?”

A. With every year, my confidence and support behind Agile Mind grows. I know that those that stand behind this program really know what they’re doing. I myself am more open to learning new things – not only do I appreciate the ‘why’ things are all being done but also the sequence in which they are being done.

Q. What’s the best part about teaching Academic Youth Development in summer school?

A. It’s scary fun! People can’t believe that my students and I can go four hours a day for 15 days. They can’t help but be engaged, especially with the final project. It’s fun to watch the students understand the material. There are definitely times they get frustrated but to see the “Ah ha moment” first hand is great.

“This is not just a summer course, this is a leadership program.”

Q. What kind of tips to do you have for a new Agile Mind educator?

A. Read the lessons –Read the corresponding advice for instruction–Be confident in what you’re doing.

Q. Advice for Administrators thinking about AYD for their summer program?
A. Trust in the proven results. They have been fantastic for us! This is not just a summer course, this is a leadership program.

We’ve found a way to combat lack of interest to even be at school, to having 9th graders now passing all of their classes when previously they’ve failed at least one.

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We invite you to learn about other districts and their success using Academic Youth Development. Click here to access: Academic Youth Development: Promising Findings and District Snapshots

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The Promise of Next-Generation Assessments

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As a classroom teacher, I spent considerable time sifting through data in search of information. I wanted to distill volumes of quiz and test results to a focused understanding of where my classes and individual students were struggling. Despite considerable time and effort, I was typically left with a combination of intuitive understanding and patchy data – enough to make a difference for my students, but I knew there was much more potential that I simply didn’t have the time to capture.

I see this reality writ large in my day to day work with teachers and administrators. Formative assessment has become a core part of daily instructional practices in districts across the country.

Our ability as a profession to efficiently provide feedback based on this data in ways that can effectively inform instruction holds great potential for the success of the children we serve.

On top of our desire to use assessment information to support instruction, standards have increased in rigor, and achievement is now being assessed with a new generation of technology-enhanced assessments. These new assessments will take some getting used to, and districts should provide opportunities for students to practice them. But more importantly, I think they represent a learning opportunity for both teachers and students.

New assessment types ask students to use and demonstrate critical thinking skills and depth of knowledge in more dynamic ways. In many cases working through these assessments will support and advance learning. In addition, when delivered within a well-designed formative assessment system these new assessments put data and information into the hands of teachers, allowing them to efficiently provide feedback and adjust learning.

With these new assessments and more readily available information, we can make assessments powerful learning opportunities in themselves. They become formative assessments for learning as opposed to assessments of learning.

Formative assessment systems are valuable resources that can support these objectives, but they vary widely in their approach and substance. We at Agile Mind have been working on next-generation technology-enhanced assessments for years, and I am very excited by our supplemental program, Agile Assessment. Agile Assessment’s next-generation items replace or supplement standard multiple choice questions with more rigorous technology-enhanced questions. Students have innovative ways to represent their knowledge, and teachers are able to more powerfully assess student understanding.

I am excited by the instructional opportunities offered by next-generation assessments, and encourage educators to learn more about these tools and how to implement them successfully to advance student success. To learn more about Agile Mind’s assessment options, review this Fact Sheet.

Good luck with the new generation of assessments!
Nicole Whitecar
Director of Professional Services

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Agile Assessment items were authored in collaboration with the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Both Agile Mind and the Charles A. Dana Center have collaborated on next-generation public resources such as the PARCC prototyping project, the CCSS toolbox, the TEKS toolbox, and other projects to further the advancement of student achievement in mathematics.

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