Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 5/3/2022
AMHERST – The Amherst and Pelham school committees conducted a joint meeting on April 26 and unanimously voted to approve a recommendation from Superintendent Michael Morris and the Office of Teaching and Learning for a new K-5 math curriculum called i-Ready Classroom Math.
The recommendation was made after a six-month review process by an Elementary Math Review Committee (MRC) composed of 21 principals, math specialists, administrators and parents. The committee selected four highly rated curricula and narrowed them down i-Ready and Illustrative Math (IM) which were piloted in every elementary school. 15 teachers across K-5 taught lessons for six weeks from the two programs and had classroom observers from the committee. Feedback from students, teachers and parents was collected and presented to the school committees in a presentation.
“We have persistent opportunity gaps in state-defined subgroups in our districts, and that result is at odds with our district commitment to equity,” said Amherst Regional Public Schools (ARPS) interim Coordinator of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Mary Kiely. “We want to make sure we are using all tools at our disposal to support the achievement of all students, and we know that one of the most powerful of those tools is a high-quality core curriculum. Our last curriculum, Everyday Math, was adopted over 10 years ago. Since then, some interesting curricular options have become available in the marketplace, including the new curriculum we have just adopted, and we wanted to be able to take advantage for the sake of our students.”
Superintendent Michael Morris specified five parameters for the MRC to guide their search for a new curriculum. Saying the MRC needed to find a high-quality curriculum with research-based evidence, Morris emphasized equal access in English and Spanish, supported learning of all diverse skill levels, include print and digital materials and embed a strong program of professional development for teachers.
In addition to being fully available in English and Spanish, i-Ready was widely preferred among students, teachers and parents according to the surveys by the district. 82 percent of teachers said their visual representations helped to deepen understanding and 85 percent said they were able to find print and digital resources for every lesson with ease.
“I’m really impressed at the level of piloting and teacher engagement,” said ARPS School Committee member Peter Demling. “Often with these decisions, not just in schools, you do the best you can and make an educated guess, but you really don’t know whether it’s going to be a good fit until you actually use it so to be able to have that actual lived experience is wonderful.”
Over 90 percent of student respondents in first through third grade agreed that their math tools like digital slides, videos and games helped them learn math and were easy to use. 95 percent of that group said their new math book helped to show the i-Ready math and encouraged collaboration with peers. Students from Grades 4 and 5 had very similar feedback.
“I can tell you that I was in one of the first grades on the day that the teacher unveiled the i-Ready math workbooks to the children,” said Title I District Coordinator Stephanie Joyce. “Not only had this teacher done a beautiful job of building up the enthusiasm and excitement that she held for her class to participate in the pilot and be bringing a new curriculum to the classroom, but the children were literally jumping out of their chairs and clapping and cheering for their new math books as they started looking at them so it’s very exciting.”
Demling brought up a concern about only 46 percent of teachers saying that i-Ready had materials providing support for students above their grade level and 66 percent saying the routines helped foster math learning. Joyce hypothesized that it could have something to do with limited time to try and explore the curriculum.
“Our perception of the way that rating perhaps came out had to do with the learning curve of knowing all the components of the curriculum and what you could possibly do in six to seven weeks with a very new curriculum,” Joyce replied. “The phenomenal diagnostic component and the data-informed teaching and learning component of i-Ready is something that really stood out for the pilot teachers. That diagnostic on each domain in mathematical learning gave them a list for each child of the prerequisites that any individual child would need to go into the new unit. It helps establish what your small groups could be to meet those prerequisites, and what lessons you might have to go back to or forward with for children who are ready for more. We think it helped them to do some of the differentiation and it may have been that then it didn’t lead them into looking for more paths for differentiation so that may have had something to do with it.”
Kiely said that they applied to the Massachusetts Department of Secondary and Elementary Education (DESE) and were granted initial approval for the Accelerating Math Instruction Program for Students, a grant which will cover the full expense of acquiring and implementing new high-quality core math instructional materials including professional development for educators for the fi-Readyst year. The first year costs totaled just under $120,000.
“The grant funding, I mean – I can’t clap loudly enough for the miracle of that funding,” Demling said. “It’s not just the ability to implement this curriculum, I mean that’s a six-figure cost that we’re not going to have to take away from somewhere else in a resource-constrained environment so big kudos on that.”
“It was a highly competitive grant; the vast majority of districts who applied for it did not receive it,” Morris added. “The grant has a huge difference because we were planning on using ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funds and now we can use it for some other things in the future. We will need to use some of the ESSER for the manipulatives but that’s a much less significant cost. This is a great relief, so I appreciate the work not just on the process but also on the grant funding aspect of it as well.”
The math manipulatives Morris referred to are the other aspect that the MRC determined the schools needed to implement. The cost added to the ESSER funds will add up to around $20,000 for Amherst and $3,000 for Pelham.
“Math manipulatives are concrete objects that can be viewed and physically handled by students in order to demonstrate or model abstract concepts,” Kiely explained. “Some of the most common math manipulatives are counters, snap cubes, fraction circles or fraction strips, base 10 blocks, Cuisenaire rods, color tiles, etc. The use of manipulatives in the teaching and learning of math has a long tradition and solid research history. In addition to helping directly with the cognitive processes involved in doing math, manipulatives tend to be very engaging to students and increase their interest in and enjoyment of math. i-Ready makes extensive use of manipulatives, so we will be equipping all classrooms with the materials as needed.”
With the curriculum approved, Kiely said they will now go back to DESE, and the funds will be released. Once funds have arrived, they will distribute books and online access to teachers and administrators with professional development training days scheduled starting this year and going through summer and next year.
“This was truly a community effort. We are especially grateful to the members of the MRC and the pilot teachers for their invaluable contributions to the demanding work of seeking a new elementary math curriculum,” Morris said. “Proficiency in math is a gateway to future opportunities for young people. We are excited to make i-Ready Classroom Math K-5 available to our students, teachers and families, and we look forward to the implementation of this powerful tool for teaching and learning."