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Date: 6/14/2022
AMHERST – The Amherst Regional School Committee heard a response to its request for an update and summary on the new secondary math curriculum and courses offered at the middle and high school during its meeting on June 9.
Eli Edinson, the curriculum leader at Amherst Regional Middle School, said they had moved to a “fairly new curriculum” called Desmos.
The school piloted the curriculum last year and utilized it officially for the first time this year. Edinson said the change came after Looney Consulting paid a visit in 2018 or 2019 and one of their recommendations was for a new curriculum.
“It’s been really highly praised by the department,” Edinson said. “We gave a brief survey just on a scale of one to 10 and we averaged nine out of 10 of the four department members who have been using it. The kids have been pretty receptive with it, it’s been leading into what they’re going to do at the high school pretty well, so we feel like it’s really the best thing out there that we’ve seen and we’re going to continue it for at least another year before we decide to make any changes.”
Edinson also informed the committee on the heterogeneous style of seventh grade math that the school has been rolling out, meaning that students with varying math abilities are intentionally placed in the same room to collaborate. Edinson admitted that in its first year fully in the building, heterogeneous math has been a work in progress and a challenge.
“We’re getting some help doing that, we’re not trying to do it all on our own,” Edinson said. “We partnered with this guy named Mike Flynn. He’s a former Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, I think he leads the Mount Holyoke [College] graduate mathematics program, he’s sort of a big shot in the local math world. He started his own consulting company, and he helps districts with challenges like teaching in a heterogeneous classroom or how to get kids talking about math and how to work with kids with varying abilities. He spent one and a half days with us this year doing some workshops and modeling a class.”
Edinson said they would continue working with Flynn’s company to improve as teachers and use it as a resource to solve problems moving forward. The school also removed the Geometry Portfolio, an afterschool math class that students could start in seventh grade which would help them accelerate through high school math. Removing the opportunity for students to extend their math thinking and tackle more challenging problems concerned some members of the community, so Edinson said they created an additional seventh grade math class called the Problem Solving Elected which was offered this year for the first time.
“When I was in middle school it was the Portfolio that was offered and I did not take that because I had after-school things, I live in Shutesbury, so the late bus was super late getting back to my house and I wasn’t really interested in math,” said Jaeden, an 11th grader at the high school taking pre-Calculus Honors this year and AP Calculus next year. “I just took the SAT, and kids that took Portfolio in middle school, their math section on the SAT was a breeze for them, same for MCAS. I had to study so much for the math SAT, but they didn’t because they had been ahead all of high school just because of this little class they took in middle school that I didn’t even think about. I’m really glad that that’s been eliminated and moved to something in school because I think that if I had been offered the math elective in school, I definitely would have taken it.”
Jane Mudie, Head of the Math Department at the high school said they also picked new curricular materials around the same timeline as the Looney Report came out. They moved from an integrated curriculum to a traditional sequence that goes from Algebra 1 to Geometry and Algebra 2. They began implementation the same year as Edinson but had their curriculum and its development hindered because of COVID-19 so they had to heavily modify the curriculum at the end of the year.
“This year, we had to continue modifying because we also have the challenge of not being able to put our students in groups which these materials heavily rely upon,” Mudie said. “We also had to adjust the content to the needs of our students. They had been out of school for so long and yes, they worked diligently on the online course, but it just isn’t the same. We were very cognizant of that, and we modified through the whole year because if there was a gap we saw, we would stop and pay attention to that gap and work on that gap.
“One thing we do really like about it is the mixed space practice,” Mudie continued. “That’s done in the homework section called ‘review and preview’. What that means is if you’re say in Algebra 2 and you worked on a topic that day, you would have three questions for homework on that topic and then the rest of the questions would reach back to earlier Algebra 2 topics, Geometry, Trigonometry, and the idea is you want to keep it fresh.”
Committee member Allison McDonald recalled conversations from a couple of years ago that focused also on the parent education of what the pathways in math are. McDonald said some parents were “in the know” and knew exactly which math class they wanted their child to take in 11th and 12th grade.
“There’s also parents that aren’t aware and don’t understand the choices they’re making or what courses are available to them,” McDonald said. “Is there a moment where there’s a conversation with the caregivers, the families, the student and the teacher talking about not just the choice for eighth grade, but also to see what that pathway is into high school and what doors are open or not available depending on that choice?”
Mary Kiely, the district’s coordinator of curriculum, instruction and assessment, said they deliberately tried to create multiple pathways to reaching advanced math in 12th grade. She said they have changed the acceleration options to coincide with the updated block schedule, where students can take one math class in each semester to essentially double up over the year and advance their track.
“As a previously mathematically terrified student myself and parent of a seventh grader at the middle school I can’t thank you all enough,” said Amherst Regional School Committee Chair Ben Herrington. “My kid loves math and that was the bane of my existence in seventh grade.”