Data Driven: In the Midst of Moving to the Common Core, One District Education Director Shares How a Technology-Supported Math Program Is Getting Students and Teachers Alike to Think Critically about Data

THE IMPENDING SWITCH to Common Core State Standards will requite a transformation of teaching and learning in K-12 classrooms across the United States. Many current teaching practices simply will not provide students with the necessary skills to be productive 21st century citizens, and most educators recognize that fact. However, changing a teacher's practice and a school's culture can certainly be daunting tasks. At Charlotte,Mecklenburg Schools (NC), where I work, a number of students and teachers are ushering in sweeping change as they move toward full implementation of the Common Core's Standards for Mathematical Practice. They are reimagining the way math teachers are trained and students are taught, using an approach that makes use of technology and focuses on professional development. Specifically, more than two years ago the district began employing a Texas Instruments initiative called MathForward that combines the use of technologies like graphing calculators and a navigator system (which allows teachers to collect instant feedback from students), a heavy focus on professional development, and differentiated learning. The program can be used in conjunction with any textbook, because it's not a curriculum--it's a way to change the teacher's pedagogy and work in the classroom. Today, the district's Title I middle schools (150 classrooms) and high school Algebra 1 classes (100 classrooms) are enrolled in the program. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As part of its overall Common Core implementation strategy, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district's principal focus now is on the core's W-1 standards, which, while not math-specific, focus on evidence-supported argumentative writing, a skill that applies to all content standards. A central part of the MathForward program incorporates using math-based data to support a student's hypotheses. Teaching Teachers First The program consists of multiple parts, but it all starts with the teachers, who begin with five days of face-to-face training on using the technology and research-based pedagogy for math instruction. Then, four days each month a program coach observes teachers' classrooms and works with them to create lessons that take advantage of the data teachers collected from students (i.e., test scores and homework answers). Four to five times a year, all participating teachers are pulled out to learn more content and work as a professional learning community. The program is in use every day in the classroom. When students come in, teachers ask randomly selected homework questions, and students answer them using buttons on their graphing calculators. The questions could be multiple choice, fill in the blank, or even open response. The data is then transmitted to the teacher's navigator system, where teachers can display the answers for the entire class anonymously. Teachers can then say, for instance, We need to go over No. 7, a lot of you missed that. The great thing is that it gives the teacher immediate buy-in. They see instantly that this is something that can make their lives easier and benefit their students. The students have taken to it too. If they have 15 homework problems and everyone in the class got 14 of them right, they know they won't have to spend 30 minutes in class going over it. The teachers can focus instruction on the areas in which the students need the most help. In these MathForward classes, students also spend about 20 minutes of each class solving what we call real-world problems. Texas Instruments has a team that scours the news and develops topical situations that students can think critically about. For instance, last year, when oil was spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, students spent about eight weeks looking at data coming in from the region. They used Google Earth, their math skills, and various technologies to digest the just-in-time data the experts were generating. …