DCPS middle school tries a new way of teaching math

Can a blend of computerized and traditional teacher-led instruction give students a better educational experience? Hart Middle School in Congress Heights is trying to find out.

Math class at Hart is looking different these days. Instead of 25 or 30 kids seated at desks or grouped around tables in a classroom, scribbling in worksheets or tracking the teacher, nearly 200 students are spread over two huge basement rooms. Whiteboards and bookcases divide the rooms into sections.

When a student enters one of the rooms, she consults an airport-style monitor that directs her to one of 7 areas each supervised by a different teacher. She then retrieves her laptop and joins a group of other students to work on a particular skill at a level that a computer has determined is appropriate for her.

During one session she might use software that guides her through the task of measuring triangles. After half an hour, she might join 15 or 20 other kids for a teacher-led lesson on measuring cylinders. The next day she might go online to work with a virtual tutor on a concept she’s having trouble mastering. Or she might even fill out an old-fashioned worksheet on her own.

At the end of each day she gets an “exit slip” that identifies which skills she’s mastered and which she needs to continue to work on, perhaps in a different way.

Blended learning is on the rise

This year Hart, a school that faces multiple challenges, has been experimenting with “blended learning” in its math curriculum. While the term covers many different configurations, it basically describes an educational approach that uses technology and online resources as one way of delivering instruction.

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding blended learning these days, across the country and within DCPS. On May 16, the same day I visited Hart Middle School, Microsoft announced a $1 million dollar grant to expand a fellowship program which encourages DC teachers to incorporate blended learning in their instruction. (The fellowship program is operated by the CityBridge Foundation, also a major funder of the Hart project.)

Data on the effectiveness of blended learning has been mixed. But so many things get included under the label that it’s difficult to gauge success across the board. As with many educational innovations, it all depends on how well you do it. Simply equipping a classroom with a smart board or parking a student in front of a computer isn’t necessarily going to yield results.

Hart’s program personalizes lesson plans for each student

The program Hart adopted is called Teach to One Math, and at least in terms of its concept, it’s one of the better ones. Created by a nonprofit called New Classrooms Innovation Partners, Teach to One emphasizes personalization. New Classrooms co-founder Joel Rose, a former teacher and New York City school administrator, says the basic problem with traditional education is that it fails to differentiate between students.

A typical 7th-grade classroom might have some students working at a 6th-grade level and others at an 8th-grade level. Some kids will have grasped the concept the teacher introduced last week and others won’t. There’s no way a teacher can tailor his lesson for each of those kids, so usually he’ll end up teaching to the middle, losing some kids and boring the pants off of others.

But with Teach to One, students can get instruction geared to their particular level and move at their own pace. Ideally, a student who needs to work on fractions and is interested in sports can even get a program that combines both of those elements. The company draws on lessons from a variety of educational publishers and software providers and uses the ones that work best.

Hart Principal Billy Kearney says that some higher-achieving students have complained that they used to get A’s in math and now see their grades slipping. But, he points out, the fact that they were getting A’s doesn’t mean they were engaged in rigorous learning. (Witness the recent flap in Montgomery County over massive numbers of students, including some with good grades, failing county-wide math exams.)

One apprehension about Teach to One’s system, says Rose, is that students will miss the relationships they form with an individual teacher. But in fact, kids have told him that sometimes they didn’t like the math teacher they’d been assigned for the year. With Teach to One, they rotate through a variety of teachers, and there’s usually at least one they respond to and work with regularly, if not every day.

Does it work?

Reaction from teachers at Hart has been mixed. One teacher applauds the program’s individualized approach and praises the support teachers get in creating quizzes and homework. In addition, with one laptop per student, kids have the opportunity to acquire keyboarding and internet search skills along with math.

But, says the teacher, putting 175 middle-schoolers in two large rooms can create problems. Although the 6th graders I observed for 10 or 15 minutes seemed engaged and reasonably quiet, occasionally fights or loud arguments break out, disrupting learning for everyone.

While grouping students by skill level sometimes works well, putting a bunch of low-achieving students together can lead to disaster because those students are likely to exhibit behavior problems. Even when things are calm, noise levels can be distracting.

And, according to the teacher, the lessons provided by Teach to One are of uneven quality. Even though teachers are supposed to get the next day’s lesson plans around 4:30 pm, often they don’t arrive until 7:00. At that point the teachers need to scramble to modify or replace lessons that are deficient.

These are all problems of implementation that could be fixed. The real question is whether this instructional approach will deliver better results than the old-fashioned method. At Hart, which had only a 27% proficiency rate in math on the DC CAS last year, it’s too soon to tell, because there were no mid-year assessments.

Rose says that interim results have been promising at two schools in Chicago that are also in their first year implementing the program. At one of the schools, for example, the 7th grade had achieved 1½ years of growth by January.

Hart may or may not see similar gains. Generally it takes more than a year to assess whether a new approach is working. And DC CAS scores may not accurately reflect the program’s success because the test holds all students to their assigned grade level. If, for example, a 7th-grader who was working at a 5th-grade level moves up to a 6th-grade level, the DC CAS may not register the improvement because it’s only testing for mastery of the 7th-grade curriculum.

Critics have attacked blended learning in general as a way of cutting costs by getting rid of teachers. But when done well, blended learning can allow teachers to make better use of their time.

Ultimately programs like Teach to One could enable schools to shift their “human capital” to areas where it’s really needed: maybe students will go en masse to a blended learning math class in the morning, and in the afternoon work on writing with a teacher in groups of 4 or 5.

As Rose points out, technology has up-ended many aspects of our lives. Why, when it comes to education, should we cling to a classroom model that has prevailed for at least 150 years? Given the results we’ve been getting, it’s about time we tried something new.