Keen teacher insight and the faith of an administration has the Gill Montague Regional School District off to an early use of one of the nation’s top rated elementary math curriculum.

Three years ago with MCAS math scores declining and the district being deemed under- performing the GMRSD knew they had to make solid curriculum changes and fast.  They assembled a math committee that included teachers, administrators and a curriculum specialist.  This committee invested numerous hours researching the different options and listening to various sales pitches.  “Sales people came and did a day with the math committee of teachers and they’d show you their wares and try to convince you that their program was the best,” said Chip Wood the districts Director of Elementary Education.

The choices were narrowed down to 3 or 4 different programs, some time-tested and reliable and some brand new and just being rolled out.  But one program stood out – Houghton Mifflin’s’ Math Expressions program, the newest curriculum being offered.  According to Houghton Mifflin, Math Expressions uses an approach that emphasizes in-depth, sustained learning of grade level-concepts and mastery of skills, and brings K-5 students to fluency with word problems, math drawings and accessible algorithms. 

“Frankly administratively we were very nervous about it, because here we were, very underperforming, not doing well and we thought we should try something tried and true that was getting results,” said Wood.  “But our teachers said You know what? This program is really, one, child friendly, two, very teacher friendly – we can really understand these teacher guides and three, very compatible to responsive classroom.”  “They voted that this should be the curriculum we should adopt, and when you have that kind of teacher buy in, that’s what you want to go with.”

Sharyn Wood a grade three teacher of Sheffield Elementary School and a member of the math committee further emphasized how child friendly the Math Expressions Curriculum is.  “A big component of Math Expressions is having student leaders, where children are encouraged to come to the front of the room and explain their math thinking.  If they can explain it, then they understand it,” she said.

With the decision to adopt Math Expressions came a rare opportunity, the chance for GMRSD teachers to meet with the program’s author Karen Fuson.  Fuson, who developed the curriculum based on 10 years of research she had done with more than 200 teachers and 5,000 students in both urban and suburban schools, was going to be in Concord for a day. Teachers traveled there and got a real understanding of the program.  Eager to put it into play – teachers came back from their trip and piloted the program in their classrooms for the rest of the year.  That was two and half years ago.

Then in March of this year –in an article published in Education Week, the nation’s leading news weekly in education - the Math Expression’s curriculum came out on top in a new large-scale study of early mathematics programs.  Beating out the other widely used curriculums.  The study conducted by Mathematica Policy Research showed that not only did it out perform overall, but resulted in higher achievement for both students in schools with low math scores as well as with higher levels of poverty.  Both of which GMRSD has been faced with.

“When we chose this three years ago we did not know this was gong to happen.  This program we chose on teacher faith turns out to be the highest performing program nationally,” said an enthusiastic Wood. 

Measuring District Success

With the adoption of Math Expressions came the need for teacher and student support.  With this in mind GMRSD hired Steve Smith – a consultant and math coach who had worked on early versions of Math Expressions with Houghton Mifflin.   “It is enormously interesting for me to actually see in detail how things – how kids are understanding the curriculum,” said Smith.  Smith spends his time working with teachers offering them professional development, curriculum adaptation and pacing.  Every day Smith visits the elementary classrooms offering teaching demonstrations and helping individual students with any problem areas.

Smith also holds bi-weekly groups with each grade level to talk about what’s coming up next and to review what has been done.  “On the one hand we want them (students) to discover and use new methods and be able to problem solve.  We also want to tightly connect that up with efficient and well automatized numerical solutions.  Math Expressions brings these things together in a powerful way.”

“Having a math consultant for the teachers and students was really essential for this program – this curriculum is different from most standard math curriculums,” said Wood.  “The foundation in thinking is so strong in Math Expressions that whatever they (students) go on to, they are going to be fine.  This is such strong algebraic thinking that they are ready for anything they are going to need in middle school math.  I’ve never seen children think so strongly algebraically in elementary school before in my life.”

Gill-Montague will be looking to this years MCAS scores for a true understanding of how Math Expressions is working.  Last years scores showed a significant increase in third grade proficiency, but Wood indicated that it takes about 3 years to see what you get out of a shift in curriculum.  “I think we are going to see it this year.  What we are seeing on unit tests in very positive.”