Kent School District

 

The Kent School District adopted Everyday Math district-wide two years ago. We talked to them about their implementation and visited 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classes in one of their schools. Overall, the teachers were very happy with Everyday Math. Items of note about Kent's implementation of Everyday Math are given below.

• They implemented all grades levels at once, but gave considerable leeway to the 4th-6th grades. The 4th-6th grade children and teachers had a harder time the first year than the K-3rd grade. There were varied opinions about the best way to implement. Everyone agreed that 4th-6th should be given extra consideration, but that these teachers should be learning the curriculum, rather than postponing the pain.
• Kent School District provided 20 hours in-service, grade level specific Everyday Math training. They provided a mandatory full day release for training. The summer before implementation, 1/2 day optional workshops at grade level were offered. They also provided optional classes on how to teach Everyday Mathematics and how to do assessment for the purpose of aligning instruction for the children.
• Kent offers classes each year for new hires.
• Kent offered a Saturday school for parents district-wide that was grade-level specific for explaining the Everyday Math curriculum.
• Kent School District bought all the supplies recommended for use in the Everyday Math lessons. Linda Austin, Linda Deal, or Kris Koch can tell Northshore useful tips on this purchasing if Everyday is adopted. For example, for 4th grade don't buy the primary templates, but buy the intermediate level ones, etc.
• They had two mentor teachers per school. The purpose was to make sure that someone in the school knew the math content and could be a resource to other teachers.
• They found that the Everyday Math materials were very helpful in teaching mathematical content to the teachers. For example, one teacher kept track of the math words that he learned while preparing his Everyday lessons: 143 new words! His conclusion was that he was not too pleased with the curriculum. Our conclusion is different: The Everyday manual is doing exactly the right thing - making sure teachers understand the content they are trying to teach.
• They found that if the teacher is enthusiastic or even neutral about this curriculum, the children really like it.
• The success is tied to teacher support. This support should come from people that understand the mathematical content.

We visited the Neely-O'Brien Elementary School and observed 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classes. Neely-O'Brien has a high transient population and is designed a Title 1 school, which means that they receive two math specialists that rotate among all grade levels to assist the teacher. In addition, teacher aides are provided on an everyday basis to assist the LAP children. We found that Everyday Math worked extremely well in this setting. Items of note from our visit are given below:

• Everyday Math needs to be supplemented with computational practice. Some teachers would make up extra worksheets for more drill for students that needed it. Other teachers would accomplish some of the same by adding their own problem to the fourth slot in the Math Box. Almost all teachers told us this supplementation was necessary. Our opinion is that this type of supplementation is very easy for teachers to do and should not create a major overload-everybody can make up extra practice problems.
• A 4th grade teacher commented that using Everyday Math was much easier the second year. Presently, she is two units ahead of where she was last year. A majority of her children this year have had Everyday Math last year. She commented that last year she had to do a lot of backteaching, but still managed to do 105 out of 130 lessons.
• We observed the math specialist doing Lesson 63 (on polygons) from Everyday 3rd grade. It really worked well. The children were focused, understood what to do, and enjoyed their math hour. Many strands of mathematics are incorporated into this particular lesson, and they were all explored. For example, measurement (perimeter), geometric sense (angle, sides, polygon vocabulary), probability (combinatorics, in listing the ways to name the polygon) were easily identified.
• The 4th grade teacher found that practice teaching through some of the lessons with other teachers was very helpful.
• The 5th grade teacher loved Everyday Math. She noted that a teacher must be involved in the teaching of this curriculum. She noted that it is very important to purchase all the supplies that the curriculum calls for. She said the keys to success are a positive attitude and teacher training and support.
• The 6th grade teacher noted that in such a transient district children that enter the school from elsewhere may find Everyday Math difficult since they may not have had it in their previous school. For these children other ways of catching up may need to be provided, just as backteaching may be required for children who haven't had Everyday Math in the previous year during the implementation phase. This teacher supplements the curriculum with computer help on the basic skills and computational skill worksheets.
• We had extensive conversations with the two math specialists, Linda Deal and Linda Austin, that were assigned to the Neely-O'Brien school (plus two other schools in the Kent district that are also Title 1 schools). They stressed how important it is to have resource people (math specialists) that understand the content in the curriculum to help the teachers until they are proficient, but especially during the early stages of implementation. They felt that the classroom teacher is so busy and takes on so much that help must be given so as not to overwhelm them during the implementation phase.

We also visited the Covington Elementary School in the Kent School District. We discussed the issue of split classes at length with Mrs. Funk, the Special Education teacher there. She teaches the 5th grade Everyday Math to the children from a 4-5 split class at the same time that the classroom teacher is teaching the 4th grade Everyday Math. She told us that the grade levels must be separated because the teacher must be involved throughout the entire hour since even the small group work is guided practice. Other items of note from this visit include:

• Everyday Math is taught to the inclusion children.
• Everyday Math forces the pull-out children to go to a higher level of thinking than they are ready to do at the moment. These children still do a few exercises from Everyday, but manipulatives and other materials are used to improve their skills from the level of thinking they presently exhibit. As time goes by and these children have more exposure to Everyday, the hope is they too can become inclusion children. The important thing to note is that the children are assessed as to their level of thinking and the right help is provided for them to advance.
• Everyday Learning publishes a pamphlet telling the most important lessons to cover. This is useful if more time per lesson is required for some classes.
• The games in Everyday Math can be very sophisticated. This teacher had used many games prior to teaching Everyday and was impressed by the level of mathematics in these games.
• The teachers we talked to thought the best thing about Everyday Math was that it was not boring! They found kids to be very excited about math because it made sense to them, and the activities were fun.
• Everyday Math should be supplemented with computational practice.