Al-Maghar will Promote Excellence

Maghar is a city in the Northern District with a mixed population of 24,000 Druze, Christians and Muslims. It was officially declared a city only recently, in October 2021. It has two middle schools and two high schools. Expanding matriculation in the five-unit mathematics track has been unstable and fluctuating, with 14.3% of the students completing five-unit matriculation in 2020. Although the Ministry of Education’s program for promoting excellence in the periphery allocated additional hours for excellence studies, they are not always utilized.

The middle schools serve 858 students, 108 (31%) of which study in three excellence classes in 9^th grade. To strengthen the basis of the students in middle school, the municipality now plans to add two additional excellence classes in both 8^th and 9^th grades and concentrate on content in the existing excellence classes in order to raise the level of teaching and learning. Maghar will provide each of these new classes two additional weekly teaching hours. Their goal is for 148 (42%) students to graduate an excellence class in 9^th grade by 2025.

Six excellence-class mathematics teachers will attend state-level professional learning communities for at least two years, at academic institutions that develop high order mathematics tasks based on real-life contexts. The academic institutions will provide them with instructional coaching once every two weeks for the first two years and help the teachers to implement the content in their classes. In addition, two science teachers will attend a state-level learning community to learn to teach high order mathematics material in science contexts.

Two department heads will attend a state-level community to learn how to guide their mathematics team to implement the material in their classes. Then, from the second year, they will start to receive instructional coaching to guide their teachers with implementation. A program coordinator will organize seminars and workshops for the teachers, principals and department coordinators. The coordinator will also collect student data to monitor their results and persistence in the excellence classes.

* The text above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation’s Board of Directors / Grant 468