Twelve Professional Learning Communities for 200 Middle School Mathematics Teachers of Excellence Classes, Focusing on High Order and Applied Mathematical Thinking
The PISA mathematics framework emphasizes the way students apply their mathematical knowledge in real life contexts. It requires conceptual thinking skills that allow knowledge transfer from familiar to unfamiliar circumstances, inducing meaningful conclusions from raw data, and the ability to solve a complex problem by using a mathematical model. Teaching these notions is not the typical practice in Israel’s middle schools. The focus at the middle school level is still on procedural fluency, technique and solidifying the basics. In recent discussions we held with dozens of excellent mathematics teachers, we exposed them to PISA assignments. Their first reaction was one of confusion. The immediate impression was that these must be very easy tasks, with rather simple mathematics. Many said that they are surprised that their students failed the test. However, when they tried to solve the assignments themselves, and struggled to do so, many of them changed their response. Almost all of them said that not only their students will find the assignments very difficult to learn, they believe it would also be hard for them to teach. These reactions led us to understand that the preparation of new learning materials that we currently are funding, will need to meet a well prepared pedagogy. For this to happen, the teachers will have to go beyond the courses that the content developers prepare for them that are tailored to train them to teach specific assignments. We now acknowledge that for teachers to adapt their pedagogic approach, they need to deeply reflect on their practice. We believe that such process could flourish within professional learning communities, where teachers meet routinely in order to jointly investigate and improve their teaching.Therefore, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, we are now approaching relevant facilitators of such communities. The first candidate is Einat Heyd-Metzuyanim of the Faculty of Education in Science and Technology of the Technion, who with assistance from the foundation has been operating a professional development program for middle school mathematics teachers, training them to orchestrate effective classroom mathematics discussions. Heyd-Metzuyanim is now proposing to establish 12 communities for 200 mathematics teachers who teach the high ability tracks and excellence classes in middle schools and 10th grade, and have the opportunity to teach the 5-6 excellence levels of PISA during two weekly supplementary teaching hours. The Ministry of Education agreed to fund the ongoing operations of these communities. The foundation is asked to support the development stage, which will rely on a team of 3 experts. The team will collect high-level PISA assignments, and develop training kits and ten lesson plans. In addition, they will film 10 lessons of best practice, in order to demonstrate how to teach the applied approach. Then, the program will establish a core group for 15 teacher leaders in order to prepare them to lead the communities. Talli Nachlieli, an academic expert on mathematics instruction, will lead this group. This effort will set the stage for creating 12 professional learning communities in which teachers will participate for two years. In the first year, two such communities will operate, scaling up to an additional 10 over the four years of the program. The plan is to engage 200 mathematics teachers in ongoing professional development by participating in these communities.
* The text presented above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation Board / Grant 377