Grant amount
NIS 1,100,000
A Program To Increase The Number Of 5-Unit Mathematics Matriculation Students In Kiryat Gat
Municipal program in Kiryat Gat to Double the Percentage of Students of 5-Unit Mathematics Matriculation Students to 20% by 2020
Municipal program in Kiryat Gat to Double the Percentage of Students of 5-Unit Mathematics Matriculation Students to 20% by 2020
Kiryat Gat is a city in the Southern District of Israel, it lies50 km south of Tel Aviv, and has a population of approximately 52,000. Primarily Jewish, the city has a level 4 socio-economic ranking (out of 10), and around one third of its residents hail from the former Soviet Union. It has seven secondary schools, three of which cater for orthodox children, and in recent years, 77% of Kiryat Gat’s 12th grade students have been eligible for matriculation.
In 2016, 13% of students were examined at the 5-unit level mathematics matriculation and 16% were examined at the four-unit level. Kiryat Gat has been working for several years to improve its achievement in mathematics, with the goal of helping as many students as possible access higher education in good quality academic institutions. Today, there are a number of supplementary programs in the city to advance student excellence in science and mathematics, including those in partnership with the Education Ministry, philanthropy, and the business sectors, such as Intel-Israel, which operates a big factory in Kiryat Gat.
The current programs focus on students rather than teachers, providing mostly extra-curricular teaching hours, empowerment, visits, robotics, and some middle school instruction. The municipality claims it dedicates insufficient attention to the overall management of these programs and has not defined objective for measuring their accumulative success. They also noted that they suffer from an increasing shortage of mathematics teachers who are able to teach 5-units, and the veteran teachers need to adopt a more clinical approach to teaching, focused on the individual student, so that the dropout rate from the 5-unit classes will decrease.
In order to address these issues, Kiryat Gat is proposing a three-year program aimed to increase the rate of 5-unit students from 13% to 20%. They propose establishing four type of teacher communities: a city-wide teacher community for expert 5-unit mathematics teachers; school-based communities for teachers with potential to teach advanced levels; a city-wide community for middle school teachers; and a community for school principals.
Each school will send its 1-2 lead teachers to join the community of expert 5-unit teachers, who will be cultivated as a mathematical leadership for the city. They will meet weekly with an expert organization to learn how to instruct and coach new teachers and potential 5-units teachers; how to observe and provide feedback to fellow teachers; and how to facilitate and lead school-based teacher communities. After six months, these lead teachers will open seven school-based communities in their own schools for potential teachers of advanced level mathematics.
In parallel, 24 middle school mathematics teachers will convene to work together, once every two weeks over the course of three years and will receive instructional coaching on an individual basis or in small groups. The school principals of the seven schools will meet routinely to jointly develop shared instructional systems and learning goals. They will get together once a month and will receive one-on-one mentoring from the Program Manager.