The city will strengthen the professional capacity of its mathematics teachers and increase the pool of those who are able to teach the five-unit track and advanced mathematics in middle school
Holon is a large city in the Tel Aviv District with approximately 190,000 residents. The city branded itself as the “Children’s City”, with a children’s museum and numerous cultural activities for kids. The educational system of Holon accommodates more than 37,000 students attending 265 kindergartens, 34 elementary schools, and 19 high schools (of which 11 schools teach potential 5-unit mathematics students). In 2017, 83.2% of twelfth grade students graduated high school with a matriculation certificate, in comparison to the national average of 68.2%.
As per students completing 5-unit mathematics matriculation, their number has been steadily increasing, from 9.8% in 2013 to 16.7% (375 of the 2,245 twelfth grade students) in 2017, above the 14.3% national average. However, the local educational leaders claim that there is still untapped potential, since there is a significant performance gap between the schools and a high drop down rate (18%) from 5- to 4-unit mathematics between 10th and 12th grades.
At present, the city’s teaching cadre consists of 144 mathematics teachers in middle and high school, 36 of which teach 5-unit mathematics. Most of the 5-unit teachers are experienced veteran teachers and many are due to retire within the next three years. In order to cater to the growing number of 5-unit students, the city identified the need to strengthen the professional capacity of its mathematics teachers and to increase the pool of those who are able to teach the 5-unit track and advanced mathematics in middle school.
In order to address this challenge in middle schools, during the previous year 12 mathematics department heads formed a professional learning community. They regularly meet with experts from the Weizmann Institute (assisted by a grant from the Trump Foundation) with an aim to generate school-based communities of practice.
The municipality is now planning to leverage this bottom-up effort and to incorporate it in a comprehensive program. The goal of the citywide program is to improve the quality of teaching in order to prevent the drop down of students and increase the percentage of 5-unit mathematics graduates to 26% (500 students) by 2021. The number of 5-unit teachers will rise from 36 to 50 and a menu of professional development opportunities will be offered to the teachers and principals:
In addition, as part of the program but not as part of this grant, an additional 30 teachers will participate in a teaching certification course, funded by the Ministry of Education. The municipality will convene a conference and seminars for the teaching staff. It will also establish a work team consisting of representatives from the municipality and the Ministry of Education, the program manager and the program mathematics coordinator, which will meet 4 times per year in order to identify needs and collect data on each school.