Photo retrieved from Great Minds Blog post
In school year 2022–2023, the Public Schools of Robeson County adopted Eureka Math2® district wide in grades K–7. In shifting away from having no formal curriculum in place, administrators hoped to bring consistency and rigor to math instruction across the district. “We’ve been a low-performing district, there was no consistency, and our kids are very mobile. Teachers used a pacing guide that told them which standards should be taught when, but if you went into any of our 30 K–8 schools, you saw something different for math instruction in every building,” says Dr. Windy Dorsey-Carr, assistant superintendent of curriculum, instruction, and accountability.
District Profile
- 20,783 total students
- 37 schools
- 42% American Indian/Alaska Native, 24% Black, 17% Hispanic, 13% White
Dorsey-Carr also noted that students historically struggled with multi-step word problems throughout the grade spans, often finding difficulty with understanding how to break problems down and apply their mathematical thinking to solve them. Administrators wanted to find a curriculum that would help teachers strengthen students’ mathematical sense making and ability to connect mathematical ideas, concepts, meanings, and procedures.
To begin their search for a new program, Robeson administrators thought through a math curriculum’s must-have features for their district, put out a bid for curriculum providers, and consulted trusted sources like EdReports to narrow down their options. “We wrote up a proposal indicating that we wanted conceptual learning to be involved, we wanted hands-on learning, we wanted to make sure the rigor was there, and we wanted students to have the ability to have that discourse. We were looking for a curriculum that would meet our needs—one that taught math conceptually and had a strong application piece,” says Dorsey-Carr.
“We wanted conceptual learning to be involved, we wanted hands-on learning, we wanted to make sure the rigor was there, and we wanted students to have the ability to have that discourse. We were looking for a curriculum that would meet our needs—one that taught math conceptually and had a strong application piece.”
Eureka Math2 rose to the top as the best fit for Robeson given the research base of the curriculum, the success of other schools and districts using it, and the sustainable cost for a district of their size.
Laying a Strong Foundation of Knowledge and Professional Support
Initially, there was a mix of excitement and apprehension among teachers about adopting the new program. “We heard a lot of, ‘This is not the way we’ve ever taught math,’ so we had to help teachers make connections between the standards they were used to and the new curriculum. We told them ‘This is how you’ve been asked to do it the whole time. There are all these different strategies for addressing that standard and for kids to really conceptualize what’s going on with the mathematics, but you just never unpacked the standard completely.’ They only saw the surface level; they saw key words; that was it,” says Dorsey-Carr.
In addition to connecting the curriculum to the standards, there was a layered professional development (PD) plan in place to support teachers through implementation. The entire district received a full day of initial training—the Launch: Bringing Eureka Math2 to Life PD session with Great Minds®—right when school started. Then, once a month, all Robeson academic coaches met with a Great Minds PD facilitator for additional training that they brought back to the teachers in their building. Robeson leaders also did a couple of guided observations sessions with a Great Minds coach to monitor implementation and identify trends.
In year two, administrators adjusted the PD plan to align with the progress teachers had made. New teachers received initial training at the start of the school year led by other Robeson teachers who had been successful during year one of implementation. The district also allotted two days—one in the fall and one in the spring—in each school for a Great Minds PD facilitator to observe classrooms and then meet with both coaches and teachers to support their practice. “Ashley [Great Minds coach] usually meets with PLCs to support based on what she has observed. That might mean helping teachers plan, unpacking data with them, and even modeling part of a lesson. It varies school by school,” says Dorsey-Carr.
Dorsey-Carr and her colleagues go into the schools regularly as well to observe, to monitor, and to help principals and coaches be strong instructional leaders in their buildings. She noted that since coaches and principals don’t necessarily have a background in math, the Eureka Math2 curriculum and PD have been very valuable in supporting them.
“Some of our academic coaches may be certified in English or science, but they serve everybody. So the professional development gives them an opportunity to see instruction in action. And for principals, when they were previously trying to observe teachers, they didn’t always know what to look for just by looking at someone’s lesson plan. But now, with the way Eureka Math2 has everything laid out, you can have a really good idea of what you’re expecting to see even if you’re not a math person,” says Dorsey-Carr.
Productive Struggle Pays Off
Dorsey-Carr has already seen many benefits of the curriculum across the district, explaining that having common materials and assessments in every building has enabled stronger instructional leadership, collaboration, and problem-solving across buildings. Teachers have also been able to shift their time from gathering materials toward internalizing lessons and building their instructional knowledge.
“Eureka Math2 has really helped teachers have an idea of what instruction should look like. They were able to build more knowledge through it, and some of them learned strategies they had never known just by doing the math themselves...It really did help teachers make better instructional decisions because now they knew the content was going in the order it should.”
“Eureka Math2 has really helped teachers have an idea of what instruction should look like. They were able to build more knowledge through it, and some of them learned strategies they had never known just by doing the math themselves. It didn’t come naturally to everybody, but it did help support them to deliver instruction so that it was building on the child’s skills and the previous standards. It really did help teachers make better instructional decisions because now they knew the content was going in the order it should,” says Dorsey-Carr.
Dorsey-Carr also explained that she was pleased to see teachers getting through more standards in a school year with the guidance and pacing of Eureka Math2. “Previously, teachers would unintentionally spend two or three weeks on a standard if a student didn’t do well on it instead of moving on because they weren’t thinking about the pacing. So based on what we saw, Eureka Math2 allowed more standards to be taught because teachers weren’t getting hung up on one standard thinking they had to stay there until everybody mastered it,” she explains.
But reaping these benefits has not come without productive struggle for teachers and for students. Pacing through lessons and making sure teachers got to all the essential lesson components was a challenge in year one as both teachers and students were becoming familiar with lesson protocols and routines. Principals and coaches spent a lot of time working with teachers on studying the lesson structure and data from student work to help teachers focus their time and move through lessons more effectively.
“Now teachers get through more of the lessons, but they are hesitant to release students to work independently. Letting students have a productive struggle has been hard for teachers. Some of the students have been so accustomed to somebody coming in to help them right away that at first you would see kids just sit there because they figured at some point someone is going to come and help. But I’ve seen more students willing to try because of having that opportunity to struggle. I see students rising up. People were initially saying ‘Oh, this is too hard for them,’ but because we gave students the opportunity, we see students rising to the occasion and working through things. I really think that it shows the potential of our students. If you let them grapple with the content for a little bit, you realize they can do it,” says Dorsey-Carr.
Encouraging Gains in State Test Scores, Discourse, and Accessibility
State test results indicate that the productive struggle is already paying off. The percentage of students scoring level 3 and above on the state math test has increased in almost every grade level. “We really did celebrate. We unpack our data at the beginning of the school year so we can celebrate the successes and also be realistic about next steps and gaps that we still have. It was a celebration, but also setting the stage to continue that growth now that kids are coming in stronger. We’ve had teachers and principals say they can see the difference with the students who came into the classroom this year, that they knew more. So that always builds morale,” says Dorsey-Carr.
And with the growth in proficiency has come noticeable changes to the classroom environment and student engagement as well. Dorsey-Carr said that she hears more student voice, observes more group work, and notices more opportunities for students to work through problems together in pairs than ever before. She hopes to see student and teacher comfort with discourse grow even more in the upcoming year, saying, “We’ll discuss doing a ‘turn and talk’ during a lesson or something like that, and I’ll hear teachers say, ‘Well, they’ll get loud.’ But it’s okay if students get loud. I had to really talk to teachers about it being okay to have a noisy classroom. It doesn’t have to look quiet. Even today when I was in a classroom, I had to tell the teacher, ‘Don’t let that one-word answer go. Push them to answer in those complete sentences.”
Dorsey-Carr has also seen a greater variety of strategies in use to solve math problems, both when looking at student work and when observing the way that teachers present content, which has helped students gain a better understanding of the mathematics. “You’ll see sometimes somebody used a tape diagram and somebody else used a number bond to solve a problem. Previously, teachers would get stuck teaching the one way they knew how. So there’s more use of those different strategies than there was before, which allows some of our kids who really struggle with math to access it a little easier,” says Dorsey-Carr.
“Just listening to students reading some of the problems I can tell that it’s also easier for some of them to access the content because of the readability. We are almost at 2,500 multilingual students now, which is almost 25 percent of our population, so we’re seeing that they can still access the content even if they can’t read some of the words yet because of language barriers.”
Looking Ahead to Year Two
When reflecting on lessons learned, Dorsey-Carr had several pieces of advice for others: Provide initial training early so teachers have time to process and digest what they’ve learned; layer support as much as possible; and give educators time to problem solve together.
Dorsey-Carr also noted that administrators really pushed to have their teachers solely focus on Eureka Math2 without the addition or distraction of any other resources. “We told everybody in the district that they couldn’t use anything else during the math instruction block. Otherwise, you really don’t know if teachers are making sound instructional decisions about what they’re cutting and what they’re adding from other places, and it gets really murky. So I’d recommend leaning in with what you have in front of you and using it to the fullest extent so that you really know the impact of the materials you’re using to support your students.”
In the year ahead, Dorsey-Carr says the district will focus on helping teachers feel confident in making lessons their own and personalizing instruction to their class, saying, “We want teachers to be able to take that real-time data that they’re collecting and adjust the lesson in the moment so they can have a bigger impact on their students. We don’t want teachers to be robots or follow a script. We want them to be able to make intuitive decisions because we feel that will push us further when we think about growing our students.”
This article appeared originally on the Great Minds website here. It was shared here on the PSRC district website with permission.