Creating an Intervention Course - Standards and Pacing

This is the second post in a series about creating an intervention course.  The first post can be found here.

Last school year the 7th grade team worked to determine essential standards for the grade.  When it comes to intervening with students we need to have a focus, so we worked to determine which standards were essential in 7th grade.  For this process we started by unpacking the standards and determining what we called "essential understandings".  Basically we were answer the questions, "What do we want students to remember after we teach this standard?"  Turns out it is actually a great question and shifts the focus from what students need to know how to do (procedures) to big ideas and understandings they need to have.  For example:

For example, for the standard 7.NS.A.1.B
Show that a number and its opposite have a sum of 0 (are additive inverses). Interpret sums of rational numbers by describing real-world contexts.

Some things students need to remember are

• the definition of “additive inverse” and how it can be used to add integers.
• The difference between adding +17 and adding -17
• The significance of a negative quantity and how to represent it.

After unpacking all of the standards we looked at 3 criteria to help us determine which standards are essential:

Now that we have our essential standards determined, our goal for this year is to create what we are calling an Essential Standard Tracker for each chapter.  This is part of our PLC goals for this year.  We are using Tim Kanold's Mathematics PLC at Work resources to help us.  

There was no way to get a good screen shot so you could read the words, but the headings are:

• Description of Standard (in student friendly terms)
• Description of Proficiency (this one is an important discussion)
• Vocab and Pre-requisites
• When Taught (which is a link to our pacing guide which I will write about next)
• And then some common formative and summative information

Again, the focus of this document is the essential standards.  We still teach all of the standards but for interventions identifying the vocab and prerequisites for the standards with endurance, leverage, and readiness for the next level is where we want to focus our time.  If we can front load these skills and help strengthen students background knowledge before we reach that standard in class, they are much more likely to engage in work we do in class.  

As part of our PLC process this year we are creating pacing guides.  Honestly, we already had this information in different formats and different places and I questioned the need to copy and paste things into a different format.  What I found however, was that when we put in together in one place we started to notice areas that needed improvement.  For example, some targets were too general and spanned several days.  We relooked at our learning targets and made them more specific to that lesson.  We also added success criteria.  I love that part and am excited to see how it goes in the classrooms.  

Here is what the pacing guide looks like at a glance:

And here is a close up of one of the learning targets:

I really think the success criteria is going to help teachers with the close of the lesson and help students be more reflective on their progress with the concepts.  

After we had the pacing guide for the chapter created I made a pacing guide for the intervention course.  I thought it would be overwhelming, but our interventions are every other day.  So with an 18 day unit I only had 9 days to plan for the intervention work.  Suddenly an overwhelming task seemed much more reasonable.  

The goal for the year is for the 7th grade team to continue creating pacing guides for each chapter.  Then I will use that to create the pacing guides for the intervention course.  In Unit 1 of Math Investigations (the name we have given the course) we will work on chapter 1 concepts and chapter 2 prerequisites.  Then in Unit 2, when the class is on chapter 2, we will work on chapter 2 concepts and chapter 3 prerequisites.  

The tricky part will be to stay ahead on our essential standards trackers and pacing guides so that when I create each intervention unit, we have the next chapter for math class already mapped out in terms of the essential standards.  

In my next post I will discuss my process for selecting activities and planning for work with students.  

Next Blog Post found here

Creating An Intervention Course - The Origin Story

I don't blog as often as I'd like, but when I do I love how it helps me process and reflect on the work I am doing.  This is my second year as a math coach / interventionist and I have decided to create an intervention course for our 7th grade.  It will be an ongoing project all school year and I decided I should blog about the process for a few reasons.
1.  I want to remember what I am doing in case I want to try to do something like this again.
2.  I want to share it with others in case it helps you with your work.
3.  A blog is a great place to share ideas and concerns to get feedback from others, and I know I am going to need some help along the way.

This first post is just going to give you some background on why I have decided to create this course and what I hope to accomplish.

Our teachers run intervention groups during study hall time.  They work with small groups every other day.  We have spent years floundering through these interventions.  Not sure who to work with, what to work on with them, or if what we were doing was making any difference.  Because the bulk of our day was spent teaching math classes, the intervention work was always somewhat of an afterthought in the planning process.

One of the struggles we have experienced in my middle school is that the intervention work is often many grade years below what we do in class.  Students might be making some progress in interventions but they would continue to struggle in math class and receive failing grades.  It is difficult to keep a student motivated to do extra math when they are not feeling successful in that class.

Listening to the Making Math Moments that Matter Podcast last year I started to think that maybe we were taking the wrong approach to interventions.  We were selecting activities below grade level to help improve those skills.  But what if we chose grade level tasks.  We could engage students in open tasks that explore grade level concepts, and help build and strengthen the prerequisites along the way.  In the podcast, Kyle and Jon, talk about the importance of anticipating how students will solve a task.  If we could anticipate possible solutions, we could anticipate discussions about those background skills along the way.

Last year was also a big year for our 8th grade math program.  Two of our teachers were able to pilot the CPM Support course with some our our students.  Here is the description given by CPM:

The course is unique in that it focuses on problem solving, building relationships, building student confidence, while also focusing on some key 8th grade standards like ratio and proportion, solving equations, and numeracy. 

I was able to observe this course being taught and it was great.  Our teachers saw great results.  Many students who had been disengaged and overwhelmed in math class were participating in discussions and more willing to try new things.  The teachers were frontloading some concepts and the students were more confident in class when those concepts were discussed.

Because of the success of the support course, I decided I wanted to try to create something similar in 7th grade.  Keeping in mind that CPM has done a lot of research and training to create their course that I will not be able to do, I want to use the same philosophy as CPM's support course and the framework*  laid out by the Making Math Moments that Matter team to create an organized curriculum for 7th grade interventions.

*Framework is not really the right word.  You can follow the link and decide what the right word choice should be. 

And so this year my I am going to attempt to create what we are calling Math Investigations.
Wish me luck!

**I should also note that 2 teachers will be using this intervention course.  There is still another layer of interventions that allow for small group targeted interventions.

Next Post in the Series: Standards and Pacing