The Impact on Mathematics Teaching Environments Through Establishing, Developing, and Maintaining Professional Learning Communities
Orange County, California, with a population of over a half million students has wide disparities in socioeconomic status, which is reflected in the achievement of its students and its schools. One of the biggest educational challenges was to close the gap by increasing student achievement at low-performing schools. Mathematics teachers in 11 low-performing schools-four high schools and their feeder middle schools-were brought together to compose the Teachers Assisting Students to Excel in Learning Mathematics (TASEL-M) project, a partnership between California State University-Fullerton (CSUF), Orange County Department of Education, and four school districts in Orange County.
The four TASEL-M high schools were from either decile 2 or 3 on a 10-point scale for the statewide Academic Performance Index (API). On average, only 39.7% of the grade 9-11 students from TASEL-M schools scored at or above the 50th percentile on the Statewide Testing and Reporting (STAR) system in mathematics, which was significantly lower than both the county and state averages (57.6% and 47.3%, respectively). Collectively, these high schools and middle schools enroll 16,137 students with a high percent of Hispanic students (63.2%) and a high percent of socially-economically disadvantaged students (50.7%). Moreover, many of these schools struggled with high transience rates, and all had high percent of English language learners (51.6%). All are Title I schools, receiving federal support for programs due to the low socioeconomic status of their students.
The focus of this presentation is on the success of TASEL-M in bringing about change in the mathematics teaching environment through establishing, developing, and maintaining Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) within the mathematics departments at each of the TASEL-M schools. The TASEL-M project demands that teachers take an active role in their professional development, while empowering them with the knowledge and tools of effective collaboration, as well as of mathematics content and pedagogy. It teaches them how to analyze assessment data in depth, share their classroom experiences and develop new, and standards-based approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. Although TASEL-M was not explicitly designed as a research project, data collected from the project can be used to shed light on important research questions.
