Comments on: RECONSIDERING MATH INVESTIGATIONS IN PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY — PART 1

By: sally can't add

sally can't add — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:08:44 +0000

A large part of the problem has been the attitudes of some in the district office and mixed messages to the principals and staff. When Investigations was rolled out the message to staff and parents alike was very clear, “This program should NOT and will NOT be supplemented!” or it will end in disaster. The math department claimed low SOL scores were the reason for the drastic change in curriculum. Then both stories changed completely when challenged by parents when they discovered this wasn’t true. There has been a complete lack of transparency and accountability surrounding MI and some PWCS staff continue to claim the “sky is falling” by taking a more common sense and balanced approach to math education. The professionalism and respect needs to be a two way street but what we saw of the last board meeting was far from that. If you haven’t watched the replay on pwcstv.com I recommend that everyone watch it. Some video clips are also available on this site:

http://www.bvbl.net/index.php/2009/01/27/don-richardson-working-for-us/

By: Ed

Ed — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:26:58 +0000

No; they are very inconsistent.
And all I meant was, it they had supplemented it would have take longer for us to notice the problems..

By: pwceducationreform

pwceducationreform — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:26:23 +0000

I’ve seen nothing but straight up MI and my classroom teachers have told me that that’s all they’ve been authorized to provide. Some are providing other material but they are doing so against county policies.

By: kgotthardt

kgotthardt — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:53:31 +0000

When my daughter comes home with assignments, she comes home with MI worksheets. Her MI worksheets have traditional word problems and computation problems. The non-traditional material came earlier on in the curriculum, providing some background. In addition to the worksheets, she is asked to do other things like memorize times tables and complete similar traditional exercises.

I don’t think they are taking things out of MI. But I don’t know if ALL teachers are teaching this way.

By: pwceducationreform

pwceducationreform — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:46:23 +0000

I’m not sure blending the Investigations curriculum is the best approach. Investigations is designed to be a standalone curriculum – it provides a full academic year of lessons. Blending means you’d have to pull something out of the Investigations curriculum and replace it with alternate materials which, in my opinion, would undermine the integrity of the Investigations program.

While the blended mantra seems to have a nice ring to it, I’m not sure how much blending is really going on. Are teachers being provided materials from alternate programs to conduct their blended lessons; are they being provided guidance on where to insert additional material into the Investigations framework so that the lessons are a blended; are they being encouraged to teach and support alternate computational strategies not support by Investigations and are they provided materials to enable them to teach, support,and reinforce those strategies; or is the blend just teachers allowing students to use strategies Investigations does not support without having to justify their work but those strategies are neither taught, reinforced, nor supported by the teachers and materials to teach, support, and reinforce those strategies are not provided?

I suspect that the “blend” we’ve heard so much of is more teaches doing things on the fly rather than an organized, structured blend of instructional materials.

In my opinion, Investigations highly regimented and structured program makes a blended approach difficult if not impossible when Investigations is the core curriculum. Other programs are more flexible and would lend themselves to adaptation and inclusion of alternate materials a bit more readily than Investigations does.