Glendale school district wins science and math grant
Glendale Unified officials are taking another step to enhance the way they teach math under the new Common Core State Standards by using a competitive grant they won worth $1.5 million to spend on teacher training in math and science over three years.
The California Mathematics and Science Partnership Grant will have the school district partner with the Educational Development Center and UCLA, whose math and science professors will help further train Glendale teachers in creating lesson plans and teaching the new math and science standards as they are taught to sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, as well as high school students.
Glendale Unified is one of 11 districts in the state to receive the grant, provided by federal funds that the state department of education awards.
Thirty-one math teachers in Glendale volunteered to participate in the program, and each of them will undergo 85 hours of training, beginning in July.
Another 19 teachers will receive training in science, including two from Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy.
The grant, with a major emphasis on math, comes at a time when Glendale school officials have spent the past several months retooling how they approach math instruction.
Last summer, a team of 11 math coaches and nearly 30 teachers spent 15 days writing new curriculum to fit with the Common Core standards.
“This was the opportune time to go for a grant like this to really support our teachers and the big changes they are making,” said Lisa Reed, a mathematics teacher who currently serves as a math coordinator helping oversee teacher training across the district.
In her own experience teaching math before the Common Core standards, Reed said she was good at standing at the front of her classroom calculating math problems on the white board for students who may or may not have understood how she arrived at the answer by the time they arrived home to do math homework.
Those days are gone with the new standards, she said, which call on students to approach problems with critical thinking, and by explaining their thinking.
“I was the one that was making sense of the math for them,” Reed said. “Now, what we want them to do is make sense of the mathematics themselves.”
The new standardized exams do not list multiple-choice answers for math problems as they once did.
When Reed was visiting a kindergarten class this week, she observed students articulating ways to break numbers down, including by taking eight apart by concluding that five and three or four and four equal eight.
“They’re not just memorizing a fact now,” Reed said. “They’re making sense [of] ‘Why does two and six make eight?’”
Giving students basic foundation in numbers is a focal point in Common Core math, and one that today’s older students went without, largely because decades of past teaching practices emphasized memorization.
Local educators are certain that students’ expertise in math, because of their critical thinking skills, will only improve.
According to the results of the new standardized exams, which became public in September, 49% of Glendale’s students met or exceeded the mathematics standard, which was significantly above the state average of 33%.
When students take the standardized exam again this spring, Glendale Unified officials will see the first year-to-year comparison in those test scores, and they expect them to improve this year and in the years to come, particularly as the new standards become innate, both for students and teachers.
“We’re hoping to see some change because kids are thinking differently… It’s going to take a few years, and we know that,” Reed said.
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Kelly Corrigan, kelly.corrigan@latimes.com
Twitter: @kellymcorrigan
