Integrated math teachers restructure curriculum with aim of improving student understanding and results

BY GABI HUTSON
[email protected]

Since the start of the new Integrated Math 2 courses last term, the math teachers from each site in the Roseville Joint Union High School District have held meetings discussing how they could combat the high fail rates of the new class. Last term the IM2 teachers Levi Fletcher, Sandra Schmatjen, and Miguel Quinonez had a fail rate average of 21 percent.

Through these meeting, they decided to begin by reorganizing the topics and lesson plans of IM2’s curriculum.

According to Schmatjen, the major change of the curriculum will not be a change in the actual content, but in the lesson’s order.

“I believe all the schools are tweaking as teachers usually do with any curriculum” Schmatjen said. “They hone in on what type of a lesson worked and what didn’t and hone in on that or improve it. So that’s what we’re doing, we’re looking at what we did last term and having lots of discussion on the order we taught. So we’re not changing the topics just the order we teach them in.”

According to Fletcher, the department was rearranging the course to pick up where IM1 had left off to make the transition to IM2 smoother, specifically in geometry content.

“We saw some ways to make the learning more continuous and build on top of eachother, versus somethings that didn’t necessarily connect and we taught them one right after another,” Fletcher said. “For example, IM1 ended in triangle congruence, but then IM2 didn’t start with triangle congruence. So we decided that kids were coming right from that so we should start with that.”

Fletcher believes that math teachers noticed last term that students seemed to have a hard time with how choppy the lessons seemed to be and that they found ways to improve and resolve that issue.

“It was during last term, as were teaching it we saw students struggling here and as teachers we fix it so they’re not,” Fletcher said. “We realized even last semester as we were teaching it that we needed to change it, and now that we have we’re seeing how students are responding to it and how we can further improve on it.”

According to Schmatjen, the whole site IM department agreed to include proofs with slight variations from the original proofs taught in lesson plans for the fall term.

“I assumed all the teachers were doing proofs in their class, so again our department has been coming up with what we think is a good order of the material and another teacher might think,” Schmatjen. “I’m going to hold off on that proof until we teach this section because this leads into it. As far as the proofs go my hopes were that it would show up in all of the IM2 classes because that’s something we discussed and agreed on that it should be one of the things that we cover and is in our curriculum.”

The district is now allowing the schools and individual departments to make their curriculum more personalized and accessible for modification if the teacher feels that is necessary.

“Other schools are also doing that same thing, but where last term we met as an entire district and all the schools met and said, ‘Okay this is what we’re doing this is our curriculum,’” Schmatjen said. “We had the same test we had everything the same, and now that we have a base the schools get to be kind of be like ‘Okay now let’s hone it in for our teachers.’”

According to Fletcher, the IM2 department allowed students to make up their grade during the second quarter of the fall term if they had failed the first quarter by completing a program and taking a modified midterm.

“Last term we wanted to give the students who were struggling a way to make up that grade during that term,” Fletcher said. “But quarter one if they didn’t pass it we put together a program through Matheia and put together different modules. We said that if they can go through that material and show that you have learned it we would give them a different midterm and if they passed that midterm then they passed that quarter.”

Sophomore Anthony Acosta felt the teachers experience in teaching Common Core-based math was underdeveloped caused students to struggle with understanding the curriculum.

“It was very confusing and it was just installed and we were like the guinea pigs and the teachers didn’t fully know how to teach it or how they should approach it,”Acosta said. “They were just winging it. It was confusing for all of us but we pulled through.”

Sophomore Tyrel Martin said that it was agitating to have to be the “guinea pigs” of the IM2 curriculum and regrets that it lowered his GPA.

“I was very upset by it, it kind of screwed up my grades,” Martin said. “I’d be very irritated if I had failed and had to retake it.”