BY JOHNNY MULLIGAN
[email protected]
After Integrated Math classes yielding low passing rates the past year and half, IM teachers Levi Fletcher and Lisa Vaccaro created a math intervention class which started the spring of this year. There are currently two sections of this class.
The class allows students to recover their credits from a failed IM1 class under the ideal of “reinforcing” the subjects rather than “reteaching.” The class follows a more hands-off approach from the teachers, because the class is largely based online through Blackboard.
“Rather than it being synchronous, it’s asynchronous, so one student might be working on chapter one and the other might be working on chapter two because the first might be struggling with chapter one,” Fletcher said. “We wanted to tailor the learning to each individual student.”
According to assistant principal Matt Pipitone, students who have struggled with the normal IM1 classes can often have problems even when they retake IM1, and the new class gives students a different way to advance through the material.
“Students who do not pass the first time tend to not pass the second time,” Pipitone said
Students can continue through the units at a different pace compared to the usual IM classes. At the start of each unit, students take a pretest. If they score 70 percent or better, they skip the unit.
“The students are all in here having been through the material. It’s not that they failed every chapter,” Fletcher said. “It might be that they were really good at chapters one, two, three but chapters four, five did not work. So we want to get them through one, two, three so they can focus on where they struggled.”
According to Fletcher, students can have various reasons for enrolling in the class.
“[Students] may have struggled and were not successful for different reasons, maybe they were sick, maybe they never really understood how to add and subtract integers so we really wanted to give each student the opportunity to learn,” Fletcher said.
According to Fletcher, the class creates a better environment for students who only struggled with certain topics or missed units due to absence. Rather than redo each unit at the pace of the IM classes, the units are streamlined.
To get into the class, IM teachers Fletcher and Vaccaro looked through transcripts and found students who had already taken IM1 and were re-enrolled in IM1. They then interviewed these students to see if they were interested in the new class.
Sophomore Sara Strauss is one of the students who decided to try the new class.
“They told me that it was gonna be full of other kids who had already taken the class so it helped me feel more welcome to be able to not feel discouraged by other people who had never taken it and are passing it,” Strauss said. “It’s a better environment with other people who had already taken it.”
Students who do not pass the pretest for the unit go through a series of exercises, lessons and quizzes. The unit test is only available after students have worked through all lessons and got 100 percent on all the quizzes. If they do not get a 70 percent or above on the chapter test the teachers step in and give more specific help on the parts that the student struggled with rather than retake the whole chapter again.
“We want to see where their specific struggles were,” Fletcher said.
According to Strauss, the class has a more relaxed attitude and it is more difficult to get behind than in the normal IM1 class.
“You get a chapter and are expected to finish in a week, if you do not finish it, it goes missing but as soon as you finish it it will catch your grade up.” Strauss said. “You can retake a test and not have to worry about it impacting your grade too much.”
Pipitone finds that there is a trend of students who struggled in IM1 also struggling in IM2. If a student completes the IM1 units faster than a single term, their teacher can give them IM2 material before they start that class, to give them a head-start.
“They can start working on IM2 materials cause if they struggled with IM1 the first time they probably will struggle with IM2, we can pre-teach that so they’re more prepared,” Fletcher said.
Sophomore math intervention student Danny Garcia enjoys the different style of class.
“I like it because you get to go at your own pace and you won’t be pressured by the teachers too much,” Garcia said.
Currently there is no IM2 intervention style class, but according to math department coordinator Michelle Walton, there are IM2 and IM3 intervention classes in the works. Walton expects IM2 math intervention to be available next year and IM3 the year after.
The math department has also considered making math intervention one class that can have all levels of IM in them.
According to Walton, IM3 does not need an intervention class because there are no students who are failing in this term’s section. The students in IM3 had to double up on math at some point in order to schedule IM3. Walton teaches the sole, second period IM3 section available right now and heading into last week’s midterms, all IM3 students were passing.
“[For] the kids that are in there now, [completing] up to IM2 is a requirement, but the kids that are in IM3 are like ‘I want to get done with math’ or move on to higher levels of math,” IM3 student Bhawna Sharma said. “Everyone in that class is trying.”
Sharma believes that IM3’s Chromebook-heavy instruction style can help students, depending on their preferred way of learning.
“It depends on the teacher, so if that is your style of learning and you need a different way, that would help.” Sharma said.
Any IM2 students who have failed can either retake the class at RHS or take it at Independence High School, while students who failed IM1 have the option to retake the class, enroll in the IM1 intervention class, or take the IHS course.
According to IHS principal Debbie Latteri, the approach of the IHS classes is also alternative to what students find in a typical classroom.
“There’s a variety of methods online,” Latteri said. “We have videos and lectures and teacher voice-overs and a whole bunch of varieties.”
Many students have been going to IHS to remediate their grades for the IM1 classes they failed after their first attempts.
“The first year of IM1 we had a spike in failure relative to the last year of Algebra, in the second year of IM1 we were starting to see the rates of IM1 seem to be approximating that of Algebra.” Roseville High School principal David Byrd said. “It is going to be interesting to see if IM2 settles into a pattern in its passing rates.”
According to Byrd, the school needs to try to prevent these trends and have programs in place after failures happen.
“But with all that being said we gotta have a plan for and continue asking, ‘What we are gonna do to prevent failure and deal with it after it occurs?’” Byrd said.
