Going into September there were no illusions about how difficult it would be to introduce teachers to a new set of materials, familiarize them with the assessment tasks, learn how to use the Exemplars rubric, and, in the case of New York City teachers, begin to create additional performance tasks for their students to meet the DOE requirements. Our idea was to create a team to share the work: the three ISA math coaches, two staff members from NCREST and five New York City math teachers who regularly practiced inquiry in their classrooms. In a "train-the-trainers" model of professional development, our team worked with Aldo Bianchi from Exemplars in July to identify which performance task to administer to students first ("Tina's Quilt Squares") and how to introduce it to teachers. During one session in late August and another in mid-September, the team introduced Exemplars to the 46 New York City math teachers. The responses were overwhelmingly positive; teachers liked "Tina's Quilt Squares," the resource CD and the focus on problem solving. In early October we brought Aldo back to run a scoring conference where the teachers closely examined the Exemplars rubric and then applied it to samples of student work from "Tina's Quilt Squares" in advance of scoring their own students' work.
The response from teachers was again very positive; teachers enjoyed looking at students' problem-solving skills and discussing the sample papers with one another. It was a good start, but we are still pursuing a deeper goal - to support teachers' practice of inquiry-based instruction. This means, in part, working with teachers to learn about what makes a good performance task, how to revise performance tasks and how to create their own. To plan for this work, we brought Aldo to New York City again in late October to work with our team and with three teachers. These three teachers were our "focus group" as we experimented with different approaches to support creating tasks. After an intensive four-hour session, the two 9th-grade teachers collaborated to draft a task dealing with inequalities. The 10th-grade teacher, after taking time to identify what is most important for students to learn about triangles, drafted a task that asked to students to design various roofs for doghouses, and in doing so, generalize rules about the relationship between sides and angles. By the end, our 10th-grade teacher remarked, "This is good. Why haven't I been doing this all along?
At the start of November, we brought together all the New York City 9th-grade teachers in preparation for their second assessment administration. Over the course of six hours, the teachers worked in small groups clustered around the same topics in algebra. Some identified problems from the Exemplars "Best of Secondary" resource CD and then revised the tasks to fit into their upcoming curriculum; others started from scratch and created tasks that employed the key concepts they want students to learn. Our ISA/NCREST team circulated to facilitate groups, make suggestions and ask questions to prompt further discussion.
It was a long day, one that we will repeat in late November with 10th-grade teachers, but it was well worth the effort. Teachers were discussing not only content and skills but algebraic concepts and problem-solving strategies that are key components of inquiry instruction in math. Our New York City teachers took another step along the path of preparing students for college, and now we're working to take that step with teachers in Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Buffalo and other school systems partnering with ISA.
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