Building Foundational Knowledge
UNITS
For Administrators & Teachers
2-4 Hours Each Unit, 10-20 Hours Total
Unit Goals
Unit 1: Why Are We Here? The Case for Improving Math Outcomes for All Students
Goals - At the conclusion of this unit, participants will be able to:
Analyze data around how students are performing in the area of math across the state and within their county.
Articulate the learner variability that exists across all students, examine areas of disproportionality when considering students with disabilities, and explore characteristics for each area of disability related to special education.
Understand that each student needs to be considered as an individual, use profiles of student’s background, interests, strengths, and challenges to more fully understand the variability that exists across all students and recognize that a disability label does not define a student.
Identify Executive Functions (those complex cognitive processes that support ongoing and goal directed behavior) as an area of learner variability and understand how these skills impact how students plan, organize, strategize, pay attention, remember, and manage within time and space in a math learning environment.
Unit 2: Evaluating Practices for Providing Access to All Students to Core Instruction and Rigorous Standards
Goals - At the conclusion of this unit, participants will be able to:
Use data to analyze problems through the lens of Improvement Science. Participants will receive guided practice to:
Review local data and implement protocols to look at the data through a “ladder of inference”, develop a “problem of practice” statement, and develop an aim for improving practice.
Based on a “problem of practice”, implement protocols to determine root causes for the problem.
Delve deeper into the root cause of a problem by using protocols to determine what may potentially be driving the problem and begin to use that information to brainstorm change ideas.
Describe the elements of an MTSS system currently in place at the site, and implement a protocol for looking at a process within their system for providing supports to individual students.
Examine which service delivery options they are utilizing and evaluate their effectiveness in promoting high quality, equitable, and accessible core instruction that map toward college, career and civic life preparedness.
Unit 3: Universal Design for Learning, Mathematical Mindset, and Shifts in Practice
Goals - At the conclusion of this unit, participants will be able to:
Explore current opinions and beliefs about math, relate these to a “productive” math mindset, and understand how our beliefs affect the types of learning opportunities we provide students.
Apply the principles of UDL to a math learning environment:
Understand the relationship between three basic learning networks established in neuroscience research, and how we structure learning to effectively engage each network in a UDL model.
Relate these with specific UDL guidelines that enable students to effectively activate each network.
Apply this to math talk activities, observing barriers that individual students may experience in these math activities.
Explore what the UDL definition of “expert learning” is and how that relates to students’ agency, ownership and identify with mathematics; observe for evidence of these characteristics in videos of math lessons and apply to the belief that the types of learning opportunities we provide students supports the development of expert learners.
Unit 4: Strategies that Support Inclusive Math Learning
Goals - At the conclusion of this unit, participants will be able to:
Identify barriers in the learning environment specific to individual students’ needs.
Using the information we have about a variety of individual learners (case profiles), identify strengths and interests that can be leveraged as well as potential barriers those students may have in accessing instruction.
Given a recent math lesson plan, and considering a current student or case profile, use CAST’s “Designing to Remove Barriers” tool to identify potential barriers, identify an applicable UDL guideline to address the barrier, and use the checkpoints to identify options or strategies to incorporate into the lesson.
Be able to identify elements of high-quality tasks and use a variety of resources to support changing tasks or activities to be higher quality.
Unit 5: Administrative Leadership in Supporting Effective Change (Admin only)
Goals - At the conclusion of this unit, participants will be able to:
Identify what mindsets or mental models need to shift in order for us to address the root causes of why our students have challenges with math achievement.
Use a variety of tools to observe instruction for evidence of universally designed learning environments and reflect on a continuum of coaching stances (direct...facilitate...inquire) to implement with teachers.
Evaluate collaborative practices at their site, and use this inventory to prioritize next steps around improving collaborative and inclusive practices by addressing a) instructional setting for special education students; or b) building a site-wide system of support.
Use a variety of tools to evaluate how students currently access tier 2 or tier 3 supports to identify potential gaps or problem areas that need addressing.