The Math and Science Department makes every effort to ensure that it’s professional development is aligned and integrated into school site staff development activities. It is designed around three components:
- Workshops or Institutes for math and science content and instructional strategies
- Follow-up sessions for lesson development, team teaching, and coaching
- Facilitated, collaborative sessions for planning, feedback and data analysis.
Math or Science professional development can be originated by:
- Requests from school sites for inservice on specific content or instructional strategies
- School site or individual teacher’s participation in math/science grants
- District mandated inservice
Academic Language
District data indicates that the primary reason for low performance on the State CST test is the inability of students to access the test due to a low accumulation of academic language and low concept understanding in core subjects. Therefore, all science inservices will have an integrated SDAIE/ English Language Development component
Short Term Workshops
| Delivered by: | Math/Science Teacher Specialists, Site Math/Science Facilitators or Math/Science Leadership Cadre |
| Grades: | Math - K through Algebra; Science - K-8 |
| Design: | Designed to meet specific content, instructional strategies, or teacher resource needs. Generally originated by Site requests, District policy or Math/Science Leadership groups |
| Current workshops: | "Textbook Components and Use" New schedule will be posted in Spring 2008 |
CaMSP - California Math Science Partnership (CaMSP) 2007/2008
CaMSP functions as a primary training program for Math, Science teacher leaders in MUSD. It’s membership includes all school levels and it’s main objective is to build a capacity within MUSD to provide our own cost effective math, science training program. Members of other Math/Science leadership groups are encouraged to participate in CaMSP.
The grant provides extensive science and math inservice to teachers in Grades four through eight. In math, ninth grade teachers of Algebra are also included. Additional teachers or other levels that participate are funded through Title II.
CaMSP inservices includes a (5) day summer institute that focuses on: Understanding Concepts and Content; Best instructional practices; Lesson design and Assessment This is followed by (2) days of participation in a Teaching Learning Collaborative in which teachers, as a team and with support from university faculty members, design and teach lessons with peer and coach observation. The objective is to design lessons that include the best practices and embedded assessment leading to increased levels of student performance.
Teaching Learning Collaboratives (TLC)
| The TLC is a classroom-based support project in which teams of teachers work together on effective science lesson design. The process benefits both experienced and new teachers by focusing on the core content of teaching and learning. Unlike coaching, the TLC is not one-on-one and does not focus on the teacher. Instead, the focus is on lesson design and its effectiveness at getting at student understanding. Facilitated by TLC staff, four-person teams conceptualize the student goals of a given lesson, one that usually ties in with the regular curriculum. The team then goes into the classroom and implements the lesson, with each member teaching part of it, while others act as observers. Following the session, they evaluate its effectiveness by looking at student work and then redesign the lesson to improve student understanding. The redesigned lesson is immediately taught to a new classroom, evidence of student learning is analyzed, and the team reflects on the lesson’s effectiveness. Over the school year, participants engage in several of these sessions, in addition to an intense summer academy. The process — design, teach, debrief, redesign, and reteach — is sometimes referred to as “polishing the stone” because it is a continuous process of honing and improvement. |
| Partners: | K-12 Alliance; CSULB | ||||||||||
| Focus: | Math/Science Content and Inquiry Strategies; English Language Development and SDAIE Strategies | ||||||||||
| Grades: | 5-8 | ||||||||||
| #Teachers: | 50 | ||||||||||
| Design: |
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California Post Secondary Education Commission (CPEC); Renamed: Academic Language Through Inquiry Science (ALTIS)
| Partners: | K-12 Alliance; CSULB | ||||||||||
| Focus: | Science and English Language Development/SDAIE | ||||||||||
| Grades: | K-2, at selected schools | ||||||||||
| # Teachers: | 44 | ||||||||||
| Description: |
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Teacher Recruitment and Retention Grant (TRRP)
| Grades: | K-8 Math and Science; K-12 Teacher Retention |
| Design: | Supports K-8 science, math and English Language Development by extending efforts of other professional development grants and programs in producing quality teachers. |
Algebra I Extended Format (EF)
Algebra I (Extended format) is one component of a Grade 5 through Algebra I effort to prepare students to pass Algebra I and CAHSEE.
The high school component is specifically designed to extend instructional time in Algebra I for intervention instruction in pre-Algebra skills, prior to instruction of basic algebra concepts. This component is based on:
| a. | a recycling of pre-algebra skills through-out the course. | ||||||||
| b. | an agreed upon mastery level by the class prior to moving to the next concept. | ||||||||
| c. | teacher collaboration for instruction | ||||||||
| d. | flexibility and support to address the non-academic issues surrounding student failure | ||||||||
| e. | an agreement that failure rates and credit deficiencies can be lowered dramatically through a combined effort to:
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