A question-and-answer session about Gillingham Charter School's approach to teaching mathematics was held for parents Tuesday night at the school in Pottsville.
The session was meant for parents, according Nicolle M. Hutchinson, director of education and CEO at Gillingham, and was not open to the public.
Dan Kurtz and Richard Clancy, education consultants from Synergy Education Consultants, Holland, Northampton Township, Bucks County, hosted the program. Both were visiting and working at the school during the day Tuesday, although Clancy was not available for an interview.
While Gillingham isn't teaching a new type of math, it's actually a reformed mathematics platform, Kurtz said. He and Clancy held the session because parents had questions and wanted to see and get a feel for what the subject is like for their children.
"It's actually not that new and a lot of the research dates back to the early '90s," Kurtz said. "It's been used pretty effectively in selected areas like in Philadelphia and it's called Interactive Mathematics Program, or IMP."
Rather than a traditional high school math program in which students take algebra I, geometry, algebra II and so on, as discrete courses, IMP integrates the courses in "a spiraling way," Kurtz said.
"You're going to touch on algebra and geometry and trigonometry and algebra II constantly throughout the year, each year," he said. "Rather than having content courses, you have year one, year two, year three and year four."
Kurtz said IMP has been proven to be more effective, more aligned to the common core standards and more real-world application-based.
"There's been data to show that not only do math scores go up, but literacy scores go up as well because there's much more of a focus on reading and problem solving within the mathematics," Kurtz said. "That aligns to our philosophy here in terms of meeting students where they are. The elements of the Gillingham program that make it a unique and model school, the relational education, are well aligned to a math program."
According to newspaper archives, relational education, the teaching method that Gillingham uses, is based on principles developed by Charlotte M. Mason, a British educator who lived from 1842 to 1923.
The Charlotte Mason method of teaching, promoted by the nonprofit organization Childlight USA, is centered around the idea that education is an atmosphere, a discipline and a life. Mason stressed using prose books containing full stories, or "whole books," to teach children rather than using textbooks.
While IMP is used with grades nine through 12, it is aligned with other programs for elementary and middle school-aged students, called RightStart Mathematics and Connected Mathematics, respectively.
"Those math programs, what they ultimately end up doing, is spiraling students through content in a connected way, real-world scenarios without discrete or arbitrary divisions," Kurtz said. "Instead of the traditional divisions between, this is multiplication and that's what we do, then we move on to the next skill, skills are overlaid. Frequently what will happen is students will be exposed to a skill like measurement at each level with increasing rigor."
Some of the questions Kurtz expected to hear from parents concerned students in multiple grades doing the same thing since it "doesn't make sense to people who have had a traditional mathematical program."
He said the point of the session is to show parents how students are spiraling through it and how they make broader connections.
According to Republican-Herald archives, ninth-grade math at Gillingham consists of a mixture of probability and statistics, algebra, geometry and calculus. Primarily student-led, most lessons integrated realistic or historic situations - for instance, calculating the percentage of people who died on a wagon train while moving out west.
Clancy, who helped pilot the implementation of the IMP program in Philadelphia, gave an IMP lesson to parents Tuesday night at an eighth- and ninth-grade level. Much of the program research is based on his actual teaching.
After giving the lesson, Clancy showed the connections or elements learned at lower and higher grade levels.
"Important in all of it, the curriculum we deliver has to be aligned to the specialized vision and mission of Gillingham," Kurtz said. "There's no proprietary off-the-shelf curriculum or program that we can grab and say to the teachers, 'here, teach this.'
"From the beginning of this year, all the teachers have been engaged in the process of writing curriculum guides and curriculum maps to make sure that we're aligned to the common core and the external requirements of the state, so that we are also delivering it with our vision, our mission, our instructional model and our particular curriculum that we use, the Childlight USA."
At the Gillingham Board of Trustees meeting Thursday night, two parents, Susan Whitesell, Schuylkill Haven, and Molly Fry, Pottsville, said that the school's approach to math is helping their children.
Whitesell, who has a daughter in first grade and a son in sixth grade, said that her son went to school in Schuylkill Haven up until October of last year and had always struggled with math, but once he came to the charter school, he excelled in math and everything else.
"He still has a difficult time with certain things in math, but not to the same point," Whitesell said. "He understands everything."
She said he now understands the concepts and can explain it, where before he would do a problem but had no idea how he got his answer.
"I'm more than happy with the math," she said. "I'm very impressed with it."
Whitesell also said that her daughter is able to do addition in her head, while her son has always had to do it on paper.
Fry, who has two children in the school, a daughter in first and a daughter in fourth grade, said that her older daughter attended cyber school previously.
While Fry said her older daughter did well in math before, she also said that the concepts work better at Gillingham.
"She did great, but for her to explain it to someone else, she wasn't able to do," Fry said. "Now what she learns, she can turn around and tell her younger sister or she can tell me and explain what she got."
A second part of the program Tuesday night detailed how the math programs prepare students for standardized testing assessments, including the state-required Pennsylvania System of School Assessment and Keystone Exams, and higher education testing like the SAT and ACT.
During the interview Tuesday, Kurtz said he and Clancy would discuss which college qualifying test presents the best opportunity for the students to be successful.
"A lot of the rational why they currently take the SATs is a geographical, historical preference on the East and West coasts versus the entire center of the country which takes the ACTs," he said. "They're equally accepted by colleges."
Synergy did an analysis of local data, and local districts were shown to have scored better on the ACTs as compared to state and national averages than on the SATs.
According to www.actstudent.org, a student site for ACT test takers, the ACT is an achievement test that measures what a student has learned in school. The SAT is more of an aptitude test, testing reasoning and verbal abilities, according to the site.
"We want to make sure ultimately that our students are prepared, that our students that are better SAT takers take that one, and our students that are better ACT takers take that test, but that parents have an understanding about how to go about figuring that out," Kurtz said.