Graham Letter to Parents

Dear par­ents:

We have fin­ished half of the year in our Teach to One math pro­gram pilot and col­lect­ed feed­back from teach­ers, par­ents and stu­dents. In review­ing sur­vey respons­es, let­ters, emails, and infor­ma­tion pro­vid­ed by teach­ers, there are both pos­i­tives and con­cerns across all groups and schools.

What we learned is that stu­dents have ben­e­fit­ted from Teach to One’s indi­vid­u­al­ized learn­ing and inno­va­tion. Teach­ers have access to dai­ly data about their stu­dents’ progress and appre­ci­ate TTO’s abil­i­ty to dif­fer­en­ti­ate math instruc­tion for all stu­dents. Addi­tion­al­ly, our teach­ers and stu­dents stat­ed that they find val­ue in the math advi­so­ry, teacher-led instruc­tion, vir­tu­al instruc­tion and rein­force­ment, and task por­tions of TTO.

We have also heard the desire for a bet­ter bal­ance between teacher-led instruc­tion and Teach to One to pro­vide stu­dents a deep­er under­stand­ing of math­e­mat­i­cal con­cepts.  More­over, there are some con­cerns that stu­dents need more expo­sure to grade-lev­el and foun­da­tion­al con­cepts before advanc­ing to high­er-lev­el skills.

So what comes next?  As a Dis­trict we oper­ate as a learn­ing orga­ni­za­tion. We have heard from some about aban­don­ing the pro­gram com­plete­ly, and from oth­ers who would like to con­tin­ue to improve the deliv­ery of this inno­v­a­tive pro­gram. Tak­ing all fac­tors into con­sid­er­a­tion, the Dis­trict will make changes to the pro­gram, begin­ning Jan. 9 for the remain­der of the year, to strike a bet­ter bal­ance between tech­nol­o­gy-assist­ed and teacher-led instruc­tion.

Teach to One will be reduced to 50% of class time. The oth­er 50% of time stu­dents will work with a teacher on the lev­el of Eure­ka Math appro­pri­ate for them. Stu­dents are assigned strate­gi­cal­ly for their Eure­ka math instruc­tion based on the results of a vari­ety of assess­ments. This will pre­pare stu­dents to be on tar­get to exit eighth grade hav­ing com­plet­ed Geom­e­try, Alge­bra I or eighth-grade math.

In order to ensure that stu­dents deep­en their knowl­edge before mov­ing to a high­er lev­el, we will pro­vide more tra­di­tion­al instruc­tion time and mod­i­fied TTO pro­gram­ming.

Teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors devel­oped a new sched­ule for their indi­vid­ual sites, and details about the spe­cif­ic sched­ule will be com­mu­ni­cat­ed by each mid­dle school prin­ci­pal on Jan. 3.

This pilot process is an impor­tant one that allows us to iden­ti­fy the strengths and weak­ness­es of Teach to One for all stu­dents, so that we may make changes in a thought­ful, method­i­cal man­ner. Thank you for your sup­port and patience.

Sin­cere­ly,