April 2006

Supporting Remedial Math Students with Math ClassTools

West Seattle High School, Susan Derse, Principal, Reid Earnhardt, Teacher

"To break through the barriers of race and socioeconomic status in terms of student achievement, schools have to do two things: increase the pedagogy students receive in the classroom and increase access to learning," Susan Derse*, principal at West Seattle High School, believes. "The DLC, which allows students to access Math ClassTools and other resources 24/7, helps answer the second part of those two strategies."

One way that West Seattle High School (WSHS) is increasing access to learning is with Math ClassTools, a DLC Teaching Resource. Reid Earnhardt, a math teacher at the school, is currently teaching Computer Math Class.

Computer Math Class is an extended remedial math class that runs two semesters instead of one. Students were assigned to the class due to their seventh-grade WASL scores. Class periods at WSHS run 85 minutes long; Earnhardt's class spends about half that time in the classroom and the other half in the math lab, using Math ClassTools.

Instant assessments benefit students and teachers

For each class, Earnhardt prints out a Math ClassTools workbook sheet and has his students work on it while they make their way through the day's lesson online in the math lab. At the end of the lesson, they take an online quiz.

"I like the quiz because it gives instant feedback to the students, so they know whether or not they're doing things right. It also provides me with a really quick way to look at the entire class set of data on one computer screen…I can do a quick assessment based on their scores: Do I need to go back and reteach something, or can I move on, or is it time to take the test? That saves me a lot of time."

Earnhardt uses this time to walk around the math lab, providing some one-on-one and supervising students.

Earnhardt says that Math ClassTools makes a difference because he is "able to give every student some direct instruction, which is usually hard to do with a big class, especially classrooms like this where students have so much energy and don't necessarily want to sit down and listen or take notes."

He adds: "Math ClassTools is a great tool to use to reinforce, to reteach, or to remediate a class that's having trouble with a subject…It provides a lot of the extra help that struggling low-end students need."

Working with students beyond the traditional classroom

Principal Derse and some teachers have designed a new class called Math Lab that they'll offer next year, which will be a credit-retrieval course. Teachers will identify the parts of the curriculum each student needs to focus on to retrieve credit, and then students will work at their own pace, using Math ClassTools.

"When I arrived at the school in the summer of '04, there was not one after-school program at this school, there was not one online course, and there were no credit retrieval classes, period," Derse explains. "I think the DLC really did a lot for us in terms of starting to create a culture in which we feel committed to students beyond the traditional classroom."

* Susan Derse is now the principal at the Center School, in Seattle, WA.

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