The Rainy River District School Board is receiving additional funding for math facilitators from the Ministry of Education, to help improve student EQAO scores.
The EQAO – the Education Quality and Accountability Office – issues a series of standardized tests annually to Ontario students in grades 3,6 and 9, as well as the Ontario Literacy Test.
According to Brad Oster, Superintendent of Education Math Lead for the RRDSB, the funding is determined by the Ministry, based on the 2022-2023 EQAO scores. That has resulted in a mix of priority and non-priority schools across the Board, he stated in the October 1 public board of trustee meeting.
Of the 13 schools within the RRDBS, all schools except Sturgeon Creek, Donald Young, Fort Frances High School, and Northern Lakes High School are slated for a new math facilitator.
Moreover, the Ministry of Education has supplied the RRDSB with “high-impact instructional practices” to help students improve their attitude toward math.
“So, the Ministry of Education determined the priority schools for the Rainy River District School
Board based on the 2022-2023 EQAO data,” says Oster. “What they determined is whether or not to designate funding — teacher support funding — to provide supports for grade three, grade six, and grade nine mathematics.”
“The priority schools that had lower achievement in grades three, six, and nine, they would receive this extra funding to hire teachers to support those classrooms.”
According to Oster, there was no deliberation with the Ministry of Education in deciding which schools would receive funding and which would not.
“The ministry gives you the priority schools,” says Oster, “They determined which schools they were, and then it’s been our job here to hire people into those positions.”
Since hiring people into those positions, Oster and the rest of the school math facilitators have been working to implement “high-impact instructional practices.”
According to Oster, these practices include “learning goals, success criteria and descriptive feedback,” adding, “those are all kind of lumped into one.”
“Those learning goals are making sure that students understand what they’re about to do, really making sure they are clear on the direction that they’re about to embark on with the teacher.”
Oster says success criteria is about “putting those [criteria] up on a board or a piece of chart paper that are explicitly showing and telling kids this is what you need to do to be successful over the next, you know, weeks, two weeks, months, however long that learning will be taking place for.”
“The descriptive feedback piece is not just giving a mark back to students. Not just saying, this is a level one, two, three or four, but this is what you need to do to improve the next time,” says Oster.
“Descriptive feedback is in words, it’s in conversations with students,” says Oster, It’s not … a mark out of 20 or a mark out of ten, because kids, they look at that.”
“If you get a 10 out of 10, you know, students will be like, ‘Ah, good. I got 10 out of 10.’ If they were to get seven out of 10, they’d be like, ‘Yeah, okay. I got seven out of 10.’ As soon as you get into that level one and two range, which is not provincial standard, kids right away will adjust their social-emotional learning or their feelings. They become almost – not defeated – but they feel down on that. So, we have to build that up by giving feedback, not just marks all the time.”
The second high impact practice is direct instruction, where the teacher is leading, said Oster,
“I would say that’s a more traditional model, which has to be done at times, but not all the time because we don’t just want kids sitting and getting. We want students engaged with conversations … working with manipulatives and all those things that make math feel fun.”
The third is problem-solving tasks and experiences, he said.
“It’s really supporting kids to realize that math is, it’s all about problems and solving problems, and it might be through budgeting, right? And figuring out, okay, I have this much money this month, and I have this payment, and I have this payment. So really, to problem solve, do I have enough money to … to do what I want to do?”
Oster says the most common question from students is, “’Why do we have to do this?”’
“It’s making it relevant to them so they understand, ‘This is why.’ Because if you’re working in a trade, someday you’re building a home, you need to know the cost of things and figure out the cost to put up the walls of a home, or if you’re putting flooring down,” says Oster. “It’s about really making them understand the why.”
Oster says the fourth “high-impact instructional practice” is tools and representations.
“There’s these tools that are at the disposal of teachers, but, making sure teachers understand how to use those tools because there’s lots of them,” says Oster. “There’s all these different tools that I never utilized because I was never taught them when I was a kid. So, now we’ve learned these new tools and strategies.”
“We really believe that students, social-emotional learning skills can be improved,” says Oster. “That’s where you’re building kids up and making them think and not saying, ‘You’re wrong.’ Or, ‘Nice try.’ It’s really taking what they’re thinking about and really putting that thinking up in front of them, and then saying to the kids, okay, we have a variety of different responses here or answers to the question that I asked.”
“It’s always fascinating to watch kids who gave the wrong answer, who then put up their hand and say, ‘I want to change my answer! I want to change my answer!’” he said.
“It’s not right or wrong. It’s helping them to talk with the students in their class, to learn their strategies, and then the teacher facilitates that,” says Oster, “I like to think of a teacher, as a facilitator, not just a teacher who’s, you know, regurgitating information.”
Oster says this is because the school board wants students to build a connection with math.
“If you just sit and get, we’re not going to build that social-emotional learning and that improved attitude towards math.”
According to Oster, the EQAO and internal board data has shown a downward trend of students enjoying math, as they advance through the grades.
“Earlier in primary, you see more kids in grades one, two and three saying they like math and they enjoy math. When it gets to grades four, five and six, that number drops,” he said. “And then you get to grade nine and it drops off significantly. This is across the province where this is happening. So that’s something that we need to work on, the social-emotional learning.”
To help remedy this, the board is enlisting the help of a specialist in brain science learning.
“Regurgitation and memorization and mathematics, we know is not a good practice,” said Oster, “We need kids to be able to problem solve.”
To help facilitate this, Oster says the school board district has made the district “resource-rich” in math learning tools. The board has purchased a Nelson math resource for the junior and intermediate divisions and a Pearson mathology resource for the primary division.
A STEM co-ordinator has also been enlisted to go from school to school, working side by side with teachers, to plan and implement the resources, and assisting the math facilitators.
Oster says the next high-impact instructional practice is “small-group instruction,” also called, “one-to-one intervention.”
“That is when you’re looking at those individual students in your class who, you may not be getting a concept, and it’s doing that extra work with them in that smaller group,” he said.
He says the penultimate high-impact instructional practice is “flexible grouping.”
“Any student in a class might have a way of explaining a concept better than a teacher,” he said. “They can articulate something in math or in another subject area, where they explain it to their classmate, and the classmate goes, ‘Oh, that makes sense,’ and teachers have to utilize those brains that are in those classes with them.”
The last element is deliberate practice. Simply put, “It’s giving them that opportunity to practice and show you, as an educator, that they know what they’re doing,” said Oster, adding that parent-teacher communication is critical.
“I think it’s really important to mention schools and school boards value parent input. I think that that’s so important,” he said. “I think school boards, including us, we are attempting and trying to be better communicators with our families.”
