Parish math teachers refine skills at Nicholls

Four St. Mary Parish teachers connected marshmallows with toothpicks, working through a geometry problem, while 21 others worked on computers to create activities students across the district will participate in during the coming school year.
The math teachers are becoming the students for two and half weeks this summer as they attend Nicholls State University to learn to better communicate their knowledge. The program is the beginning of Project NUMBER, Naturally Understanding Mathematics By Exploring and Reasoning, an 11.5 month mathematics professional development project designed to create a group of math teachers who have a conceptual understanding of mathematics and are able to communicate mathematics effectively.
DesLey Plaisance, project coordinator and Nicholls professor, said instructors are modeling the way to teach the activities by doing it themselves and helping to increase the teachers’ conceptual knowledge of the subject, explaining the “whys and hows.”
Della Bellard, a third-grade teacher at J.A. Hernandez in Franklin, said the program is professional development that gives her “resources and skills to help our children be successful with Common Core. It teaches us how to add rigor to our activities,” she said.
Gayle Adams, a third-grade teacher at Berwick Elementary, agreed, adding that the course gives teachers different strategies with which to teach children.
Tammy Verrett, also a third-grade teacher at Berwick, elaborated.
“We’re trying to come up with some different activities that coordinate to the standards. Each grade level is coming back with some different activities (to be used in the classroom) that we’re going to post for the whole district to share,” Verrett said.
Sedonia Lousteau, a fourth-grade teacher at J.B. Maitland Elementary, said another advantage to the program is networking.
“We’re able to talk with other teachers from across the parish,” she said.
Plaisance said she has gathered information from the district over the past few years to determine the school system’s weaknesses in math.
“We started out by looking at what schools would need the most help. We targeted those for improvement and over the last three to four years we recruit from those schools again and as teachers moved to other schools, we picked up other schools,” Plaisance said.
Participating this year are 25 teachers of grades three through eight who come from 10 public schools and V.B. Glencoe Charter School, all in St. Mary Parish. Plaisance said the teachers range from having no experience to 30 years in a classroom.
“Teaching is dynamic. It always changes … the students of today are not the students of 20 years ago,” Plaisance said.
The project is paid for with Louisiana Systemic Initiatives Program funds, according to Plaisance. The state program’s signature effort has been statewide university-based science, technology, engineering and mathematics professional development for K-12 teachers. At Nicholls, it is a collaboration between the Department of Math and the College of Education.
The money is awarded to programs serving districts with 60 percent or greater of the student population eligible for free or reduced lunch. St. Mary had 70.58 percent of its students on free or reduced lunch during the 2013-14 school year, according to Superintendent Donald Aguillard.
The project costs $165,000 and is paid for with state funds. There is no cost to the St. Mary Parish school system other than reimbursing the fees teacher incur in conjunction with the three graduate credit hours they earn and a $25 per day stipend paid, Plaisance said.
While the project gives teachers a host of activities to perform with their students that meet the criteria of Common Core State Standards, it is more about modeling pedagogy and math understanding, Plaisance said.
“The ultimate measure is how are they improving on high-stakes testing? That’s a difficult thing to measure these days because nobody really knows what high-stakes testing we’re going to use,” Plaisance said, adding “if you step back five years before Common Core State Standards and you step now, there’d be a lot of similarities because it’s all about understanding the mathematics and teaching it from an understanding point of view as opposed to a series of steps.”