…in the east: Singapore Math: Ending the Spiral of Non-Mastery

A conversation on Schools that Can with Vinny Dotoli of Harlem Academy (the first school in Manhattan to adopt Singapore Math) reminds teachers that they need a strong math background…

relevant to their instruction, because they “can’t teach [Singapore Math] on autopilot.”

…and the west: Math, Singapore Style

Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School adopted Singapore Math school-wide this past year:

“I was stunned that six and eight weeks into the school year, teachers were at my door telling me how much they loved the program,” Director of Studies Allison Gardenswartz says. “I have never seen a response like that in all the years and programs I’ve brought on.”

Jeff Schrier - The Saginaw News

In the news this month:

Learning math Singapore style

Newtown Friends Quaker School believes that:

The Singapore program is “just a better way to teach,” said Schade. “The depth that you go into with Singapore math provides students the opportunity to solve problems in so many ways.”

Midlothian School adopts Singapore Math

The first school to adopt Singapore Math in the Archdiocese of Chicago likes that:

Singapore Math emphasizes problem-solving and model-drawing, with a focus on an in-depth understanding of the essential math skills recommended by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Saginaw Township elementary schools implement hands-on Singapore math program

Best quote from the article:

“Math is math, this is just a consistent way of presenting it to students,” Braun said.

And an “eek!” quote:

…materials were $220,720 and six days of intensive training was $75,982.**

Goodbye Flashcards, Hello Singapore

Fair Haven K-8 school in New Haven, CT is in their first year using Singapore math and anecdotally, teachers feel that students are better problem-solvers and are learning concepts to mastery. According to district math coordinator Ken Mathews:

There’s no official measure yet of whether students have gotten better at math under the new approach. The quarterly district assessments have changed to adapt to the new curriculum, so year-to-year comparisons don’t make sense.

The district finds that the Singapore approach aligns well to the Common Core:

The shift to Singapore math comes as the New Haven takes part in the Common Core State Standards Initiative, whereby districts and states are aligning assessments and curriculae to a new national standard. Connecticut is one of 45 states that have pledged to do so, with the hopes of being more competitive internationally. New Haven plans to overhaul its math and literacy curriculae by the 2014-15 school year, including the full implementation of Singapore math.

** If any other district has this kind of money to spend, call me! I’m happy to provide professional development for a slightly lower fee.

As Thanksgiving approaches, I am reminded of the great good fortune I have enjoyed over the past twelve months. I wanted to share this news and extend my sincere thanks to everyone who has played a part in making the year so special.

Professionally, 2011 was my most successful year as a Singapore Math Trainer and Consultant.

Just last week, I completed my final training sessions of the Summer of 2011 (that’s  right…summer just ended for me!).  I had two lengthy engagements. One was an eye-opening and highly valuable set of sessions devoted to the Common Core Standards on a grade-by-grade basis. The second, serving as an instructional coach, is ongoing; I get to spend time with teachers and students in their classrooms, observing and modeling Singapore Math lessons.

I can’t believe I get paid to do this – Woohoo!

The Numbers
In the past year, I:

• Hosted trainings and seminars in 15 states plus Mexico and Canada.
• Conducted teacher training/professional development for 14 schools and one district-wide Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES).
• Presented 13 Singapore Math workshops for the Bureau of Education & Research (BER).
• Introduced several thousand people to Singapore Math.

Sadly, I had to turn away invitations from more than a dozen schools seeking on-site Singapore Math training in the busy summer months as my schedule was completely booked for six consecutive weeks.

Among the professional highlights in 2011, I:

• Auditioned a new BER program, “Boost Students’ Math Problem-Solving Skills Using Singapore Model Drawing,” to rave reviews, including a rare perfect score from an audience in St. Louis, Missouri. The new Model Drawing program and my flagship workshop, “How to Use Strategies from Singapore Math to Strengthen your Math Instruction,” will be offered in 21 cities in 2012 beginning in January.
• Completely revised and updated my Singapore Math Sourcebook, a 140-page resource guide that I provide to attendees at all my seminars and trainings.
• Was invited to present a Singapore Math workshop for the Middle School Mathematics Institute in Minnesota (prior speakers include Professor Hung-Hsi Wu ).

Volunteer Projects
In 2011, I was able to devote time to some other projects that I believe are very worthy, including:

• Serving on the Board of Directors at Liberty Common Schools. Go Eagles!
• Hosting a Monday math club for more than 50 third and fourth grade students.
• Advising Poudre High School International Baccalaureate students for their Creativity-Action-Service project. Go Impalas!
• Reviewing books and articles for National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM).
• Volunteering at the NCSM and  NCTM 2011 Annual Meetings in Indianapolis.

Personally, 2011 will be difficult to beat. After years of planning, we spent five weeks in Kenya, where we enjoyed a fabulous safari and spent two-and-a-half weeks with my mother and stepfather in Diani Beach. My family visited a Maasai school and I picked up some elementary math texts. I’ll spare readers other personal news (but trust me, it was amazing). Mzuri sana!

Looking ahead to 2012, I’m excited to:

• Present a session entitled, “Technology  + Singapore Strategies =  Number Sense,” with Lauri Susi of Conceptua Math at the 2012 NCTM Annual Meeting and Exposition in Philadelphia.
• Attend the Twelfth International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME-12) in South Korea in July 2012 (hopefully!).
• Introduce Singapore Math to those attending my BER workshops.
• Continue to work with visionary schools and their administrators and teachers to bring the world’s leading primary math curriculum to eager students and their parents.

If I may be of service at any time, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

Once again, my sincerest thanks to my clients, colleagues and partners for a wonderful year.

As always…Passionate about Singapore Math.

-Cassy

The New York Times SchoolBook recently ran an an article from Peg Tyre, author of “The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve”.   Entitled Five Tips for Identifying a Good School, Tyre identifies five research-based tips for identifying what makes a “good” school.

Here’s her response to the question: What does a good math program look like?:

Math ability builds on math experiences. From the first day of preschool, children should be exposed to numbers and simple math concepts (greater than or less than, bigger or smaller) and algorithms (add and take away).

A good elementary school math program (yes, I’m talking about you, Singapore math) helps children harness their innate sense of number, their mental math, to understand math concepts. Being able to compute quickly and accurately is a must, too.

It seems like everyone is “talking about you, Singapore math”, these days. From the Common Core State Standards to Core Knowledge to schools across the country, Singapore math is all the buzz.

Wondering about schools using the curriculum near you? Check out my Schools in the News page or email me at Cassy (at) singaporemathsource (dot) com.

Reporter Jennifer Smith Richards outlined some of the reasons for Singapore’s math success:

Solving problems — and a deeper understanding of why the answer can be found with a certain method instead of only how — is a key principle of Singapore’s methods. The country’s national math curriculum is slower-paced than many American methods and insists on laying a strong foundation in understanding numbers and place value.

Smith Richards importantly notes that the District,

chose to move away from so-called reform math, which relies more heavily on learning abstract mathematic concepts at the outset, in part because students who didn’t have a strong foundation in number sense weren’t as successful.

Third grade teacher Meagan Erwin nails it: “If you understand how a number is made up, there’s no stopping you.”

In Columbus, Singapore Methods are being introduced in Grades K through 2 this year. Next year, the Singapore Math curriculum will be included in Grades 3 to 5.

Note how Ms. Erwin’s students found many ways to answer the problem on the board: “If Gigi has eight bags with 94 stickers each, how many does she have in all?” And reporter Smith Richards has done an excellent job focusing on the strengths of Singapore Math using a concrete example.

The Bruce Monroe Elementary School in Washington DC struggled to implement Singapore math, but the school remained committed to the program. In a June 6 article in the Washington Post, the school’s instructional coach, Nuhad Jamal, referred to Singapore Math as “a strength of our school.”

Recently released test scores show a 2011 proficiency percentage of 43.04%, up from 23.42% in 2010. But forget percentage points, let’s talk students. In 2010, 40 of 172 students were proficient in mathematics. In 2011 almost 75 of 174 students were proficient.

Every subgroup showed improvement. Math scores for students classified as Limited English Proficient jumped from 24.14% proficient in 2010 to 51.11% in 2011. Or an increase from 17 of 70 students in 2010 to 36 of 70 students in 2011.

While these score still fall below the school’s proficiency target, they are a start. Here’s wishing the Bruce Monroe school continued success! And some stability.

Meanwhile, here in Colorado, I’m flabbergasted that parents and teachers are telling me that Singapore Math is “too hard” for their students.

If you’ve been wondering what the difficulties are when implementing Singapore math, look no further. This school in D.C. has them all; school closures, lack of enough professional development, mobile student and teacher population, and it’s a dual-language school. Standardized test scores dropped significantly after the change to Singapore math.

The story  evoked responses from many in education. Joane Jacobs mused:

The fact that it ( Singapore Math) requires elementary teachers to understand math well has to be a serious obstacle.

In a letter to the editor dated June 14, 2011, Dr. Alan Ginsburg suggested that the problem at Bruce-Monroe may be bigger than just the Singapore math adoption. He pointed out that the school’s reading scores

declined by 15 percentage points in a single year, and Hispanic students’ scores declined by 21 percentage points.

Bill Jackson, in another great Daily Riff article (Going Beyond Singapore Math: Resisting Quick Fixes), ennumerates the complex issues behind plunking a program like Singapore math into the American classroom.

While most educators familiar with Singapore math agree that it is not the oft-quoted “silver bullet”, Jackson reminds us that:

if we keep throwing out promising ideas just because they don’t immediately improve scores on tests whose quality is questionable at best we’re doomed to repeating the haphazard and fragmented reform efforts that got us here in the first place.

He closes with a word to schools that are currently using Singapore math:

I would like to say that you are definitely moving in the right direction. There will be challenges along the way but they are the same ones you would face with any math program and they can be overcome if you understand the bigger issues behind effective math teaching and learning.

Faced with so many challenges, it’s impressive that Bruce Monroe’s  instructional coach, Nuhad Jamal remains upbeat about the school’s Singapore math adoption.

Melrose Elementary School Mathematics/Science/Technology Magnet has seen impressive results with their new Singapore Math program, Primary Mathematics. Math Coach Lacy Endo-Peery announced:

We had a 32% increase in students who were advanced or proficient in Math last year. Our students went from 43% to 75 % in one year!

The school has put together an informative 8 minute video about their experiences with Singapore Math. Its always helpful to hear  teachers sharing the reasons why Singapore math works with their students, the importance of sustained training, and why the school selected Singapore math.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Singapore math materials tend to be light on practice for mastering math facts. To compensate for that, many schools supplement using the activity in the video referred to as a math sprint. These were designed by Professor Yoram Sagher (also in the video) and are used widely in U.S. schools. While sprints are designed to help students become fluent with computation, they are not a part of the Singapore math curriculum. (Sprint books for teachers are available at SingaporeMath.com.)

Reynolds School District in Fairview, Oregon is expecting student achievement to rise with their adoption of the Math in Focus version of  Singapore math materials. Before the adoption, the 12 elementary schools in the district were using different curricula, which was an issue for students that changed schools within the district.In the video, both teachers and students report  how much they like that visual component of the materials.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo credit Monica Lim

There have been several items in various news outlets this past week.

From Boston.com comes the story: Wellesley math teachers learn Singapore techniques from Tenacre specialist

Although the Wellesley district  is not considering adopting a Singapore Math curriculum, they asked a a teacher from another school to demonstrate one of Singapore Math’s well-known strategies, the bar model method of  solving word problems. Jen MacPherson, Wellesley Public Schools’ elementary math coordinator may look at further professional development for the teachers:

Kids struggle with word problems. This is an easy tool to use in any curriculum.

Model drawing is a hot topic! The School Board in Briarcliff agrees. Their budget includes:

Approval for consultants to train kindergarten through sixth grade teachers in the Singapore Math Model Drawing Method.

And in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser is a brief snippet amongst a story about a Hawaiian charter school that began in a chicken coop:  With stable teaching staff and financial aid, Waianae school is model for student success

Principal Alvin Parker cites Singapore Math as helping the school meet turnaround goals:

The school adopted Singapore Math in the fall of 2009, and math proficiency jumped from 27 percent of students to 37 percent over the course of that school year, helping the school make “adequate yearly progress.”

Finally, blogger Monica Lim writes about her life with kids in Singapore and periodically includes interesting math problems as well as issues with the PSLE and education in Singapore. She recently posted a couple of interesting problems and student solutions: Revisiting maths models.

In September 2007, NBC’s Today Show  launched an ambitious 13-year project to follow a school class from kindergarten through their high school graduation. Students in the Today Show’s “Class of 2020″ segment are now in 3rd grade. From an episode that aired on May 2, 2011, we learn that the class of 2020 is learning Singapore Math.

This story does a very nice job of presenting some of the key features of Singapore Math and the ways American teachers are effectively implementing it. Mrs. Kaprelian explains the curriculum’s emphasis on place values, mental math and mental flexibility with math, all leading to a firm grasp of bar modeling. Note how Mrs. Kaprelian highlights the important role of manipulatives (in this case, cubes) in the concrete -> pictorial -> abstract progression. That groundwork leads seamlessly to the use of the bar model method to solve highly complex problems.

I Wish I Had Singapore Math

The role of parents also is addressed. Mrs. Kaprelian offers lessons to parents to introduce Singapore Math and tell them how it differs from other elementary math curricula. Initially, parents may be puzzled by Singapore Math, but typically there’s an “Ah Ha” moment when they get it and say, “I wish I had (Singapore Math).” (This is very common, I see the same reaction whenever I host Parent Nights at schools implementing Singapore Math.)

Involved parents, with knowledge of Singapore Math, on the same page with their child’s teacher…no wonder math is Eileen’s favorite subject.

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