Early and midway through our project, we conducted Contextual Inquiries with 8-10 th grade math teachers to learn their process in assessing students, planning lessons, how they use resources to teach. It was surprising to find that in some schools teachers spend an entire academic year mapping out what is important in the state standards, and tying them into their curriculm.
Experienced teachers have abundant teaching resources. The teachers we interviewed kept drawers full of worksheets and projects they use in the classroom and share with other teachers [U14, 17, 30, 31]
We observed that these teachers document their lesson plans by the week, but mostly for administration, and not necessarily for themselves.
Teachers think of skills as steps within a question
These teachers together study the state standards and identify which standards are important to cover in the curriculum, and plan the next year ' s curriculum accordingly. As they plan, they share their experience in how much time it took to teach a certain skill, and use the estimate to plan.
Here is how the teachers created a new integrated curriculum of algebra and geometry to help the lower performing students.
Teachers would put together material to use in the PSSA (standardized test in Pennsylvania ) preparation sessions they hold.
They pointed out that terminology was one of the parts they focus on as they get closer to the test, for they think just by knowing what the term means helps the lower performing students in the test.
