On-Site Math Consulting

We are a New York City Department of Education contracted vendor.

Our on-site consulting model focuses on customized approaches and responses to address each school’s specific, individualized needs.  After an initial audit of a school’s math environment, practices, resources and policies, our consultant will work with school administrators to create a targeted action plan focused on the school’s current needs and goals.

Consistent with best practices, our consultants use a co-teaching model to work alongside individual teachers and coaches in classrooms to ensure focused and effective mathematics instruction. Our consultants work with teachers, coaches, and school leadership to establish exemplary math teaching and learning classroom environments by:

• providing professional development that addresses specific content strands and integrates the New York State Next Generation Mathematics Learning Standards math content and practices
  
  
• facilitating grade level or whole school professional development meetings and workshops to deepen teachers’ and math specialists’ math content and pedagogical knowledge
  
  
• sharing and discussing best-practice research
  
  
• developing standards-based curriculum maps, units of work, and assessments
  
  
• supporting data interrogation and deeper-level interpretations and conclusions to inform instruction
  
  
• introducing protocols for the analysis of student work and assessment data
  
  
• facilitating meetings to assist school planning teams to review and design strategies to support curricula, assessment, and pedagogy
  
  
• providing in-class support for teachers through co-planning, co-teaching, reflection, and re-teaching sessions to develop best teaching practices, and grow teachers’ math content and pedagogical knowledge
  
  
• increasing teacher proficiency in the use of technology tools to support student learning and teacher assessment; and 
  
  
•  facilitating inter-class and inter-school visitations to share best practices.

Working side-by-side with school administrators, coaches and teachers, our consultants tailor on-site consulting plans to ensure they are specifically tailored to the individual school’s needs.    

Based on the school’s needs, a consulting plan may include any or all of the following types of consulting days:

Administrative PD Days

Administrative PD Days are designed to build leadership capacity within your school, with customized, collaborative coaching that will guide and support the development of your instructional leadership team.  Our consultant and your school’s instructional leaders will work together to identify key instructional priorities, to set goals, and to develop strategies for overcoming specific curriculum and instructional challenges.

Typically, our consultant will also meet with your school’s administrative team to look at student work and grade level and/or school-wide data to guide and support leaders in the creation and implementation of a clearly defined action plan for math improvement based on an analysis of data and an audit of the math environment, practices, resources and policies.  Our consultant may also do learning walks/instructional rounds with administrators and math coaches to support the administrative team in further developing their understandings of best practices for mathematics teaching and learning.

1:1 Coaching Cycles

During 1:1 Coaching Cycles, your school may set up a schedule for our consultant to work with selected classroom teachers during math lessons to provide individualized feedback and coaching to establish exemplary math classroom instruction and improve student outcomes.  Our consultant will typically meet with teachers individually prior to a lesson to co-plan the lesson and again after the lesson to review student work and plan next instructional steps.

Each coaching cycle will focus on the the development of one or more high-leverage practices critical to advancing skill in teaching so that all students learn important content.  Based on the needs of individual teachers these high-leverage practices may include:

• implementing organizational routines
• implementing norms and routines for classroom discourse
• designing single lessons, sequences of lessons, and units of study
• setting long and short-term learning goals for students based on assessment data
• setting up and managing small group work
• modeling content, practices, and strategies
• analyzing instruction for the purpose of improving it
• eliciting and interpreting individual students’ thinking
• coordinating and adjusting instruction during a lesson
• selecting, designing and implementing informal and formal assessments of student learning
• analyzing student work and diagnosing common patterns in order to plan for differentiated instruction
• developing practices for providing feedback to students

Planning Days

During Planning Days our consultant will typically meet with your school’s teachers and math coaches/specialists in grade level or vertical planning teams to plan an upcoming series of lessons or unit of study.  These sessions may also be used to write or revise curriculum maps and to further develop teachers’ math content and pedagogical knowledge.

"Our consultant first started working with our early childhood grades.  She began by teaching them about curriculum maps, math journals, the scaffolding of skills and differentiated instruction.  The result of this work in our early grades was exceptional.  It produced tangible data and led to the whole school adopting math journals as a way of strengthening reasoning skills and academic rigor.  Our consultant has not only helped us develop math curriculum maps, she has assisted us in using data to drive instruction, build capacity and, consequently, strengthened us as a professional learning community.  ... Beyond her work with the staff, she has also served as a change agent with our administrative staff because of the way we now look at our practice.  Specifically, by participating in conducting walkthroughs, looking at student work and examining data with us, she has enriched the way we supervise mathematics." 
Assistant Principal, NYCDOE

Team Coaching Cycles

Team coaching builds a community of learners through collaboration, while allowing grade level teams to share their experience and expertise.  During team coaching days one model classroom is chosen from each grade level involved. Prior to the labsite, teachers in the grade level meet with our consultant to co-plan a lesson or mini-lesson.  The teachers then visit the labsite classroom to observe the lesson through a particular lens and practice their teaching with support from our consultant. After the lesson our consultant will facilitate a lesson debrief to allow teachers to reflect on the teaching practices that supported student learning and review student work with a focus on learning and misconceptions.  Finally, our consultant will work together with teachers to plan the next instructional steps. In order to develop habits of self-reflection and critical thinking, lesson study cycles may also be utilized to enable groups of teachers to plan, observe, analyze, and refine mathematics lessons over a period of time.

Workshop Days

Our research-based Workshop Days offer interactive learning experiences designed to improve teachers’ instruction, advance students’ learning, and increase achievement in math.  Our consultant will collaborate with school leadership to decide on a topic aligned to the school’s curriculum in order to nurture instructional excellence through the introduction of research-based best practices.  Frequently requested Workshop Days include:

Grades K-2

• Building Number Sense, Flexibility in Thinking and Student Discourse with Number Talks in K-2
• Counting is Complex: Structures and Routines for Developing Counting Skills
• Developing Fact Fluency with Understanding: Addition & Subtraction
  
• Developing Spatial Sense and Geometric Reasoning in K-2
• Designing and Using Rich Tasks in K-2

Grades 3-5

• Building Multiplication and Division Fact Fluency from Conceptual Understanding 
• Models and Strategies for Multi-Digit Multiplication and Division with Whole Numbers and Decimals
  
• Building Number Sense, Flexibility in Thinking and Student Discourse with Number Talks in Grades 3-5
• Teaching for Understanding: Fractions (Grades 3-5)
• Developing Spatial Sense and Geometric Reasoning in 3-5
• Designing and Using Rich Tasks in Grades 3-5

Please contact us for more information about on-site math consulting options and/or a quote based on your school's needs: orders@k-5mtr.com