A Place You Can
Make a Difference

In a large Hispanic community, professional development and a change in leadership help teachers improve student mathematics learning.

Story by Bracken Reed
Photos by Mount Burns

HILLSBORO, Oregon—David Hill Elementary is located just off Southeast Baseline Street at the heart of the largest Hispanic community in Oregon. Twenty minutes south of Portland, Hillsboro was formerly an agricultural town just beyond the city’s suburban sprawl. Most of that farmland has now made way for developments such as Intel’s gigantic Ronler Acres plant, but the Baseline neighborhood retains a blue-collar feel. Many of its residents still rise before dawn to work at local horticultural nurseries or in the vineyards, farms, and filbert orchards to the south and west.

The demographics at David Hill reflect this labor force: Approximately 75 percent of its students are Hispanic, more than 25 percent are designated as Migrant, and nearly 70 percent are limited English proficient (LEP). But, according to David Hill Elementary teacher Megan Turner-Baxter, the most telling statistic is that 94 percent of the students qualify for Title I free or reduced-price lunch. As in many other parts of the country, poverty and limited English skills are the dual challenges here, and delivering high-quality content while addressing those challenges is the primary goal.

A New Era of Professional Development

Until recently, David Hill staff pursued that goal with little support. Revolving-door leadership, including four different principals in a four-year span, kept the school in constant rebuilding mode. “Every year it was like we had to start over,” says Turner-Baxter. “As a staff, we had to sell our ideas, our programs, and our approach again and again. It was really detrimental to progress.”

Without a strong, consistent advocate, staff also struggled to have their voices heard at the district level. Grant money was scarce, professional development was rare, and staff members were seldom included in decisionmaking that directly affected their work. As a high-poverty school in a relatively affluent district, many staff members felt that the district lacked an understanding of their unique challenges.

In 2004, things began to change. Superintendent Jeremy Lyon and Principal Toni Crummett both came on board, and leadership in several other district offices turned over. The school had won a Reading First grant the previous year and began to reap the benefits. Suddenly, communication lines were opened and professional development opportunities began to flow. For Toni Parque, a long-time special education teacher at the school, the key to the change was both simple and immediate.

“The new administration did something very innovative when they came in,” Parque says with a bit of irony. “They asked us what we wanted. And then they did something even more amazing: They gave it to us.”

What the staff wanted, she says, was research-based, content area–focused professional development that was relevant to their high-poverty, LEP population.

What It Looks Like

One example of that kind of training came almost immediately. In the summer of 2004, both Turner-Baxter and Parque participated in a two-week Math Lesson Study Institute at the Northwest Regional Educational Service District. (Although their names are similar, the ESD and the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory are separate entities.) Directed by Marta Turner, a recipient of the 2005 Service Learning Educator of the Year award, the institute was funded by a Title II, Part A federal grant to improve teacher quality. The institute—a partnership linking the ESD, Pacific University, and Linfield College—had a dual focus: Help teachers develop their math content knowledge and simultaneously learn new pedagogy skills.

Lesson study, the pedagogical focus of the institute, is an innovative, collaborative process that is focused squarely on student learning. Typically, lesson study begins with an indepth study of state standards and curriculum, followed by the development of a single lesson. One member of the team then teaches the lesson in an actual classroom setting, while the other members, as well as outside experts, make detailed observations. The group then meets for a formal debriefing in which each member shares observations and experiences. Finally, the lesson is revised and taught again by another member of the group.

This process follows strict protocols that keep the spotlight on the student and the actual lesson: What worked? What didn’t work? How did students react to specific elements of the lesson? Did they learn the concept? How can the lesson be improved to better achieve student understanding?

As Turner observes, “It’s a method that embeds professional development directly into classroom instruction. The focus is on student learning, with a very specific, very clearly defined goal. Everything is evaluated on whether that goal is met—whether the students learned what you wanted them to learn.”

Because of its focus on specific content, lesson study combined beautifully with the institute’s content-knowledge component. During the morning sessions participants studied statistics and probability, while in the afternoons they used this same content to develop their understanding of the lesson study process.

While Turner-Baxter and Parque have not yet been able to implement lesson study at their school, both say the institute was a valuable experience that has directly affected their classroom instruction.

“It really built up my self-esteem in math and reminded me how important it is to have content knowledge above and beyond what you need in your own classroom,” says Turner-Baxter. “If you know what’s coming next for your students—in middle school and in high school—it helps you zero in on what’s really important. I left there feeling a lot more confident about my math skills and about how to evaluate my teaching.”

By shining a light on the best teaching strategies in a way that is practical, specific, and embedded in actual classroom instruction, lesson study is also ideally suited to an English language learner’s context. (See Teaching Math to English Language Learners for more ELL-related strategies.)

Making a Difference

The Math Lesson Study Institute is only one example of the many professional development opportunities that David Hill teachers have had since the change in leadership. As Parque says, “Just in the first few months [of the 2005–2006 school year] I’ve received more inservice training than in the last 10 years combined.”

All signs point to the beginning of a new era at David Hill. Test scores are up, the school has met AYP for two years running, and they recently received a “strong” rating on the 2004–2005 Oregon Department of Education report card.

Those results are definitely good news, but for Turner-Baxter and Parque the best part of this new era is that it helps them do what they came to David Hill for in the first place. “I think we all start out wanting to really make a difference in the world,” says Turner-Baxter, “but when you get out in the real world you discover that you can’t really have the impact you wanted. At a school like this, there’s no question as to whether you’re having an impact. It’s a place you can really change lives, and that’s priceless.”

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