 All being recorded. If you did not choose to have the webinar system call you, you can call this number here. In addition, if you get disconnected, you're always able to call back in at 1-877-423-6338. And then when prompted, enter the participant passcode 142587 pound sign. Please note that the audio portion of this event is only available by telephone. We also have a number here for you to call. Please make a note of it in case you encounter any difficulty connecting. Please contact Adobe Connect at 1-800-945-9120, and they should be able to help you out. In addition, we'll keep the conference call number and participant passcode available for you up here in the chat portion of the screen. So we'll go ahead and get started, and I see that people are still arriving. So they'll catch us, catch can. So welcome to the first episode of this webinar series that highlights education innovations across the Appalachian region. I'm Caitlin Howley, director of the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center, otherwise known as the ARC, which is funded by the US Department of Education to provide technical assistance to state education agencies. Our region includes the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Living and working in Appalachia, we've discovered that education innovation can hide in plain sight. Across all of our states, teachers, schools, and local education agencies are quietly, or not so quietly, finding new ways to address both persistence and emerging education challenges. We're producing this webinar series, the Shinnest Podlight on Local Innovation, so that teachers and education leaders across the region can share promising practices and try things out in their own schools. The webinar in this series will highlight local ingenuity, ranging from stories of classroom success to school-wide leadership for innovation to partnerships between state and local education agencies in implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act. Throughout the theme of locally inspired innovations, the whole promise for elder sites will be explored. Today, we're really excited to kick off this series with a webinar featuring math coach Joanna Bert Kinderman and math teacher Jennifer Nail, both of whom are involved in a remarkably effective math coaching program in Pocahontas County Schools, West Virginia. Mr. Terrence Beane, who's the superintendent of Pocahontas County Schools, also joins us. And we invite you to please pose any questions you may have to him, as well as to Joanna and Jennifer. I'll be interviewing Joanna, Jennifer, and Mr. Beane today to learn more about the reasons for the program, how the program worked, and what resulted from its implementation. Although you should feel free to jump in with your own questions or comments or observations at any time, we will also conclude today with an open-ended opportunity for participants to share their thoughts and ask questions. And so without further ado, I'm delighted to welcome Joanna and Jennifer, along with Mr. Terrence Beane. Let's get started. So Joanna, tell me a little bit about your background and the school district in which you work. Sure. Well, first thanks for having us. We're so excited to be here today and really want to give an extra thumbs up to you for doing such a simple yet innovative in our mind thing, this is Fred Beane from the trenches. So thank you so much for having us. My name's Joanna Burt Kinderman, and I grew up right here in Poconus County. Left at 17 and did a math degree at Haverford College, where I had no intention of majoring in math initially, but intersected with a brilliant math teacher at the same time as I came up against both a short-changing girl, short-changing America study. And a book, Radical Equations, by a man named Bob Moses, who made a really compelling case that the biggest civil rights issue of our time is access to a righteous math education. And that is the true gateway to full citizenship and to the realization of the promise of public education. And the degree to which the access to that sort of education was really different based on class was super compelling to me. So I got drawn away from thinking about law school and into thinking about teaching math really as an issue of civil rights. And thinking about the degree to which math literacy could change the narrative in my home state, which I have a lot of love for, which has a too strong history of being kind of controlled by outside interest in my mind. And so initially that's what drew me to this. I started teaching in 1998 in Georgia, not fully certified at the time, but in a private school. So for about 20 years now I've been teaching in a whole variety of settings. I've taught in public and private schools. I've taught in after-school programs and non-profits and have been able to teach community college math and math education courses at our land-grant university here, WVU. Tolcanas County is one of the most rural counties east of the Mississippi. We're, you see some facts on your stage here, but mainly national state forest. So we've got way more trees and folks here. We're very, very far from the nearest research university. On average we're an hour even from a Walmart and we're in the national radio quiet zone, so a big portion of our county doesn't even have cell service. We certainly do not have reliable and effective broadband. We're also the birthplace of rivers, seven, eight, excuse me, major rivers have their headwaters here in Tolcanas County. So a very beautiful and unique part of the world. In terms of our population here, about 25% of our jobs are connected to tourism. Now there's not as much logging, unfortunately as there once was to sustain jobs that are year-round. Our tourism jobs are seasonal in both ends. And we're in the oxy corridor, so we definitely have major addiction issues. And our stats are, of course, on the screen, but there's a lot of the cards stacked against us. On the other hand, people love it here. I came back here at 30 because I wanted to raise my own kids here. And we have just nine math teachers in the district in grades six to 12, and most of them are relatively young and will be here for the long run. So that's a huge advantage we have in the midst of some of the things that are working a little more. Thanks, that really paints an interesting picture of the place where you all are working and serving students and teachers. So I'm curious, what inspired the development of the math program that you're gonna talk about today? And I'd be interested to hear from both you, Joanna, and Mr. Veeam as well. Well, I think it's a combination of cautious faith and optimism and also a real drive from me. We agree that it was around 2010 when we first started talking about this. Yeah, in 2010, I got my first job here in the central office. I was the director of federal programs and curriculum instruction. And part of my duties was to go over the data and see exactly where we were with our test scores. And it was not a pretty picture. Both our EI test scores both were in the bottom 10% of our state and that's probably being kind. They were near the bottom. We had to try to find some way to address those issues. It just so happened that the spring of the first year I worked in this office, I met Joanna. And we had some conversations about math. I knew her passion for math. And I knew that we needed to do something about giving our teachers more support and getting our program focused in one direction rather than scattered. And so she and I had conversations on what we thought could work. And I shared it with my board. It started off very, very slowly. I mean, I think the first year we sked during like 30 hours or so just to get our feet wet and see what the climate was for a math coach. We'd not had that in our county before. And I wanted to see, as federal program director, I used federal dollars to help fund the staff development portion of her position, which would be working in the schools directly with the teachers. And so we started off with the high school. She had a high school background, miss one high school background. Ideally, we'd like to start in elementary, worked our way up, but we started in high school because that seemed to be where the greatest need was and the greatest interest was. We had some really good young teachers that were hungry for improvement. They wanted to see our schools do better. So we started off with working with them and letting them actually design curriculum, have a lot of input as the direction we were going to go. And I think that's part of the reason we've been able to retain those people in those positions. Very high percentage of teachers have remained in those positions. And they have formed a family, a math family, at the high school. And they work, they lean on each other. They bounce ideas off each other. And I give them pretty much a free reign. Joanna says, do you have your make for this? And I usually say yes, and they make it work. And our scores in the last six, seven years have gone from the bottom 10% to the top 10%. And it's all because of the effort that the teachers have put into it. There's been a lot of, this wasn't a rosy path, by any means, we had pitfalls along the way. But we stayed the course, which I think is very important, that we knew the direction we wanted to go. And we knew that it would cause some anxiety along the way. But the teachers worked really hard. They did, we did summer trainings. They had workshops where we found the items to work in the summer to kind of guide this curriculum. And then after we finished at the high school and felt like we'd made some inroads there, we moved our focus on down and included. We didn't limit the high school, but then we included the middle school. We started doing things there. And that's actually where we ran into most of our pitfalls was at the middle school level, because this was really a change for them. They did not have as many highly qualified teachers in middle school as the high school teachers did. Happy to say now that's changed. Now all of our middle school math teachers are also fully certified, which is hard to find in West Virginia to get fully certified math teachers. People were always looking for them. We've got them over here and we're not letting them go anywhere either. We've got them all kidnapped over here. We're gonna keep as much as we can. But that worked also over a period of time. And now we've expanded it now to our elementary schools. And so now we are serving all of our math teachers in Pope Honest County with this project. So it sounds like there were a number of factors that influenced the decision to undertake this work, not the least of which are low scores and the rural capacity issues in terms of having qualified strong math teachers. So I'm gonna change track a little bit here and ask you, Jennifer, a question because I understand that when you first started working with this math coaching program, you yourself were a new teacher. So I'd be interested to know what was that experience like coming into working with Joanna and the team of teachers as a new teacher yourself? Well, to start, I feel like you have to go over some of the difficulties of being a new teacher in general. And so I was a really, really good student. And I was sure after doing my student teaching and everything that I was gonna be a really, really good teacher. And then I started teaching and kind of had a rude awakening that it wasn't just kind of got fall in place like academia kind of always had for me. And so when I first started in my own classroom, I was really hesitant to ask for help. I didn't want other people to know that I was having trouble. And so I was really struggling with classroom management specifically. And I struggled with conveying some difficult topics. So I was teaching geometry at the time and so I had to teach proof and some really hard big things to kids and it wasn't working so well. And so it was kind of this realization that I was struggling with a lot of things. As far as working with the other teachers, that part was really nice. It was kind of a trial by fire at first. So my interview for this job actually was part of one of those workshops. And so I got thrown in front of every teacher in the county and sat there. And I don't think I said a whole lot but I must have been impressive enough. And you survived. I did, I'm still here, six years later. They were a really welcoming group. It was kind of nice. The first week of school for me was actually one of those math workshops before school actually started. And so it was a nice chance to learn people's names and who knows who was across the hall from me before school got started. And so it was a good experience but also a enlightening one. I can only imagine. Thank you. So given that as context, Jo-Anna, you were working then with both the new and experienced teachers before we talk a little bit about the differences and similarities there. I'm curious to hear you talk about your approach to or philosophy of coaching as you first took on the coaching role and then maybe a little bit about how it's evolved over time. Yeah, so I mean I think that guiding philosophy like the underpinning of the whole thing has not changed at all. And that is that teaching's not something that's ever mastered. And the whole idea that you can go to a teacher prep program and be ready to teach for the rest of your life with no more learning or interaction is just totally flawed if we want our educational outcomes to keep improving in this state and country. And that if you believe that part then a lot of the things that we have sort of learned about students and how they ought to be learning has a direct parallel to teachers and how they ought to be learning. We need that space for wondering. We need that inquiry. We need that what if. We need that support to kind of follow through the what if and we need community to do it in. So that part has remained really very constant. Very sort of fortuitous that I started this job at the same time that West Virginia adopted a new set of standards which at that time were the common core standards and we've done some, had some more changes along the way but then that's been nice that I've been there all the while. But initially it gave a great impetus for everyone to be able to say it's okay to be a learner right now. This wasn't what you knew already and it's okay to sort of let your guard down. But I started this much more gently than I start with new teachers now and it's interesting to sort of reflect on. I started this doing what I knew how to do which was facilitating Japanese lesson study. I still believe that's a wonderful thing to do and I'm not in any way on disparaging that approach but it came to, that really is focusing on the math pedagogy. So the content, yes, but then really crafting the delivery deliberately and then sort of investigating if that went as you thought it would, how so, how not, what could you tweak. It's a very drawn out process and I think that at this point in the game I really see treating teachers as a triad and it has to happen altogether that teachers have to have space to be learners together, to do math together. Teachers have to have interaction inside their classroom so there has to be some sort of treatment of teachers as teachers. So Jen can talk about the experience of having me do this observation on the things that she is intentionally working on and I'm saying that carefully because I don't do a value of observation. Big distinction in my mind. And then third, as an observer, teachers need to be able to watch other people teach and get together and sort of have a discussion about what happened and why. And that has to all happen in a space, I believe, where one person is not the expert. Like we're not trying to emulate one person but that we're all investigating choices and outcomes together. And it's okay that, you know, I don't think either of us have the expectation that Jen and I have the same depth of experience as teaching. But we could both name time when she had a better idea than I had that I grew because of what she had to learn. So this isn't some kind of pyramid scheme of knowing, I suppose, but more of that. Can you talk with us some about what activities you undertook with teachers? What sorts of concrete things you did that reflected this philosophy about always learning how to teach, being a learner yourself and learning from one another? Sure, Mr. Beam referenced some of them. We've been fortunate to be able to have full week long summer academies. And those times are mainly focused on math itself and sort of we have a philosophical bent here that there's really wonderful open educational resources out there and we ought not to be spending as much money on a publishing company as we are on developing our own teachers. So we have worked open source materials to try to both curate them and figure out how we could get comfy with using them. So we definitely use summertime to do that kind of work and then have been able to have ongoing yearly after school, excuse me, monthly after school meetings in the year. I'm getting that right straight. And so that's kind of our math learning time, but in addition to that, there's a time in math classroom with teachers. And so I see that time as twofold. It's part the teachers choosing something that they're working on that usually grows out of our summer after school meetings. And I'm observing for that and giving feedback to that. So that has some individual conference on either side and then is that observation time in the middle. And then also we have sort of grown into a place where the main thing that we do in middle and high school now is figure out what problems we all see. Where are the collective issues? What is it that kids can't do? So for example, we try to do these open tasks and we say, can you get a kid to try something? No, they all put their hands up and say I'm done. And so we kind of invented a way to run a class when you're trying to get kids to persist and a way to assess that differently. Two years probably iterating how we use that approach. So really doing some piece of kind of scientific innovation in the middle of that. And I see, thank you for changing my slide out. We kind of think of that as problematizing what's happening in the classroom, but doing that in community. So we never do that just one person at a time. That's always something that we're sharing together. And I think that that at this point, once we have kind of great instructional materials behind us, at that point that's what's getting us the most growth right now is being able to both work on your own teaching and work together collaboratively on what is great teaching and how can we get the action of the doing of math into students' hands and out of our own. Jennifer, what was it like to begin working with Joanna and with the other math teachers in your school? And how did that experience change over time? Well, I think there's kind of two parts to this. To first look at Joanna coming into my individual classroom and then to look at the collaborative work of all of us math teachers in a room. So starting individually, when I got hired, Joanna had already been at this for a year, but I didn't really know who she was. And so I just knew that she was this lady from the board office coming into my class and she was one of several people making observations of me at the time. And so it was this really intimidating and overwhelming process. So she said earlier, her evaluations weren't about assessing how well I was doing. Hard to separate that in my brain from like the walkthroughs and my other mentor and stuff. And so it was really overwhelming to have so many people in and out of my room at one time. On the other hand, she would come in, I really struggled with several different things in that first year. And so I just kind of threw out my hands and said, I don't know what I'm bad at and I need you to just tell me what to do. So she would pick one thing to focus on. I think the first thing we ever did was look at management itself and ways to make the kids do what we want them to do. And so it was nice to have someone to kind of target the six first, being able to do the other stuff. And she would do it first. So there would be a day that she'd come in and she would be the one teaching and I would be sitting back. And since the first year is so overwhelming in general, it was great to have a day where I got to sit down as someone else teach my class. And I had to do it myself later and she would come back later. And I was definitely accountable for continuing to try whatever we were trying. So it was nice to have a little bit of a break. And so I think that's the biggest thing about the individual part of it. The other part with the group, when we first got together, I was terrified to say anything at first. Now I think this changed throughout even just that one school year. But I was really afraid to be wrong. So I had come out of college and I had my math degree and I was supposed to know all of this math. But what they don't tell you when you graduate with your math degree is you haven't revisited some of this stuff since you were a high school student. And you might not remember it all quite so well. And so I was really afraid to be wrong. It would really go into this and find out that everyone else was the same way. So everyone else was struggling with writing proofs or whatever it was. We all were uncomfortable with something in our classrooms. So I was the first year teacher and they'd all been at it for a long time. It was really nice to know that. I think it was really, really powerful to sit down and do what we expected our kids to do. So at some point during all of this, we moved from a room in Rose to a collaborative group within our own classrooms. And so we expected the kids to talk to each other and we expected them to try and help each other. And I knew I'd done that in like study groups in college but it was completely different to sit down and do it with the materials we were gonna be teaching the kids with. I feel like a ton has changed over time. One of the largest being instead of Joanna saying this is what we should focus on now. I feel like I'll come in and go, I think I wanna look at this. And then we come up with a plan on how to do it. Sometimes I have to try it first. So I don't get my day off quite as often anymore. I also know that at this point, it's okay to ask questions. So I feel like I was terrified in the beginning to ask anyone a question about anything. And now I can go to any teacher, I mean, math department or not, and say, hey, tell me about this. And I know that they're not gonna think that I'm stupid. And I think that was a really powerful turning point in my teaching career. Big thing that I've noticed is I got my graduate degree online a couple of years ago. And my program was almost an iteration of what we've done together. So I realized how fortunate I've been to be able to start in this school district and learn this all in like my first five years and not have to figure it out later. And not have to pay the thousands of dollars I saved for my master's degree. So I don't mean to bring a question on you, but I am curious if you're willing to share what a problem of practice was that you all confronted together, something that bugged you in your classroom that you wanted to work on. Big one that, the one that really emanates with me was permutations and combinations and statistics. So this was one of the ones we did in a summer academy, because every math teacher I know pretty much when they go, what part of math do you not like? They're like, ooh, statistics, that's awful. Give me algebra any day. And so we had a whole summer academy where we looked at statistics and probability and it's still not my favorite, but I'm much more comfortable with it than I was before. Cassia, thanks for being willing to divulge. I am curious showing you how it was different or similar to work with newer versus more seasoned teachers, but Janie has a question here first of all. What grade level are these teachers? I'm a high school teacher, so I teach 9 to 12 because it's a small school, but mostly a nice grade right now. As far as the summer academies, I think the statistics one was everybody, I think. I think it was elementary, middle, and high in that one. Mm-hmm, okay. So Joanna, what were the differences or similarities between working with newer versus more seasoned teachers? So it's incredibly different in the first working with your veteran teacher the same year that initially I'm working with Jen, problems of, you know, I would say classroom management. There's things you don't learn as an undergraduate getting a teaching degree, things you can't learn unless you're learning where the kids actually are. Those things needed the more directive. And when I work with veteran teachers, some veteran teachers initially want directive because that's what they're used to. If we think about the trajectory that teachers take, they spend 13 years in K-12 with people telling them how to learn, and then we're in a red setting with people telling them what best practice teaching looks like. And I'm not saying there's not room for that, but then you get into a district and you have district level people who, you know, often you can go through, we've gone through six, a span of 10 years, all of whom had a different idea about it. I'm watching a webinar. Production looks like. And so I think that it takes a while in those first initial months for a first year teacher. For a live one or I'd pause it. And for a veteran one or I'd pause it. Get over the idea that there needs to be a directive or that I have some kind of hidden directive, which I suppose in my mind, I have an idea of what I think that looks like, but that's not the work I'm trying to do with teachers. I'm trying to get teachers to define what it is that troubles them and where is their overlap when we look at a collective Venn diagram of people who teach the same course or the same grade level. And then how can we together work on this thing? Okay. I'm going to pause and take a moment to remind folks that unless you're making a comment or asking a question, please mute your phone. If you don't have a mute button, you can also hit star six. Thanks, we appreciate it. Okay, so I have a question now for Joanna and Mr. Bean, which is about what challenges you confronted along the way of doing this work and how did you all address them? Did I start? Yeah. Well, at first, we got a little bit of kickback from some of the experienced teachers who sometimes feel threatened with a younger person coming in and giving them directives on how to teach their class for lack of better terminating. It took a little while for the acceptance from all the teachers. Some were more accepting than others. Some came around. Some never came around. But the majority of them did. And we even had one teacher in particular, I remember that at first was very resistant but when they started seeing success in their building with other teachers, then they came and said, can you come and help me with this? And that kind of broke the ice. This was a very veteran teacher who was a good teacher and not being critical of them at all, but this was a little hesitant about asking for help. So we had that little bit of a thing. When I hired Joanna, one of the concerns that I had, the first concern I had was not her ability, not her knowledge, that how would teachers accept her? You probably in a little bit of time you spent with her today, you can see that she has a very dynamic personality. She's very opinionated and she's very driven. Sometimes that scares people. And so I told Joanna for this to be successful, she needed to learn to play well with others. And she has done that. She has built that from the ground up. Now she's accepted all of our teachers and they all welcome her. They don't feel threatened in any way with her being in their classroom. And that was one of the things. The other thing was with our board members. Our board members were here, complaints or concerns from parents was saying this math that they're doing now is I don't know how to do this. This is not the way I was taught and they're doing it entirely different. And kids struggled with it at the beginning. They didn't start making really good grades right off the bat. We had some growing pains. But gradually they started getting it. They started, you know, the kids working in groups a lot in these type of instructions that we're using. And the kids depend on each other to learn. They helped each other learn. And over a period of time it grew and got better and so the complaints got less and less. We even had people who was very critical and they would publicly apologize for their criticism with their own children saying this is working. And that takes a very big person to admit when they've made a mistake, judge somebody. Of course financing and if there's other superintendents out there listening they know that money's always the bottom line on everything. You know, we like to think that it's not but it drives everything. And we've been able to keep our program going at the same level that we started out with. We've grown it a little bit. She and I meet every year to discuss where we need to go. She tells me, I asked her, I said tell me what you want, what you need. I'll see if there's a way we can do that. And she gives us a lot more than we give her. I'll grant you that. She puts a lot more time in to what we actually pay her. But it wouldn't be successful unless we had someone that was as driven as Joanna is to do it. So those are some of the things. It was, as time went by, all those have dissipated. We don't have those at all anymore, you know. And so as superintendents I'm very thankful we don't have those anymore. So a big challenge was gaining teacher, school, parent, community support. But it sounds as though you're now pretty well situated. Joanna, Jennifer, any other challenges that you might want to share and talk about how you ever came them? I would just reiterate that, you know, I was so focused on doing the work in the classroom of teachers that I really underestimated the degree to which it was equally important to be doing PR and outreach. And not PR like to make us look shiny, but to genuinely engage why we were doing what we did. Terrible job of that, a truly terrible job. And probably some of that initial kickback is very related. The kickback that Mr. Beam is talking about from teachers was pretty easily overcome, but the parent kickback was substantive. I mean, it took up a year of, it hurt teachers' feelings. And that lies squarely on my shoulders as I see it. Part of making a massive change and we'll get to the kind of results that we're seeing here is that we're doing things really differently. If you walk into one of our math classes today, it does not look like a math class that any of us grew up in. And if you're going to do that kind of big change with some urgency, discomfort is a central part of it for me, for students, certainly for teachers and certainly for parents. And so I would add in that it's been, we've been fortunate that at the beginning of this project, Mr. Beam was director of federal programs and curriculum instruction, so he was kind of directing this and then he moved into a superintendent role. If that hadn't happened in the timing that it did, there were other administrators in our system, in our schools that didn't have the same vision for what teacher improvement could look like that Mr. Beam did and had those chips not falling exactly where they did, this project might not have been able to kind of live as long as it has right now. So I would say that that's also about building support and engagement and it's not for nothing, but I've had a couple of really fortunate experience with meeting people like you and it looks like Courtney Tannenbaum is on here as well. Hello Courtney, that was the first research team that I met and not just to be able to say, oh, administrators, maybe you are doing something good here because most of our administrators don't have math backgrounds and I'm not saying ours in this county, I'm saying ours collectively and so sometimes you don't necessarily know what it is that you ought to be looking for if you're gonna do something really differently. So I think that that actually strangely was really integral meeting these different kind of research university folks at the time when I did both help kind of reassure folks and also really help spark new ideas in us. So I can't undersell how important it's been to intersect with the people that I have in the last six years and we collectively have, I mean we had a team of folks here well four years ago now that really gave us new ideas and new drive to look into some different things and that was really wonderful for such a remote spot. We don't get a lot of that so. Yeah, then you can't discount the value of things happening when they happen and people being in the place who are willing to go down this path. Particularly when you're doing something that other folks haven't done before. So I wonder if a neighbor, and Mr. Bean can certainly attest to this, like people around us say, hey, what are you doing with math? And it could be that we can then say, this is what we're doing with math and maybe the next person trying this doesn't have that same amount of stress because you're able to say, oh, well this is what those guys did and seems like it's working out okay. The neighbor has moved the road for the next folks. We hope so, and yeah. Right, yeah, absolutely. Jennifer, Joanna had said a couple of minutes ago that math at your school teaching and learning looks very different than it does, for example, in your own experiences as students. So I'm curious to know how has your experience, your perspective on teaching and learning changed as a result of this collaborative work? Well, like I said earlier, I was always a pretty gifted student and so I expected that if I stood up at the top of the room and I showed and did my examples and taught the lesson that the kids would learn, that is not the case. And so I think in shifting, we've shifted to the collaborative groups and in this the kids help each other so they are essentially the ones helping each other to learn the content, to practice the content, to find each other's mistakes. They're the ones discovering the big ideas in a lesson and then my job is to kind of guide them on the right path and then to organize their thoughts afterwards to the whole class. And that's definitely not what I was doing six years ago. And it's so nice I think now to do it because I can sit back. I had a moment the other day where this was changing. Oh, so you know, this is the equation and this is why you... You would do if you were told nothing could hold you back. The sky was the limit, the future full of possibilities. I'm sorry guys, we will find out what you did. But it was one of those moments of like, oh, this is why I went into teaching and I don't remember having those, I was starting. And so it's so nice to have changed that. Like Joanna said earlier, struggle is important and since I hadn't had a lot of struggle in school, I didn't feel like my students should have a lot of struggle in school and I definitely don't think that now. So they shouldn't be struggling all the time but definitely a big part of learning is going through something difficult at some point. And so it's been really enlightening. It's made me like love the classroom I'm in. Sounds very alive. It's loud, a lot. And walked by, you might not think they're on task but I promise they are. I will confess that I was really struck when I came to visit the schools in Pocahontas County how much math talk was happening in the math classroom and it was students doing the talking, really describing and providing justification for their answers and their reasoning. It's notable. Thank you. Janie has a question. Are the academies taught by peers and for your county teachers? So they're organized and orchestrated by me and I'm not a practicing classroom teacher anymore. I work for this district, you know, half-time doing this work and then ditch together other things but I'm not in my own classroom any longer. But I will say that I'm trying to orchestrate learning experiences that are parallel to the learning experiences that we want to be creating for teachers. So the action is in the teacher's hands. It's not in my hands. I know that many of you, if you're anywhere close to classroom teachers, know that most professional development experiences can really turn in to the opposite of what the developer is after you get into in your classrooms. And we work very hard. I work very hard to make sure that that's not the case and that the experience that we have in our campus academies is very much student-centered, which in this case would be teacher-centered, I suppose. I think we're at the portion of today's webinar when it's time to ask about, you know, what resulted from this work? What did the outcomes look like? And I'm going to advance the slide here. You have a quote, and I'll move past that and go ahead to some of the hard data. We can go back if we have time. But can you all tell us a little bit about what happened? Yeah, what you're looking at here is our middle school outcomes, and as Mr. Bean shared, I started my work in 2011-2012. So this is the first time that I had a job doing this the first year that you're seeing here at the high school level. So I wasn't really working that first year in middle school much at all. We worked on a couple of lesson studies, but we didn't have the same kind of trifecta of treatment that we were doing at the high school level. So I also want to point out that the testing instrument changed in 2014-15. So you'll see all of the percentage pass rates went down. We started using harder balance with our high stakes assessment that year. And you're welcome to analyze it any way you choose to, but I certainly, I'm incredibly proud of these outcomes certainly in, I think that one thing that was happening is that we in 2011 changed to really focus on our new standards, even though our assessment wasn't assessing those standards. And so again, have to give Mr. Bean some real credit for knowing that we were going to get lower test scores because we made that choice to start when we needed to start. And our assessment wasn't aligned with our standards. That faith certainly paid off when our assessment was testing what we were teaching. So some of these percent increases are pretty large. I mean, you know, my guess is that they're statistically significant, Jennifer. So these are, sorry, go ahead. Those are our middle school scores. So the scores that would be reflective of Jennifer's work would be that next slide. And here you can see, you know, even after that first year of work, we were right around the state average and we didn't give up on this project because we didn't get the outcomes that we wanted right away. We started out working really focusing in ninth grade over the course of that 2011, I'm sorry, 2012, 2013 school year. And so you still see not much change happening even though we had all the teachers engaged in that ninth grade level work, even if they weren't ninth grade level teachers. I think that that's something pretty important to point out as well. And then, of course, in 2017, only 11th graders were tested in the state of West Virginia. But again, I can't imagine that these aren't very statistically significant. And in 2017, we were the number one district in the state at the high school level. That speaks volumes. I'm super proud. I have one last question for you before we open up the line for some questions and comments from participants. And that is, what advice would you offer would you offer other districts who are interested in undertaking this approach? First of all, one question I get a lot and I just like opportunity to point out that while this is very teacher-centered, very teacher-driven and in my mind has everything to do with building teacher agencies. I guess Rob, the teacher is in my mind at every point of teacher training. It's not a PLC. This wasn't without leadership. And so that leader is not an expert but a facilitator of what teachers think needs doing. And certainly, I wield a good deal of influence by bringing in, hey, I think these materials are cool. Let's play with them and see what happens if we try them out. But when teachers come back, if they say this doesn't work, I don't keep pressing on that button. So I think it's really important to distinguish even though I am pretty critical of kind of a traditional PD pathway, I'm also don't think that the same outcomes happen just in a PLC space and there's a lot of good reasons for PLCs and so I'm not at all saying that that shouldn't happen. I think it's also key to be inside one another's classroom, to be modeling and giving specific feedback even if administrators are interested in looking at the hashtag, observe me. Even something as small as that is a first step to really get teachers in one another's classroom and giving pointed and focused feedback to one another, I think it's transformative. And then I certainly would say, I'm not an incredibly patient person. This six years has really given me a gift of a little more patience and being able to be reflective about what things take time to change culturally and we're changing the culture of a classroom itself. You mentioned the math talk really stood out to you. That was intention, that was one of our biggest problems of practice that when we ask kids a question, they don't have anything to say, they say 14 or nothing. And so we started assessing student dialogue and really investing in, how do we get kids to tell the stories of the big concepts that are happening here? And that's probably one of our biggest low guy of this whole project has been around assessing student dialogue and making student dialogue central to everything that we're doing. And I would also say that whatever you do with teachers, if you can't mirror that when you're working, if it doesn't, excuse me, if it doesn't mirror what you want when you're working with students, then you're not doing the right thing. And so even if you're gonna bite up a small thing and say we ought to think about how does our CE time, how does our PD time look or not look like we want teachers' classrooms to look. And if it doesn't, you gotta find a way to do that or don't do it, particularly in this age of technology when you can have a presentation. Hey, thank you. Now I'd like to open up the line for participants to share any observations or ask any questions that they might have of Jennifer, Joanna, and Mr. Bean. You're welcome to jump in. And if you're shy, you're also welcome to type your question or observation into the chat box. We'll say for our part, one of our very favorite things is to have a chance to talk with people from other spots. We're in a very remote place. And so it'd be very cool to hear your feedback or your questions. That would be a real treat to us. Janie asks, how often do you get into each classroom? Certainly monthly. And I think in the first three years where I was able to be much more focused at the middle of high school level or four years, I think every other week, for sure. One thing we need to point out is Joanna's position is a half-time position. So she's not here all day long, every day of the week. With a school system of small desires, it just doesn't warrant that. And frankly, we can't afford a full-time position at that. That's one of the reasons this marriage worked is because when we first formed it, she only needed a half-time position as all we could afford. And it worked just like she said with the timing with everything else. Just one of those things just kind of fell together. But that's the reason she doesn't get in any more than she does now. She was in probably more at the beginning, but as they have learned the process, the need is not there as much as it was. And that's why we have moved her into elementary to work with those teachers down at her. And honestly, it's so nice to see the kids coming up who've already been through it all. I don't have to train them anymore. Lovely. So by the time they get to your class, they are already sort of out of the habits of mind. Yeah. I think much more than every other week, particularly when you're doing a focus change, that you ask me to model and then you're gonna try it yourself, you need a while to try that. You need two weeks to try that. Before you're ready to come back and have feedback on it. So, yeah. And then we need some time to be having the conversation. But sometimes happened, you know, for us after school, they happen with Skype or Google Hangout. They happen on the telephone. But you need to have that time to really talk about, what are you choosing, why are you choosing it? How is it going? Is it changing what you wanted it to change? You need that time. Matthew has a question for you, which is what has the response been from other counties as they learn of the improvements Pocahontas County has seen in student achievement? And does it seem to provide a gateway into conversations about this form of embedded teacher development? Yeah, I get a lot of feedback from fellow superintendents that want to, they simply ask, what are you doing in Pocahontas County? I'm a native of Nicholas County, and weaving was the topic of one of their board meetings one night when they was asking, why can't we have the scores Pocahontas County has? Because it wasn't always that way. But we have three or four counties right now that are trying to get into our school and visit. We've had some weather issues and they've had to make some changes. We've had counties that's visited in the past and we have several more that's going to be coming in the future to see exactly what we're doing. I think there's a little bit of deer and headlight. I mean, people would like to know if there was a program they could buy. I think when you get down to draft tax of like no, you're actually investing in, some after school and summer teacher time, you're investing in, at minimum, a half-time person to orchestrate all of this. That's understandably a harder leap to take, but there is real interest. Now, I don't think that the interest has been, there hasn't been anybody to say, will you help us build the same thing in our county yet? Now they simply ask, how we got to where we're going. They will ask me, what would you suggest we do? And when I say if you're going to use our model, the first and most important piece is to find the right person to guide your math program. If you can't find that person, then you're wasting your time. We're wanting to do the same thing with ELA in our county that we're presently doing in math. But I've not found the person that I think is ready to lead our teachers. You have to find someone that you have trust in that has the passion to guide your program. I'm not a math person. I can do math, but I'm not a math person. I need somebody else that I can delegate that to, and that's Joanna. So that's the first thing that I tell them they need to do is find the right person. So they find the right football coach. You gotta find the right math coach for this job. There's that patient theme coming up again, Joanna. It looks as though Janie is typing another question, but does anybody else on the line have any questions or comments they'd like to share? Janie says, sounds like you are a coach in charge. Best practices with coaching paired with a vision. That is lovely. I feel fortunate to have a job here. That's true. Mr. Bean was pointing out that one of our former students is online here. We can't believe she's not asking us a question or chiming in with anything else, but she is a junior in college right now training to be a math teacher. So we are, hello, Casey, doing a special shout out. That's very exciting. Well done, Casey. We look forward to talking with you in the future about your own practice. All right, well, we'll move ahead and thank you very much for joining us today. Feel free to visit us at any time online, on Twitter, on YouTube, by phone. We offer an array of services, but one thing that is for sure is that we have recorded today's conversation and we will post it to our website. You'll be able to find it on our YouTube channel. So share this with your friends and thank you all very much for joining us. We'd like to now invite you to take a very brief evaluation survey, just a few short questions. It should open up on your browser momentarily. So thank you again very much for joining us. Thank you, Joanna, Jennifer, and Mr. Beam for participating and sharing your story with us. You'll have a good afternoon. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.