Expanding district pilot programs to improve math outcomes

A new case study from Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) examines how a pilot program in Lake Tahoe Unified School District (LTUSD) successfully leveraged leadership, strategic resource use and collaborative structures to improve elementary math instruction and scale practices.

As a part of the Preschool through third grade Coherence Collaboration (P3CC), the district developed a strategy “centered on capacity building by developing pacing guides, essential standards and open-ended math tasks” with California Education Partners (Ed Partners), a school reform organization staffed by academic experts that supports local educational agencies in building systems that lead to long-term change.

The pilot program, which took place at Sierra House Elementary School, led to the successful creation of a collaborative system for analyzing student learning and refining instructional strategies that can serve as a blueprint for building adult capacity and fostering instructional coherence, according to researchers.

“By consistently engaging in collaborative processes within existing structures, the school has fostered a culture of inquiry and reflection that has begun to transform math instruction within the school,” the study states. “LTUSD’s approach, which started with a focused pilot and strategically expanded, demonstrates that decentralized districts can empower sites to develop systems that improve teaching and learning and subsequently spread that learning to other sites. The journey of Sierra House highlights the importance of aligning resources and instructional leadership from both the site and the district level to develop systems … that are coherent with the district’s vision.”

The pilot

The district and Ed Partners began in 2021 creating districtwide expectations for math instruction and a plan for supporting staff to implement them, but faced challenges that ultimately narrowed the work to a single school, Sierra House Elementary.

During the second year, the math content specialist (CSP) — a long-serving high school math teacher — worked with the team at Sierra House to develop shared expectations for math teaching and learning and to build teachers’ skills for delivering instruction that met those expectations.

The CSP joined monthly staff meetings, provided individualized coaching to teachers around math instruction and introduced the use of open-ended math tasks, which provide multiple entry points and approaches or strategies for solving; draw on students’ cultures and languages and include relevant contexts; support access and flexible thinking; encourage the use of different representations and tools; and engage students in exploration and problem-solving.

“The work that the math CSP did developing and refining the essential standards and pacing guides and examining the alignment of the existing curriculum was critical for the staff at Sierra House to move forward,” according to researchers.

During this time, the principal, with the support of the CSP and P3CC program manager, established math collaboration days during which teachers could get together to analyze student work and design instructional tasks aligned to the shared expectations.

The two-day process included bringing grade-level teams together for one hour each day “to build their collective understanding of the essential standards, create shared tasks centered on those standards, and evaluate the impact of instruction as evidenced by student work and other monitoring data.”

During the pilot’s third year, “the principal added a learning lab structure to provide a space for teachers to observe one another’s instruction, which deepened the school’s shared expectations of high-quality instructional practices and collective understanding of how to support students’ learning progressions in math,” the study states. Around this time, the district also secured resources to facilitate the spread of the adult capacity-building practices to other schools throughout LTUSD.

Results

The study found that Sierra House saw improvement in students’ achievement in math after two full years of the math collaboration process — particularly those students who experienced multiple years of instruction from teachers in the pilot.

California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) data show that third-grade scores at the school improved by 13.7 percent between 2021–22 and 2023–24. Fourth-grade scores improved by 6 percent, and fifth-grade scores, representing students who had spent less time with teachers piloting the new strategies, declined 6.5 percent compared to the district overall, which improved 1.2 percent in third grade, 5.1 percent in fourth grade and 9.3 percent in fifth grade.

“It remains to be seen if this support is sufficient to develop — much less sustain — a districtwide system for capacity building, but an alignment in expectations and an increase in interest in improving math teaching and learning are underway in LTUSD,” researchers concluded. “LTUSD doesn’t have a districtwide system for adult capacity-building yet, but it now has a blueprint to work from that offers valuable insights for other districts seeking to improve instructional practices through collaboration and continuous improvement.”