How is Dunbar Middle School teacher Mike Potts helping raise test scores and encourage learning?”
Michael Potts is a math evangelist.On a Tuesday afternoon, he and fellow seventh-grade teacher Jason Tyree stand near the stairwell at Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School holding what are essentially math problems on sticks.Students crowd around, some furrowing brows, others hollering answers. One short-haired boy nails Potts’ question about the concept of “range,” then struts off in a celebratory chicken dance. Potts and Tyree are helping students learn mathematics, but they are not math teachers. Potts teaches English and Tyree teaches literature, a separate subject. In addition to giving the kids math drills in the hallways, they both incorporate math in their classrooms.Potts and Tyree are just one small part of an ongoing schoolwide math push. For three years, the school received an “accredited with warning” status from the state, because not enough students passed a new Standards of Learning test in math, first rolled out in spring 2006. Principal Brian Wray and his staff decided
Michael Potts is a math evangelist. On a Tuesday afternoon, he and fellow seventh-grade teacher Jason Tyree stand near the stairwell at Paul Laurence Dunbar Middle School holding what are essentially math problems on sticks. Students crowd around, some furrowing brows, others hollering answers. One short-haired boy nails Potts’ question about the concept of “range,” then struts off in a celebratory chicken dance. Potts and Tyree are helping students learn mathematics, but they are not math teachers. Potts teaches English and Tyree teaches literature, a separate subject. In addition to giving the kids math drills in the hallways, they both incorporate math in their classrooms. Potts and Tyree are just one small part of an ongoing schoolwide math push. For three years, the school received an “accredited with warning” status from the state, because not enough students passed a new Standards of Learning test in math, first rolled out in spring 2006. Principal Brian Wray and his staff decid
Teachers and administrators figured out that a major problem for students was understanding the vocabulary used on the (math) test. So they took each math term the students were likely to face on the test and turned it into a word of the day. Each period of the day, teachers required students to do a quick exercise with that word, like writing the word, drawing a picture, or explaining the word to a partner. Math teachers there also pushed to emphasize vocabulary and get kids to explain or demonstrate how to do problems, in their own words or using hand-held manipulatives. Principal Brian Wray and and teacher likes Mike (Michael) Potts changed the way math is taught at Dunbar, emphasizing math comprehension and vocabulary, and bringing math into every aspect of Dunbar, including all seven periods of the school day. Instead of just a being a puzzle for the math department, improving math scores became everyone’s goal.
