Addressing Math Needs in Utah's Grand County School District

Grand County School District (GCSD) is a small rural district situated in the southeastern corner of Utah. It includes Moab, a mining town that has recently become a regional tourist destination. The district educates around 1,500 students in three school buildings.

GCSD Superintendent Taryn Kay approached REL West to support the district's students to meet their math achievement goals. REL West worked with district and elementary school staff to help build "a local culture of data use" geared toward strengthening math instruction in targeted grade levels and improving students' math proficiency. REL West's Stacy Marple, a Moab local, began this six-month project by helping the district examine how several cohorts of elementary students were performing over time on two math assessments, the UTAH Readiness Improvement Success Empowerment (RISE) and NWEA Measures of Academic Progress (MAP), while also observing grade-level professional learning community meetings to hear elementary school teachers describe their students' challenges in math.

In summer 2022, REL West and GCSD co-developed a series of protocols designed to help Grand County's teachers make more effective use of available data--including results from statewide standardized testing as well as local benchmark and formative assessments and classroom exit ticket exercises--to drive continuous improvement. REL West and GCSD developed four data inquiry protocols and piloted them in three elementary grades:

• Protocol 1: What Can We Learn from Data? This protocol prompted productive conversations around the data collected the prior year from statewide standardized tests and from local diagnostic assessments. For example, grade 3 teachers reviewed the end-of-year data from grade 2 and discussed the cohort's skills and knowledge gaps (with no statements about teacher performance). Local instructional coaches then facilitated a multi-grade "Socratic seminar" centered on the patterns they saw. In the Socratic seminar teachers grappled with questions such as What might this mean for your instruction? and What other data could help fill in the picture of students' knowledge, skills, and challenges? to help them see the value of engaging with the data and become curious about their own practices.
• Protocol 2: Setting the Focus - Content Standard. This protocol supported the GCSD coaches to work with teachers to select a specific academic standard to focus on that was connected to the identified data patterns. The protocol also supported teachers to break down the selected standard into its component elements. As a result of using this protocol, grade 3 teachers in GCSD chose to focus on the fractions content standard. Specifically, they focused on partitioning shapes into parts with equal areas, and expressing the area of each part as a unit fraction of the whole. This also happened to address the districtwide goal of working on conceptual mathematics thinking.
• Protocol 3: Setting the Focus - Instructional Practice. This protocol guided teachers to choose an instructional practice to focus on from the What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guide Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Intervention in the Elementary Grades.¹ The teachers planned how, in a unified and consistent way, to integrate that practice into their weekly lesson schedule. Based on their work with protocol 3, GCSD grade 3 teachers chose mathematical language as their instructional focus. This evidence-based practice revolved around teaching clear and concise mathematical language and supporting students' use of language to help them effectively communicate their understanding of mathematical concepts related to fractions. Then the grade 3 teachers developed "Fractions Friday" as an implementation strategy. Specifically, once a month they focused on the language portion of working with and learning about fractions with their students.
• Protocol 4: Mapping the Improvement Cycles. This protocol introduced a continuous improvement approach designed to help teachers use formative assessment to understand how their selected instructional change was working. This approach allowed teachers to make decisions about adopting, adapting, or abandoning the instructional change they selected. As a result of protocol 4, teachers implemented a common formative assessment (CFA). This revealed that students were at different levels of competency in their overall understanding of fractions. The teachers chose to narrow the focus on one component of fractions each month.

In working through the protocols, Grand County's teachers realized that they needed to use common assessments as well as common instructional practices, to work more effectively as a team. Each participating grade level selected a common formative assessment to administer and met regularly to discuss its implementation. In an unintended ripple effect, by fall 2022, every elementary grade level, even those not participating in the pilot, had administered at least one common formative assessment, accomplishing a longstanding goal of school and district leaders. The district soon saw other results as well. Between fall 2022 and winter 2023, the percentage of grade 3 students tested at grade-level targets in math grew from 26 percent to 57 percent on the NWEA MAP in math.