001Advantage math recovery is really a focused professional learning for teachers where they learn about trajectories or progressions of early numeracy and it's grounded in assessments so that they can work from students strength to build instruction to move students along that number progression. It really helps us think about how students learn numbers visually, conceptually, auditorially and counting and things like that. So, it was a great way for us to understand the sequence in which students process numbers. Some students it is the visual representation. For some students, they understand number patterns and and we can use their number patterns to build upon, you know, addition and subtraction and structuring numbers. So, it's using their understanding of numbers and being able to build upon that. We know how important early numeracy is for students. The research tells us
002it's a predictor of their later success in higher mathematics as well as their later reading skills. So, we really wanted to strengthen early numeracy in APS. We've had all of our upper grades teachers actually give um kind of the the AVMR like structuring number relationship assessment so that they can see in the older students where are these gaps even and the teachers are able to target those. >> What is this number? >> 14. >> What did you do? >> I put one of the fives with the nine and then there were four left so it was 14. Oh, so you made 10 and then you knew four more. That's really cool >> to be able to pinpoint exactly where a student has a gap and focus on that skill. I'm seeing growth a lot quicker
003in those areas, which is helping me as a special education teacher really drive the IEP goals that I'm writing. Um, and also being able to communicate with families to speak to exactly how much progress is being made. What we did is we have the initial 4-day training that they do with myself and other math recovery facilitators and then we've also trained all of the math coaches so that they have support. Additionally, we're training whole cohorts of grade level teams. And the purpose behind that was so that the whole team had the same training and can talk about the same assessments and then talk about what instructional strategies they'd be able to implement based on the data that they had collected from the assessments they learned. By having a number of my teammates and our math
004coach trained in the same thing and having the same vocabulary, using the same terminology, it's helping us to work together to solve problems. Whereas before, I kind of felt like I was on an island sometimes trying to help students, but not knowing exactly the best way to do it. I was able to use some strategies to help extend for students who had really really strong foundational skills and without adding extra work or extra things for me to do, I was able to use AVMR to push those students further and able to deepen their understanding as well. We've seen a lot of growth in our students. um students who at the beginning of the year were still needing to count on their fingers to know like three and two makes five and now by the end
005of the year they're already able to do problems within 20 in their head mentally. It is one of the best things that we have done here at Long Branch. It is the number one professional learning that when teachers come back they say I wish I had had this when I first started teaching and what's great about AVMR is that it works for all students. The feedback has been exceptional from the teachers. They often say like, "This has felt like a missing piece. I felt like I had this understanding and this progression for reading, but I didn't quite have it for math, and this has filled in that gap for me. I understand where the student is or where I need to take them next and how to do that." And so it's nice to know
006that we're providing that scaffolding for the teachers to then be able to provide the best instruction for their students. So as a person who grew up feeling like I wasn't good at math because I use traditional algorithms. I didn't really understand them. I have learned more in math looking at the way we break apart numbers and things like that. I feel more successful as a mathematician myself and I'm excited to teach my students that they are also good at math. However, their brain works because we know students learn differently. I'm excited that I can help my students feel good and like they're mathematicians because they are