Rising up: Arsenal 6-8
Math achievement at Arsenal: Getting to all

2019 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor

On a warm day this past June, 6th graders at Pittsburgh Arsenal 6-8 joined 8th graders for a special kind of lesson. A teacher announced that the 6th graders would rotate through stations the older students had set up to introduce some of the math concepts they would learn the following year. At the stations, the 8th graders explained materials they had prepared, such as visuals on graph paper and dry-erase boards, and handed out worksheets with problems for the 6th graders to solve.

The 8th graders encouraged their younger counterparts, most of whom seemed bewildered by the tasks. One boy gently chided the 6th graders at his table. “Why don’t you work together? I never said you had to work alone.” His classmate offered them another way to understand a concept involving square roots: “You can see it on a number line.” At the next table, an 8th grade boy patiently reviewed his drawings of different forms of symmetry in figures, and this time, a girl wearing a colorful head wrap nodded and smiled.

The lesson was a living illustration of the path that math achievement takes at the Lawrenceville school. Patti Camper, now in her 9th year as principal there, notes that few students come to the school proficient in math. Of the 40% of the student body that speaks English as a second language, many have had interruptions in their schooling or very little formal education at all. The school adjoins Butler Street with its upscale restaurants and shops, but the overwhelming majority of Arsenal’s students come from families who are economically disadvantaged. And yet, by the time they leave, Camper sees students who are “absolutely capable” of meeting the 8th grade math standards, even if they didn’t score in the “Proficient” or “Advanced” ranges on the PSSA on testing day that year.

At Arsenal, the focus is on growth in achievement. Pennsylvania provides schools with two kinds of information about growth, through the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System (PVAAS). One is a projection of students’ future scores based on their own past performance. The other is schoolwide information based on actual test scores. Students’ scores provide evidence that the school met, failed to meet, or exceeded the state’s standard of a year’s worth of growth. As an example, Camper says PVAAS predicted that in 2019 on the math test, half of Arsenal’s 6th grade class would remain “Below Basic,” the lowest range of scores. Instead, many, many fewer students were Below Basic. “As a staff, at Arsenal,” she says, “we’ve become determined to just destroy their projections.” And year after year, they do.

How does the school produce academic growth of that order? Put another way, how do those bewildered 6th graders become 8th graders who are confident in their understanding of math concepts and skills?

Camper recalls a time when she and her teachers realized they could change what they were doing and increase students’ success. Like other administrators, she had been focusing on the students who had a chance to reach proficiency on the PSSA. “You would round up the 10-12-15 kids who were this close, and you would pour all your extra effort” into them, she says. But the “unfortunate message” sent to other students was, “You have no chance to be proficient, and so we can’t spend any time supporting you.” It dawned on Camper and her staff, “Hey, if you really work hard and intensively with 10 or 12 or 15 kids, they grow. So if you really work hard, intensively, and purposefully with all of the students we have in the room, they also will grow.”

Working “hard, intensively, and purposefully” in math classes at Arsenal begins with structuring daily lessons. Like other Pittsburgh schools with grades 6-8, math is taught in a 90-minute block. A typical lesson will involve some whole-group instruction, rotations into small-group activities, and skill-building activities on computers. “A ton of planning” goes into the rotations so they meet students’ needs, Camper says.

In 6th grade, the teacher also works to help students become comfortable with participating and with the possibility of being wrong. Camper notes that “no one wants to stand out” in middle school. At Arsenal, where students speak upwards of 15 languages, and have little in common beyond attending the same school, the issue may be magnified. “Over the course of 6th grade in all classes, we’re building that culture that you have to be a risk taker, you have to be willing to make a mistake, in order to learn,” she says. In math class, “You don’t have to be proficient to be able to talk about the math that we’re doing.” All students are encouraged to think about the problem before them and try to explain what they see. Confidence builds when they receive regular feedback from their teacher and see success in their classwork. By the end of 8th grade, Camper says, students are asking questions, explaining their paths to solutions, putting problems on the board to try to stump their classmates, and occasionally teaching the whole class.

In all three grades, Camper says teachers must “intimately know the lesson that [they’re] teaching, including all of the ways that it can go wrong.” Her math team has studied the state standards and compared them to the district’s adopted math curriculum in order to identify gaps they needed to fill. They also must know enough about their students to anticipate where problems will occur. “You have to know your students’ data like the back of your own hand,” Camper says. “You have to know [what] is preventing them from being able to solve this particular problem…if they’re missing this skill, then this is where it’s going to show up.” When students struggle, teachers must decide when to intervene and when to “allow them to take the path that they take, but then use that as a teaching tool.” And as a teacher, “you have to know [all of this] for every single child in front of you.”

Knowing students’ data doesn’t mean focusing on what they can’t do. “That’s the trap when you work with kids who are single-digit proficiency,” Camper says. “We have a wall of things that they can’t do. What do they need to do, and how can we get them to do it? That’s how you move forward.” For a 6th grader who comes in missing basic skills, “We have to find a way through that, over that, around that, so that you can still access the math that is expected in 6th grade.” That may mean allowing a student who hasn’t mastered the multiplication tables to use a calculator, or going back to teach a missing element, such as fraction skills. “Sometimes we’re not on pace with the curriculum,” she says, “but we haven’t left 50% of the kids behind, either.”

The school’s focus on growth over three years also reduces the importance of a single test score, even though that is how schools and students are judged. For students, “The PSSA is a one-time, two-day test that kind of hangs out in the shadow of your records for a year, but you can’t do anything about it,” Camper says, noting that students never see which problems they missed and get no feedback on what they did right or wrong. “It doesn’t define you.” Therefore, she’s willing to say “100 times” that “Proficient on the PSSA can’t be the measure of success.” Administrators and teachers should focus on what success means here and now, she says. What are the smaller increments of success, those areas where teachers can intervene and provide support, and what can they do to increase it?

The school’s results have allowed her some flexibility to keep the focus on learning. “Teachers have to know the most important thing in this building is student achievement,” she says. Therefore, “The window-dressing doesn’t matter.” She has heard comments like, “‘Oh, they have charts they post on the wall.’” In her view, “Those charts are great, but do your teachers have the time to plan and look at what students are doing, and have the ability to leave the curriculum if necessary, make adjustments, so that they can actually meet their needs?”

At Arsenal, she says, “I want authentic learning. I want our kids to be challenged. Most importantly, I want [teachers] to be able to say to me, they are growing, and this is how I know.”