Building math strategies

UTPB math professor Juli D'Ann Ratheal wants to help ECISD math teachers improve their student's TAKS scores, and government grants will help her do just that.

UTPB and Sul Ross State University in Alpine received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to let Ratheal work with middle-school math teachers throughout the Permian Basin.

"Learning math skills is of critical importance for young people to be successful in college, particularly STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors such as pre-engineering offered at UTPB," UTPB President David Watts said in a news release. "We are very proud of faculty like Dr. Juli Ratheal who leads UTPB's outreach to middle school math teachers. This program will support teachers taking graduate courses in math."

UTPB also got two Teacher Quality Grants from the U.S. Department of Education. The $77,000 grants are part of the No Child Left Behind movement and provide accepted teachers with both $2,000 stipends and the opportunity to receive extensive training, including monthly meetings with Ratheal during the school year as well as summer sessions at a July math conference in Dallas and a two-week training session at UTPB.

"The ultimate goal is to get people looking at their teaching to try to improve," Ratheal said.

One group of teachers participating in the grant program comes from grades six to eight, while the second group are teachers are from Algebra I classes in ninth grade. 

Ratheal said in addition to her training, teachers receive some classroom materials and learn about the proper way to use calculators in the classroom from a Texas Instruments specialist. The training during summer was more focused on content and exploring what areas teachers needed some greater background in, but since that time, the emphasis has been on teaching strategies to achieve high student involvement in math classes and raise TAKS scores.

"I like the fact that we share ideas of what works in our classrooms; she (Ratheal) goes out of her way to help us as we see things from a different perspective," Bowie seventh-grade math teacher Manuel Banda said.

Banda said he learned about the opportunity to participate in the program via e-mail. He attended a meeting about the grant, and he decided to apply. He said what he learned must be put to use for it to be effective.

"I think it is going to be up to us to try all these ideas in our classes," Banda said.

Ratheal said she worked with teachers in Amarillo under a Teacher Quality Grant. She said teachers with the training there saw a "statistically significant improvement" in TAKS scores compared to those without the training.

She already has 20 teachers learning with the two grants this year, but she hopes to have 40 for the following school year.

"The teachers have been really enthusiastic and ready to work," Ratheal said.

Doug Hale, chairman of the departments of mathematics and computer sciences at UTPB, said the National Science Foundation initiative would strengthen relationships with area school districts and improve students' early math preparation in order to increase college preparedness.

The long-term goal of this partnership is to improve performance in math in West Texas by impacting 150 middle school in-service teachers, and nearly 50,000 middle school students over a five-year period.

The teachers selected for the NSF project will receive nine hours of graduate credit and more than $9,000 in stipends, a news release said.

WHAT THEY GET

Here's what grant-approved teachers received:

>> $2,000 stipend.

>> Trip to summer math conference in Dallas.

>> Two-week summer training at UTPB.

>> Free classroom supplies.