HOUSTON – Lyndsy Mason talks about math the way some people talk about music. “I love math because it’s a language,” she says.
Mason is a sixth-grade accelerated honors math teacher at Fleming Middle School, one of 28 Houston ISD schools labeled a high-priority campus as part of this year’s state takeover of Texas’ largest school district. But she also wears many other hats at Fleming.
Keeping up with KPRC 2′s Focus on Fleming initiative, we spoke with Mason to learn about the challenges the campus is facing and what’s being done to try to overcome them.
Mason is not just your regular sixth-grade teacher. Recently, she took up a new role as a teacher expert, a position created by HISD Superintendent Mike Miles where 32 teachers are hired to review lesson plans with curriculum writers.
“I have a new position, whereas a teacher, I go to the district offices, and I help vet the curriculum that they actually put out for sixth-grade math. So, I actually work directly with the sixth-grade curriculum writers,” Mason said.
One of the biggest issues throughout the district has been the curriculum. When Miles was named superintendent shortly after the TEA takeover, he began to introduce a new curriculum -- the New Education System Schools (NES) -- which he wanted to start following immediately.
NES, a reform program, originally began with 28 schools that were located in predominately low-income neighborhoods. A short time later, principals at an additional 57 campuses volunteered their schools for the program. What makes NES different from other campuses includes turning libraries into discipline centers and giving teachers standardized lesson plans.
Mason tells us the new program changed the normal flow of things this school year.
“In the beginning, there were literally changes every day, every moment. It was like, ‘Okay, no, let’s do this different. Okay no, let’s switch this.’ So, it was high-paced, high-energy,” Mason said.
She added the new lesson plans moved so quickly; that some students couldn’t keep up with them. When KPRC 2 recently asked some Fleming families to grade the school year so far, this was one of the issues a student brought up.
Mason said what worked for her was going through the material and internalizing it, adjusting it for her students.
“I adjusted where I needed to make the model work for me and then still be able to put my own seasoning on it. As Principal Adams says, you got to season it. But it works. They are learning, and I see more confidence in them as they go through the weeks,” Mason said.
Although Mason has adjusted to the new lesson plans and its challenges to her liking, several other teachers and parents have not.
In a recent story first reported on Click2Houston, an image of what most may deem as an “inappropriate” lesson plan was supposed to be taught to middle school students at Houston ISD’s NES-aligned campuses.
Superintendent Miles said the material was flagged before reaching students, but to avoid another close call, he decided to hire “teacher experts” to review all curriculum to ensure it’s age-appropriate and meets his high standards.
So, after teaching her two classes at Fleming, Mason heads to Houston ISD’s main campus around noon to help vet the sixth-grade math curriculum and provide feedback to the curriculum writers.
“It’s not the curriculum department’s responsibility to implement the model, they’re just giving us what to teach. It’s the teacher’s responsibility to really take that, internalize it, and figure out what they should keep or shouldn’t keep so that they can implement the NES model as expected,” Fleming Principal Devin Adams said.
To help teachers and students adjust to the new lesson plan, Adams said what Mason is doing with the curriculum writers is helping them understand how teachers and students perceive the information best.
“We really want to make sure that the curriculum writers understand that, for teachers, essentially, we have about 35 to 40 minutes. So, the meat of that standard, of that skill has to be within that presentation, and then how we can embed the kids into the story, or the text will have to come through the meat of the lesson,” Adams said.
During her time with the curriculum writers, Mason is actually doing the assignments and offering feedback on how they can be better broken down or made more understandable for students.
“For example, in sixth grade, they were doing a memoir about someone living during yellow fever. The standard for that lesson was about students being able to paraphrase or summarize a specific piece of text, and the text was regarding yellow fever. But there was an activity that the curriculum writers put into the slide where the students had to read a waiver, and the follow-up question asked students if they would sign the waiver, " Adams explained. “Although that question was great, if we’re thinking about the skill that they have to master at the end of their lesson, it’s about summarization and paraphrasing. So, is this the best use of our 30-35 minutes for the time? So, we take that and kick it over to the curriculum writers.”
Mason said changes to the curriculum have already been made, many of them dealing with the aesthetic of the lesson plans, making it easier to understand for both students and teachers.
“We wanted to make it where anyone would be able to come into a classroom and be able to teach the lesson plan. It’s not a script but more a reference guide now,” Mason explained.
She also spoke about the “inappropriate” lesson plan that surfaced online a few weeks ago, saying now, when there are controversial topics, the district will have disclaimers and send a letter or an email to parents asking them if they would like to opt out their child from the lesson plan or not.
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