Come and pull up a chair in Deborah Harper’s senior-level math class, there are plenty to go around because the students don’t use them.
Class starts with each student randomly drawing a card which dictates which dry-erase board station they’re assigned to each day.
They meet their partner for the day, are on their feet and actively work on the board on a series of math problems they’ve never seen before.
It’s different than how math has been traditionally taught.
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"That is traditional math, I do a problem, we do a problem, now you do a problem. And as long as they can follow the exact steps, very successful, we call it mimicking," said Harper. "If I'm writing and I'm talking, their brain can't process. They're just trying to keep up."
Instead of the teacher showing the students how to do a problem and they learn to mimic her and do it the same way, she puts the problem on the board, and they take what they already know and try to figure it out on their own.
You’ll see different students coming up with different ideas and conferring with one another.
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Harper's methods came from a book she read, trying to come up with a way to help students who struggle with math, find a solution and over the past three years of doing the work, those struggling students have become masters of math.
"It blew me away. This works very well. And it's worked very well for three years from day one," she said.
Her students agree.
"As we gradually get through more problems, then it gets a little bit harder. That's when stuff gets more challenging. Because the first one that we just had the minus, and that was a little bit confusing, but we got it. It's not on there, but we got it," said Harmony Chatman, a student,
The teacher takes more of a backseat and the students are each other’s cheerleaders. They are problem-solving together.
Mesquite ISD is so impressed with what’s happening in this classroom they are rolling it out to more students at more schools, employing the combination of group work, small increments forward and standing up --- is the secret to improving math scores district-wide.
"I have a friend who owns a bunch of fast-food restaurants. He's like, OK, I can hire high school kids all day long, and they can follow the list. And after a couple of years, they can be the shift manager. So the problem is, they can't become store managers, because of the problem solving," said Harper. "These kids are learning to problem solve. They're learning how to explain."
And on top of all that academic success, think of all the money they’ll save on chairs.
