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Over the past two years, Doug LaMunyan has seen an increase in the number of his students who enroll in Algebra 2. He expects that those numbers will only continue to grow.
That’s because Clarkston High School, where LaMunyan is the Principal, is one of the schools participating in the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s (OSPI) project to modernize Algebra 2. He said the updated curriculum provides teachers with the flexibility to be responsive to their students’ needs and interests.
“Decisions made for hundreds of thousands of kids restrict us from making decisions individually for kids that help them to have the most success,” he said. “This curriculum allows for that freedom, at the ground level, to make success for kids.”
Washington state requires high school students to earn three credits of math to graduate. Most students take Algebra 2 to fulfill this requirement, in part because it’s a prerequisite for future math classes like precalculus and calculus. Many 4-year colleges and universities also require Algebra 2.
But for students who plan to pursue pathways that don’t require additional math classes, Algebra 2 may not be the most relevant course. Arlene Crum, Director of Secondary Mathematics at OSPI, also acknowledged that the curriculum used in Algebra 2 hasn’t been significantly revised since it was first developed in the 1950s.
“We looked at the content that was in it and they go very deeply or spent a lot of time on procedures that really are very specific to calculus,” she said. “Students didn’t have [knowledge] transferability because they didn’t know why they did what they did. The worst reason to do something mathematically is because your teacher told you to. You should do it because it makes sense.”
Modernizing math in Washington
The project to modernize Algebra 2 started with a partnership between OSPI and the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Washington is one of 22 states participating in the Center’s Launch Years Initiative, which aims to support these states in scaling post-secondary pathways in math, especially as careers rely more and more on mathematical knowledge and skills.
Starting in 2020, Washington worked with the Launch Years Initiative to develop a structure to modernize Algebra 2. Crum said OSPI worked with experts from across the country to generate ideas for updating the course, then researched existing instructional materials.
Crum’s team reviewed the traditional Algebra 2 course content to determine what knowledge and skills all students need. That content all together now comprises the first semester of Modern Algebra 2.
Chris Baldus, a math teacher at Clarkston High School, was one of more than a dozen educators who helped write the instructional materials for part of the first semester of Modern Algebra 2. He said he was interested in figuring out the math that all students need from Algebra 2 regardless of their future plans.
“That idea was really appealing to me — to make the class relevant,” he said.
For the second semester of Modern Algebra 2, teachers choose at least 4 modules to teach out of 6 modules available in the Modern Algebra 2 curriculum. The modules include:
- Advanced Modeling
- Data Science
- Finance
- Introduction to Data
- Matrices and Vectors
- Trigonometry
“We gave flexibility to teachers so that they could choose which modules within those categories would be most meaningful to their students in the moment and for their futures,” Crum said.
After creating professional learning sessions to support teachers in teaching the new curriculum, Modern Algebra 2 was launched as a pilot project in 10 high schools during the 2022–23 school year. A few additional schools are implementing the new curriculum this year.
Implementing the pilot project
Baldus taught three sections of the class at Clarkston High School last year. LaMunyan, his Principal, observed that Baldus’ teaching style is to answer student questions by asking them more questions. It creates opportunities for his students to have conversations about math.
“They’re talking about it and they don’t realize they actually do know [the content],” LaMunyan said. “That’s what makes him so special for this position and as a teacher. He just engages. He engages, he invests in kids, and they create relationships.”
As Baldus sees it, his role as a math teacher is to support students in recognizing their thinking and their contributions as valuable to the classroom.
“So many traditional math courses, just the way the content is formatted and the kind of thinking that they value, reserve the status for kids who [want to] do calculus,” Baldus said. “That’s good and that’s important, but there’s 80% of the room not [going] that way. Their ideas are valuable too.”
His collaborative nature, combined with the conceptual approach embedded in the philosophy of Modern Algebra 2, is paying off for students. Baldus said students are more engaged in class, which aligns with survey responses from students at all schools that participated in the pilot project. Survey responses also indicated that students felt more confident in problem-solving after completing Modern Algebra 2.
In Clarkston, LaMunyan said the school asked a second teacher to teach Modern Algebra 2 this year because demand for the class is so high.
Cindy Mendenhall, chair of the math department at Clarkston High School, is teaching Modern Algebra 2 alongside Baldus this year. She said there are challenges with teaching a new curriculum and was in favor of adding another teacher for Modern Algebra 2 before adopting it schoolwide.
Mendenhall also acknowledged that modernizing Algebra 2 is one way that the school itself is modernizing to prepare students for the future.
“We’re teaching students that are going into careers that we don’t know how to prepare them [for],” Mendenhall said. “To prepare them to be better thinkers is what we need to focus on. … The math background should be there, but taught in a different way that doesn’t make them feel like they’re just preparing for college, but makes them feel like they’re preparing for life.”
This story was written by Chelsea Embree, Director of Publications and Engagement Strategy at OSPI. You can contact the Communications Team at commteam@k12.wa.us.
