UMass Lowell + Bartlett School = Success

Regina Panasuk heads up a three-year teaching collaboration with the Bartlett School in Lowell.

In speaking to GSE Prof. Regina Panasuk, you get the sense that she could excite anyone about math.   

Panasuk’s passion and enthusiasm for teaching math been channeled into a successful collaboration between UMass Lowell and the Bartlett Community Partnership School in Lowell. Her work falls under the Graduate School of Education’s commitment to PK-12 outreach.  

With assistance from a $255,000 state Department of Higher Education grant, Panasuk and her team are providing educators at the Bartlett School with support for everyday teaching.  The grant, a part of the national “Improving Teacher Quality” program, funds a three-year project called Enhanced Mathematics Collaboration (otherwise known as EMC³). EMC3 develops curricula and helps teachers, para-professionals and tutors to enhance their content knowledge and pedagogy.
 
As part of this collaborative project, Panasuk held a math content institute on campus this summer.  It brought together educators of all levels from the Bartlett School who teach and supervise math, including teachers, paraprofessionals, tutors and administrators.  All participated in pre- and post-tests for self-assessment and a self reporting survey.  Both the tests and the survey evaluate the effectiveness of the project.

“To see all levels of school educators working together was terrific,” says Panasuk.  “This type of professional development speaks to how much they weigh the importance of developing a strong math program.”

As part of her commitment to offering local teachers her expertise and the University’s support, Panasuk makes herself available to observe classroom sessions, meets with teachers, and communicates online with any educator at Bartlett who asks for help.   She plans and oversees study groups and other development sessions in close collaboration with the administration and the mathematics resource teacher, concentrating on lesson planning, post-lesson analysis, content and curriculum development.

The collaboration is showing results already.  “The teachers’ enthusiasm is obvious,” says Panasuk. “They are very encouraged by the last spring MCAS scores in grades 4 through 8 which show serious improvement,” she says.

One of Panasuk’s hopes for the project is to reduce and ultimately eliminate intervention.  “ ‘Intervention’ basically means ‘re-teaching,’ ” she says.  “Intervention is what the teachers need to do if the students don’t succeed in the classroom. My goal is to get to a point where the effective teaching facilitates sound learning the first time around.”

When asked what this collaboration means for the students of the Bartlett School, Panasuk says, “Education is a two-way process. The Bartlett students are stimulated by seeing how the teachers evolve in their own learning; it is likely that students’ attitudes toward learning will soon change and they will show genuine engagement and improvement.”

Panasuk says the lessons learned in this partnership go both ways.  “This is a fantastic collaboration.  We couldn’t have hoped for anything better.  I open my classroom up for the teachers to see my decision making process and my style of teaching. I learn from the teachers just as they are able to learn from me.”

- Jennifer_Hanson