Lamont Leverages Improvement Teams to Learn and Scale

The Lamont Improvement Team is celebrating two years of powerful collaboration, learning, and growth that is shaping the future of math teaching and learning across their district. Their district’s Framework for the Future and their participation in Ed Partner’s PreK-3 Coherence Collaborative (P3CC)  are guiding their strategy. From the very beginning, the team committed to learning together. They are digging into Choral Counting and Counting Collections and Children’s Mathematics: Cognitively Guided Instruction. Teachers are testing strategies in their own classrooms and reflecting together on what worked best for students. They regularly bring classroom artifacts to share, sparking rich discussions and strengthening a culture of shared learning and collective growth.

During their second year in P3CC, the team expanded its impact through Math Lesson Labs, which brought teaching practices to life and gave educators the opportunity to learn together in classrooms with students. The Math Lesson Labs focused on how to effectively facilitate Open Tasks, such as math warm-ups, Counting Collections, and problem solving tasks. The labs also enabled the team to expand their efforts by including site coaches and upper-grade teachers to deepen alignment across schools. These labs not only advanced the team’s shared understanding of effective math practices, they also modeled a new way of engaging educators through active collaboration, planning, and co-facilitation of math lessons, which is now embedded into Lamont’s system for professional development.

What makes this work especially powerful is how the Improvement Team’s learning directly informs districtwide scaling efforts. Convenings, staff meetings, and grade-level PD sessions all draw on insights from the Improvement Team, the people closest to the work, to ensure strategies are grounded in classroom realities. Principals have also played a central role, meeting monthly to plan math-focused staff meetings. Their approach to incorporating math-focused learning into staff meetings enabled the principals to adapt this strategy to support and enhance the district’s literacy efforts. Lamont is building a sustainable district system that not only spreads effective practices but also celebrates teacher leadership and shared ownership. They are leading with collaboration and, in doing so, creating the conditions for sustainable improvement across the district.