When taking up the standard on fractions, Irvin tells her students they will not just repeat the rules. She distributes colored strips of paper that students fold in different ways to display fractions of a whole. She praises one youngster for recognizing patterns, then urges the rest of the students to think creatively. She absolutely won't give up on one struggling student in the class, offering him another example when he hopelessly stumbles over the first one. The fractions unit will end in the kitchen where students reduce or expand upon the amounts of ingredients for chocolate chip cookies.
Students receive no grade on a problem unless they write an explanation of how they solved it.
They also often create the rubrics or scoring guides for an assignment, which helps them think more deeply about the quality of work they must produce to meet a particular performance standard. Weekly agendas showing the work students are doing each day are sent home to be signed. At the beginning of the school year, Irvin taught her students to average their own scores and determine their current standing in math class. Her move to sixth grade was part of a larger plan at Highland Middle School to raise student achievement by keeping students with the same teachers for an extended period of time. Irvin conducted her own study of the looping concept and became a strong advocate for the idea among her teacher colleagues.