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Growing up in a family of teachers in Duplin County, Anna Outlaw swore she would never be a teacher and she would definitely not come back to Duplin County as an adult. Fortunately for the students at Duplin Early College High School, she broke both of those promises.
“In high school, I had a math teacher who sat at the podium and talked for the entire period — she told us a math rule and then we did it 50 times,” says Outlaw, now a math teacher herself. “I became a teacher because I didn’t want it to be that way. So when I’m lesson planning, I think about how I was as a student. There are things that students just have to practice — like solving equations. But I’m not going to stick them in rows and make them do 50 problems in a row. I need to find a way to help them enjoy what they’re doing.”
Outlaw teaches integrated mathematics, modeling mathematics and freshman seminar in a rural county that is expanding early college strategies to every school in the district. That means the instructional approach she uses in her classroom — and the belief that every students deserves access to postsecondary education — are universal across the district.
“College-ready doesn’t necessarily mean all students will go to a four-year university, but everyone needs training in some way that will make them successful after high school,” says Outlaw. “We’re trying to give them the steps and the resources to be successful after high school, no matter which path they take. Getting the college credits and learning those skill strategies in the classroom will help them be successful when they leave our school.”
With support from NC New Schools, Duplin Early College is among innovative schools statewide implementing a proven common instructional framework, a set of classroom strategies that consistently improve student performance. Outlaw believes the strategies - which emphasize the need for students to read, write, think and talk in every class every day - are critical to helping her students learn.
“I firmly believe that the one who is talking is the one doing the learning. It’s important for students to know that I’m not the possessor of all the knowledge,” says Outlaw. “If they’re not talking, they’re not thinking about the problem. Being able to verbalize the problem and the solution is more important than just doing the math.”
Since most of her students won’t be solving advanced math problems later in life, Outlaw sees her role as teaching collaboration, critical thinking and reading skills.
“If they can talk their way through a problem and come to a solution that makes sense, that’s essential,” says Outlaw. “I’m talking in my class maybe 10 minutes for the whole period. The rest of the time they’re in groups - and sometimes they get frustrated because I don’t really answer their question. I pose questions back to them, so they use those thinking strategies to come up with their own solutions. So I’m not just teaching math, I’m teaching them how to think. They need to be able to verbalize what they understand and what they don’t, instead of just giving up.”
At Duplin Early College, Outlaw says that all of the incoming students are from low-income families or will be the first in their families to attend college. Teachers have to set the expectation that all students will be successful, she says, regardless of background.
“People may think that these strategies don’t work with certain types of students, but they do,” Outlaw says. “It’s not an option for students to fail. We’ve picked up students from their homes to take them to their exams. When students see that the principal and the counselor and the teachers are all behind them, that changes things for them.
“When you see students walk across the stage at graduation who might not have graduated at another school, that’s what teaching is all about.”
A graduate of East Duplin High School, Outlaw holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and science education from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
