Internship

My internship took place at R.H. Fulmer Middle School (FMS) in the Lexington Two School District (L2SD) in the fall of 2024. My supervisor was Sims Boland, the head of the math department and 8th grade math teacher. For my internship I worked within the academic intervention team at FMS, serving as a math interventionist to roughly 48 students. Throughout my internship I worked with my students at a tier III intervention level to help them fill in their math knowledge gaps. Additionally, I worked with these students’ core math teachers to prepare them for success within their math class.

The project I completed during my internship for FMS was developing intervention content and instructional materials to help build the program. This project serves two purposes: (1) to build the available resources for intervention teachers to use and (2) to produce learning experiences for students who need additional help in math. This project was an area of need for FMS as the interventionist department was brand new (only existing for one year prior). This means that little to no material exists for teachers and students to use within an interventionist class.

During my internship, I worked on three different deliverables to create opportunities for successful learning experiences. The very first thing I completed was a needs assessment of the students that I would be serving that quarter. This included performing monitoring an assessment, collecting and analyzing data so that recommendations could be made on how to best support these students learning. This needs assessment created a foundation for knowing a student’s strengths and weaknesses; this information was useful throughout my internship to track how students were growing.

The second thing I created during my internship was a job aid for myself and other math interventionists. The job aid consisted of a proficiency scale based on three essential SC Ready math standards for 6th graders. The proficiency scale broke down each standard by skills that students should be able to achieve at different levels of comprehension for the given standard. This job aid is a tool that can be used from the very beginning of the needs assessment, all the way until the end of a quarter. It allows for student progress to be tracked over time as they work on their knowledge gaps.

The largest portion of my internship was creating instructional materials for math intervention lessons. This included but was not limited to developing lessons and activities for small groups, whole groups, and one-on-one scenarios. Each lesson, resource, activity, or practice was created with the needs assessment in mind to ensure that students were attempting skills that they were struggling with in a safe environment. Below are some examples of items created for my student’s instruction.

My internship was the most impactful timeframe within my master’s degree program as it was an opportunity to apply everything I had been learning into my personal career. The challenge that I was presented with was how do I use all my new knowledge to help build our intervention program at FMS while simultaneously maintaining my focus on my student’s growth. Building a library of resources for a variety of content with the SC Ready math standards was straightforward and could easily follow an instructional design process. I was able to use the needs assessment data to determine what topics were most important and begin mapping out the development of different instructional materials. Additionally, I was able to examine the resources already available from L2SD and how those might be able to be utilized. 

The challenge became more prominent when I began implementing these instructional materials with my students. I came to realize that students were lacking in two areas that could not be easily detected on a needs assessment, math literacy skills and confidence in their math skills. These two things are vital to students being successful in math so I had to stop and reflect on how I could adjust my current plan to address these new needs. This moment is what changed my internship for the better as I was able to dig deeper into some of the things that were keeping my students from growing. 

As an instructional designer and developer, it was hard to put aside everything that I had originally thought would be implemented, but it forced me to more intentionally evaluate my resources. I used this observational data to make adjustments to my curriculum and learning materials so that my students’ outcomes in math would improve. This incident also opened my eyes as to how important the analysis phase is within instructional design. If more time had been dedicated to knowing my target audience, I may have been able to discover these important characteristics earlier on and better prepare for my instructional development.