The Merrillville Community School Corporation, along with the Crown Point Community School Corporation, the School Town of Highland, and the Purdue Calumet Center for Mathematics Teaching and Learning are partners in the MARK Project. The purpose of the MARK project is to build middle school teachers’ capacity to address the Indiana Academic Standards for Mathematics by providing them with research-based instructional materials, instructional methods, and ongoing professional development that will help them develop their students’ ability to reason algebraically, thus equipping middle school students with the essential foundation for learning algebra. 

Funding for this project was granted by the Indiana Department of Education. In each year of the 3-year project, a new cohort of teachers from the participating districts will participate in the 40-hour summer workshop and Lesson Study. A follow-up 20 hour summer workshop will further deepen the participating teachers’ understanding of number and algebraic reasoning.