Ep 50. Three Things to Make Teaching Math Better

Johanna Kuiper 0:00
I’d like to state for the record that I did not plan this. It’s like a happy little accident like Bob Ross would say, but I swear this was not planned. This episode that you’re about to listen to marks three milestones. This is the 50th episode of solving for the undefined podcast. We it also happens to be the two year anniversary of the show. And to top it all off, this episode goes live on my birthday. Talk about the perfect trifecta, I couldn’t have planned it better. To celebrate today’s epic episode, I’m gonna be sharing three things. I wish I could go back and tell my first year teacher yourself. So with that, let’s get started. Welcome to solving for the undefined podcast. I’m your host Johanna, founder of Miss Kuiper’s Classroom, the place that equips teachers and creating a healthy math classroom where students can thrive, no matter their academic abilities. But it’s not always about the numbers. And that’s why I’m here, bringing you the formulas to solve your problems, math and otherwise, plus strategies on cultivating that necessary math mindset. And that’s what you can count on. Hello, hello. Welcome to the 50th episode of solving for the undefine podcast. In today’s episode, I’ll be taking you down memory lane with me thinking about my first year as a math teacher. And if I could go back knowing what I know now, what would I tell my first year teacher self to set myself up even further for success teaching. So I came up with three things as I was thinking and the number one thing I thought of when I looked back was how much time I spent in the classroom, especially at past contract hours, I spent late nights I spent weekends, I spent days off planning lessons. And while I think that helps set you up for years to come, it is not necessarily the best use of time. And I could have used that time to plan better activities or worked on building relationships, classroom community, there are more things to the classroom than just the lessons itself. And one of the biggest reasons why I felt I had to spend all this time outside of school planning was because the curriculum we had sucked. It was terrible. And one of the main reasons why it was so atrocious was it assumed so much of students without setting themselves setting students up to actually be successful in the activities. We had a Pythagorean Theorem unit in there and the discovery activity that it had, while itself, the idea that it was really good, the execution of it not so great. All of that to say is one thing that I go back and tell myself is while the curriculum still sucked, I could still use it. And one of those ways is to take those discovery lessons and those problems and make them into thin sliced problems. Meaning that I would take them I would chop them into each section and have students work on one at a time. When students are faced with these big tasks, especially a discovery based lesson. It can be overwhelming for students with all the text, all the ideas, all of the to do’s. So if you break it down into individual pieces, give them one piece at a time. And with that have them working with a team or a partner. Because more brains are better than one, students can see it from multiple perspectives, that would have served them better than just trying to implement an individual discovery based lesson. And with the thin slice problems, I would also Institute rough draft thinking, if rough draft thinking is a new term to you. If you go back and listen to episode 49, I took a deep dive into what rough draft thinking is and how to use it in the math classroom. I would take the idea of rough draft thinking and implemented with these discovery based lessons. I would also implement it with the practice problems. Now the practice problems within the curriculum were really, really good, but there were a lot of them. And so when students would look at a page, they were overwhelmed by all of these word problems, because it used more real life examples which is awesome. It was also a lot on a single page So implementing the idea of this thin slice problems, and the idea of rough draft thinking, and I might even implement the three read protocol, which is from a different curriculum, it has students read a problem three times and answer a question about it every time. So like, the first one is basically what do you notice about the problem. And the second is, what is our goal of the problem. And then the third one is what information from the problem will help us for that goal, in really taking these discovery based questions and these real life word problems and having them seriously think through the problem before they get started, because one of the main barriers that I find with students is, they don’t understand what the problem is truly asking them in order to solve the problem. Typically, students will take a guess at it, and then just stick with it, but having them read through it, and then take some time to just rough draft and guess and try something, then see an example or talk with a neighbor and then go back and edit their work. It seems like it’d be more beneficial than just having them do problems five through 10, on a piece of paper or in your notebook. And then the last thing I’ll say in regards to the curriculum might suck, but you can still use it is make pieces of it into a game. And one that I really like to use in my classroom is called math lottery. So for each class period, you have a 100 chart, so like one through 100. And each time a student finishes a problem and checks in with you, they can initial off one of the boxes. And then at the end of class one students have completed problems or the time is up, you would then draw randomly three of those numbers. And if students have initialed both places, those students earn a prize. The thinking behind doing something like math lottery for problems in a book is just to give students an external incentive to work through tough problems. They want the prize they want to win, they want to take that risk that gamble and see oh, maybe I can win the quote unquote, lottery. It’s gonna incentivize the more than just go ahead and complete problems five through 10. It’s giving them something more. And actually, in next week’s episode, we’re gonna have Brooklyn from Brooklyn’s brightest Come on, and tell us how to take worksheets and make them into games to help hook in and engage your students even further. So that’s something to look forward to next week. And that’s everything I would say about the curriculum might suck, but you can still use it is thin, slice the problems, Institute rough draft thinking and make pieces of it into a game. Now, the second major thing I would go back and tell myself would be stop doing traditional warmups. And when I say traditional warm up, I’m thinking spiral review problems or problems that are from yesterday’s learning, stuff like that. And the reason I’m saying this is because how often when you give a warm up, math based warmup, how often does it take way longer than you ever anticipated it taking my first year of teaching that happened on a regular basis, so much so that I stopped doing warm ups entirely, and just went straight into taking notes? How boring does that sound? Just start class, sit down, be quiet. We’re taking notes. That sounds awful. But that’s what happens is a warm up can take so much longer than necessary because when it’s a math problem, you have to go over it. And when students don’t understand it’s really challenging to move past that without giving background or helping students truly understand it. I’m interrupting today’s episode to ask you a vital question. Do you have the tools in your classroom for student success? We’ll wonder no more because I have a way for you to check your work. My new guide seven math teacher must haves for student success has the top seven items you need in your classroom, from classroom staples to manipulatives that are often missed. This checklist will ensure that your students have a successful school year. Additionally, each item shows the best budget and splurge options. Download the seven math teacher must haves for student success after listening to today’s episode by going to miss kiper.com/guide.

Speaker 1 9:53
And additionally, what if a kid was gone the day before when you taught this material? What are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to just sit there and wait for you? Or are they supposed to try it? What do you want from them, especially if it’s a brand new concept that they really truly don’t know how to do yet, it creates such an awkward interaction that you have to have and come up with on the fly of like, oh, I guess you don’t have to do it or try your best. So my suggestion is just to take it off the board and do something like a critical thinking task, specifically critical thinking tasks like which one doesn’t belong, estimation problems, crack the code, number, riddles, things like that. And back in episode 44, I dive into more of those and explain why they are important and can be beneficial for students. I’ll give you a quick synopsis here though, the reason why these can be more beneficial than your standard math problems as warmups is because one, there are a lot more fun than just giving a math problem. They’re asking students to still use math, but it has like a critical thinking and fun twist to it. That’s going to hook students at the beginning of class. And they’ve given you their attention and their engagement. And it’s going to sustain them throughout the entire class period. Whereas if you start off with a problem that students may or may not know how to do, some of them are engaged, some of them are hooked in, but majority might not be. It’s setting yourself up for maybe more problems later on, especially in the classroom management side of things. So I like to start off the class with a critical thinking task that’s fun, interactive, and is still math based. But it’s not the traditional math problem. And with this, because one of the major thing, reasons why I stopped doing warmups back, my first year of teaching was, it took so much time to review it. And if students didn’t understand, we had to talk about it more. And it just ate up our lesson time where students could be doing new math and new thinking. And in reality, if a kid doesn’t get the crack the code answer. It’s not the end of the world. Yes, it’s important for them to use their thinking skills to work through all of the clues. But if a kid doesn’t get the right answer, they’ve still put in the effort of trying. But it doesn’t matter if they got it right or wrong. And you don’t really have to go over that as in depth as you would a math problem. So you’re saving yourself time. And when I implement these in my classroom, now, we really do stick to about five to seven minutes, doing the problem and reviewing it, then we get to move on. Easy peasy. So that’s the second thing stop doing traditional warmups. Now the third thing that I would tell myself is you’re going to think this is ironic, but introduce spiral review. Yes, spiral review is absolutely important to do within the classroom, just the warm up is not the place for it. And where I would implement the spiral review is in the activities themselves. My first year of teaching, I treated math as a one and done kids know it. So we would do a lesson we do a unit, they take the test, they would show what they quote unquote, knew. And then we move on. And it would introduce a new concept with the foundation of what we just learned. And kids would be like, we never learned this, or I don’t know how to do this, what does it mean square root? So yes, spiral review would help mitigate some of this. And where I would place this spiral review is within the activities that we do. So say we’re doing a scavenger hunt, and the topic is geometric transformations. Maybe a couple of those problems, maybe about 20% of those problems would be spiral review from the unit before, which I guess could be integer operations or graphing linear equations, having one or two problems of those just to keep it fresh in students mind. So 80% of it is still stuff that students are currently learning. But that other 20% is things that they have previously learned. And plus, since you were doing it during team time, or independent work time, you are more free to help students who struggled with those concepts. Whereas during a warmup time, you’re trying to get the class started ready to go. Doing spiral review during the activity is going to help you target students who need that additional support. Another place that you can put spiral review is in homework. If you choose to give homework I have an entire episode diving into homework yay or nay? I believe it’s Episode Four. Free, you can go back and listen to not only my opinions, but other teachers opinions as well on whether homework has the proper place within the classroom slash home, and how we can make it more equitable for students. So if you give homework or you do the homework variation that I suggest within that episode, this would be the place for spiral review. This is giving students the opportunity to practice and self check their understanding, consistently, to know whether or not or know where they need to focus their practicing efforts. And then the last thing I would say about spiral review, or just practice in general is don’t overwhelm yourself or your students with the number of problems, less will most likely in most cases, the more you want to focus on giving rich tasks rather than product based questions. So the more you can get students to critically think about a problem, the more likely students are going to retain that and be able to actually extract learning from it than if you just gave them redundant type questions. And this idea goes for assessments, too. I know so many teachers love the front and back type assessments, I would really suggest keeping it down to two or three problems, because you can tell if a student know something or not by a few problems rather than having to go through in grade 10. But that rant is for another day. So if I could go back and tell myself when I was younger, I’d say insert the Victoria’s Secrets on here. But if I could go back and tell myself as a first year teacher, I would say one, the curriculum might suck. But here are some ways that you can still use it to stop doing time sucking, traditional warm ups, and three spiral review in the appropriate places. And as we wrap up today’s 50th episode of solving for the undefined podcast, I just truly from my heart. Oh no. I truly just wanted to say thank you so much for being part of this community. I have truly loved being the host of this podcast. And every time you sent messages to me on Instagram saying positive things or how much it’s helped you or you really enjoyed this or you can’t wait to try this in your classroom. It means the world to me, because I love sharing this stuff with you. And it is nice to know that you enjoy it too. So thank you so much for being a listener of the solving for the undefined podcast. And in the coming days because today is my birthday. If you head over to my Instagram, I have a couple of birthday celebrations to share with you some freebies, some discounts, and I hope that it will be helpful for you in your classroom. So at that old calculator, thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode. To find all the links and resources to things talked about in this episode, head on over to Miss Kuiper’s classroom.com and click on podcast

Transcribed by https://otter.ai