Ep 69. Classroom Transformations: Making a Meaningful Math Experience

Johanna Kuiper 0:00
Have you ever wondered how teachers transform their classrooms into forensic labs and operation room or even Starbucks? In today’s episode, we’re joined by Katy and Natalie, who are here to share how they create memorable classroom transformations for their students. Let’s get started.

Johanna Kuiper 0:18
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.

Johanna Kuiper 0:48
Hello, hello. Welcome to a brand new episode. I’m super excited for this one, because today is the first time I’ve ever interviewing two guests at once. We have Katy and Natalie joining us today talking about transforming your classroom and having a fun, overall experience with students. Welcome.

Natalie 1:11
Thank you for having us.

Johanna Kuiper 1:12
Yeah, absolutely.

Johanna Kuiper 1:14
Will you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Katy 1:17
Sure. So my name is Katy. And I started off my journey as an educator in fourth grade, start teaching fifth grade got real nervous when my principal and moved to eighth grade math and I thought, Okay, those are real big kids, but I’ll give it a try. I ended up loving middle school. So I taught eighth grade math for a couple years with some science in there and then moved schools and got a job in sixth grade math, which I was very excited about. And that is when I met Natalie. And so from there, we’ve been teaching sixth grade math for the last whole six years now.

Natalie 1:54
So I started in fourth grade math and science. Also, I took over a classroom in February. So finish off that school year. And then I did a year of second grade all subjects. Very interesting. I moved the year right after. And then that’s when I started sixth grade math with Katie. So we both kind of came from different backgrounds. But the last six years we’ve been teaching together. So that’s been our journey so far.

Johanna Kuiper 2:23
That’s so cool that you you had like an elementary background, and you came and were able to do Middle School, and then find a teacher bestie in the process. That’s awesome. And were you guys working together all of the time that you’ve been as sixth grade math teachers?

Natalie 2:40
Yes, we have been like, stuck to each other’s hips for the last six years.

Johanna Kuiper 2:45
That’s so awesome.

Katy 2:47
We had a brief real nervous year of during COVID. When we both when we had to have like, what do you call that hybrid was Yep. And then we had to have that one classroom with kids. They didn’t switch. So she had a different partner for a year. And it was really sad. We still were on the same campus, and we still, you know, collaborated and whatnot. But we’ve been set to each other for quite some time now.

Johanna Kuiper 3:11
That’s the best. So today, we’re talking about transforming your classroom and having these classroom experiences. And what got you interested in doing these for your students?

Natalie 3:22
So we were just talking about that. We it was our I know it was a refresher, I’m pretty sure it was our second year, we obviously were a little bit more comfortable with the content and kind of the flow of things until we were like, Okay, how can we make our kids more engaged and just have more fun with what we’re trying to teach them? Because I’m sure you know, also working with older kids, it’s not always easy. And so we got this random. I don’t even know where this idea came from. I feel like we probably saw something on Pinterest. Yeah,

Katy 3:53
we were just interesting, like, ideas to teach and supplement our curriculum to teach ratios and proportion. And we come across a Skittles activity and we were like, okay, that’s fine, like candy. It has to help. And then, I don’t know it was after school that we were like, Okay, how can we set this up and let’s just figure out how I wanted to structure the activity. And then we were like table cause we go get like rainbow colored tablecloth and have like, just tablecloths. So we ran to Walmart together. And then I think it was while we were at WalMart. We were like, Let’s go look for a shirt we could wear. And they have these super corny like, Rainbow Unicorn T shirts. And so I have a cricket. She had a cricket at the time. So we were like, Let’s put

Natalie 4:40
it says The thing was like, keep it 100 And we were doing that activity with percents. So we changed it to say keep it 100% of

Katy 4:52
t shirts, and then we were like, well, we might as well get streamers so it just kind of all. They’re all in this one trip to Walmart. So we went back we decorated our rooms real quick. And we were like, Okay, this is gonna be like the best day ever. And then the next day came. And I think we both said, we will never do that. Yeah, that was like the kids were not that well behaved.

Natalie 5:15
Yeah. So we kind of went into it blindly, just with an idea. And then like, she said, like, we’re never doing this. Again, I think we both kind of looked at each other. Like, that was a lot. And I think at the end of that year, like, we tried something again, and it went way better. And then it kind of just grew from there. So yeah, it wasn’t a pretty start.

Katy 5:38
But we learned like, okay, these, you know, these five things are going to be things we have to change for the next one, if we want to be successful. And then it was, so we decided to keep going from there. So

Johanna Kuiper 5:48
and that speaks so much to to like, when you’re trying something new, it’s not going to be perfect right out of the gate. And that’s something like we teach our kids to like when we’re trying to math problems for the first time. It’s not going to be pretty imperfect. But as you learn, and as you grow, you can able to change the things and tweak it to make it a better experience overall. And that seems exactly what you guys did.

Katy 6:12
Yeah, that was definitely like, yeah, we have potential in this. We’ll try it again. And then yeah, it was definitely worth

Johanna Kuiper 6:21
it. Yeah, I can imagine. So tell us more about some of the transformations that you’ve done.

Natalie 6:28
We have done, I haven’t even kept track, I think, um, but we have done pretty simple one. So we’ll probably get more into talking about Starbucks day. But I know that’s one of my favorites. Just because it’s very like low key. And the prep is pretty easy. It could cost you literally nothing out of pocket. That is when we do for a testing day. That’s the first one we do every school year. We’ve also done more extravagant ones like,

Katy 6:54
um, yeah, like CSI day, where we planned a couple of crime scenes that kids were solving, and dressed up as detectives, we’ve also done globe

Natalie 7:05
day. So they’re kind of all over the place, we do try to relate them to the content we’re learning whenever possible. So I think the most recent one we’ve done is our order of operations day. And so that was covering the order of operations. And that was where we just turned our classroom into surgery rooms. So yeah, we’ve done quite a few, like I said, they’re all over the place. But, you know, like we said, we’ve kind of just learned what works and what doesn’t, and kind of tried to get better at them each time. So

Johanna Kuiper 7:37
awesome. And are there some that you do more than once with kids? So like the Starbucks, when you said was for test review? Is that something you do multiple times throughout the year?

Katy 7:48
No, we’ve never repeated one throughout the year, not in one school year. Yeah, it was four. Yeah. Although I could see Starbucks state being something that you would do more than once. But we’ve kind of felt like planning in different things sort of surprises them. Yeah, we’ve never repeated one of the school year, cool. We will only do like three to four a year. We don’t like each one of these a year. Otherwise, it’s very wearing.

Johanna Kuiper 8:18
I can imagine it seems like so much goes into it. So can you kind of tell us from your idea of doing one to the process of implementing it? What are the steps that you take to do that?

Natalie 8:32
Well, we were just actually working on one, we’re going to be doing one next week, right when we get back. So literally, we start with just kind of mapping out on paper with a pencil or a pen. What does this look like? What are the actual activities we’re going to do? And how are we going to relate those to the content, the particular one that we’re working on right now is going to be a big review for the whole school year, because we’re gonna start seeing testing soon. So then once we kind of have an idea of like, what activities and what content we’re going to use, we take that to our laptops.

Katy 9:05
Yeah, we just start to format, okay, what do we want the day to look like? What are we gonna do a station style, how are like what our kids actually going to have in their hands. And when we start creating those things. So we start with creating those resources that they that we want them to actually have in their hands to do the actual math for the day.

Natalie 9:25
And then it’s really just about structure, like we really take a lot of time to think of like, not just what it’s going to look like, but like what are the kids gonna be doing each second of this day, because as we learned from the very first one we did, it can go really bad really fast if it’s not structured in a way that everyone’s kind of responsible and accountable for something at all times. So I’d say we spend a lot of our time kind of figuring out like the stations and who’s doing what and that kind of thing. And then the last thing I’d say we do is kind of look at like the fun stuff, which we really enjoy like the decor and things like that but that’s definitely what we save for last, because we know that none of that’s going to matter if our kids aren’t actually being productive and collaborative with their team when we’re doing them. So that’s kind of what it looks like in a nutshell.

Johanna Kuiper 10:13
Nice. And I, I liked what you said about having students have like a job or something to keep them accountable. Because that was one of my questions thinking about how do I keep students on track throughout something, because I feel like they might get lost in having this fun experience and not actually doing math. And so it’s cool that you are integrating that in and thinking about what are kids doing every single second, to make sure that they are doing math and having fun? Yeah, exactly.

Katy 10:45
I think a lot of that, too, we try to combat with like the, the competitive like spirit of it. So like in this one, we’re assigning points and you have games that you can only play the games, which is a lot of the structure we add to everything we do in our classroom is the accountability of like, if you didn’t do the math, and you didn’t like put the work in, then you don’t get to do the fun stuff. So they are usually aren’t at this point in the year they’re already accustomed to, like if I just sit here and goof around, I’m not gonna get to participate in any of this fun stuff. So they kind of know, like, I have to do my part.

Natalie 11:23
Tough Love. Definitely very team tough love.

Johanna Kuiper 11:27
Nice. I feel like middle schoolers, especially sixth graders, as they’re transitioning from elementary to middle school,

Katy 11:33
they need that tough love. Absolutely.

Johanna Kuiper 11:36
So what are some of the benefits to doing these classroom transformations.

Natalie 11:41
So I feel like the big one that we’ve both talked about over the years is definitely the student buying you back. Because especially when our students come to us, we have three feeder schools. And so we’re getting students from different places. And so getting them into a room. And to enjoy math is just a struggle, you know, all on its own. And so we have found that classroom transformations have really helped us kind of, I don’t even say like speed up that process of getting them to buy into what we’re trying to teach them, but also just the interest, because we know when students are engaged, it’s just going to help them try harder in their own words. Because they actually are really bought into, you know, whatever we’re working on at that moment. So

Katy 12:27
yeah, I feel like it kind of keeps them on their toes a little bit like they’re excited to come to class, because they know that there’s always something a little bit new happening. And they want to be prepared and they want to be there to engage in it. Because they know they have like Natalie said they have that buy in of like, math is fun. And math class is fun. And so once we have them there, I feel like that hook, I don’t know flows throughout each day. And you know, we could just be doing a simple lesson the next day, and they’re okay with it. Because they know that it’s like leading up to Yeah, like they know that there’s going to be something exciting or that they just came out of, you know, a transplant or no, they’re always ready, because they know that math is fun. And even on those days where it’s not as exciting. They still aren’t in their mind or thinking math is fun.

Johanna Kuiper 13:18
That sounds so cool. I wish I would be in your classroom. That would be I remember, as a as a middle schooler, it was just sitting in desks, taking notes from a textbook. And that was pretty much it. And that’s so boring and not how people learn. Like you learn through being engaged in talking and having a sense of belonging and community and feeling safe. Because if you don’t feel safe, you can’t take risks and learn new things. And it seems like doing these classroom transformation starting at the beginning a year with one to kind of create that community with your students has been super successful for you and for them just making math of fun and amazing place for them to be.

Natalie 14:01
Yeah, the community like aspect of it is huge. Like I said, we get kids from three different schools, which comes with a lot of different, you know, issues and roadblocks sometimes, but it is really fun to see them like at first obviously, they’re a little bit thrown off. But then we had them dressed as surgeons like they were wearing full on like, what do you call those not robes, the gowns, they were wearing the hair nets and it’s like they’re okay with being silly with each other while they’re doing math because they know that we’ve been working on it all year and they just have that buy in so yeah, the community pieces definitely really cool to see throughout the

Katy 14:42
year. And I think that’s one of my favorite parts of our transformation days is it just gives everyone permission to be a little silly. Like you know we play it up like I when I open the door I’m like Oh welcome surgeons like I’m so glad you’re here are you know our patients are already ready. Like we’re just playing I ended up working silly like, you know, even Starbucks stay, we treat them as if they were our customers and more the barista. And so the more you play it up and just give permission to say like, we’re gonna be a little bit silly today and have fun. Yeah, just play really well, we’re learning and doing this math does definitely build that community, because they are feeling like, okay, we can be safe together, we can be ourselves and just have some fun. So,

Johanna Kuiper 15:29
so cool. So kind of moving into if someone was wanting to commit and do these kinds of transformations. I know, one thing that I hear often from teachers is we don’t have a lot of time. So if a teacher came to you, and was like, I want to do this, there’s, but they’re so time consuming. What would you say to that?

Natalie 15:50
I think we both kind of probably agree, Katie could say if she does it, everything in teaching is time consuming. I mean, you know, we took so many years kind of creating lessons and our curriculum that we use, and it’s like that was time consuming, you know, other people prefer to put their time into supplemental resources. And so it’s kind of just what you value. And that’s different for everyone. And so if it’s something that I would say a teacher really wants to try and truly believes in, then it’s worth putting your time into that for that particular moment. You know, there’s different seasons of teaching in life. And so it may not always be that that’s why we only do for a year. But it’s kind of just deciding, like, Is this something I want to do? If so, then it’s definitely going to be worth the time for the outcome and

Katy 16:39
the results. Yeah, and I mean, we’ve talked about the community building, we’ve talked about the students buying an engagement. And I think you can either put, you know, time into correcting and all of those things where you can put time into building that. And this is the way we choose to use our time to build up that. Of course, there’s many other ways you can build that in your classroom. But this is one that we found that we enjoy, so we’re okay putting our time in, because it’s fun for us to. And like Natalie said, everything is hard. So whatever, however you want to deal with these things is is your choice, but we choose to put time in this way. And, you know, that’s how, and the payback, I feel like is definitely worth it.

Natalie 17:26
And then I mean to be completely transparent, like I think every year, some of our highest, like data from assessments is always coming. The days after classroom transformation, a lot of times they lead up to like, that will be our review for a test or quiz. And we always get the highest scores. When we do one of those, sorry, let me close my window, my neighbor.

Johanna Kuiper 17:57
That’s so cool that you take it as like a review day to do these amazing things. Because that also means like students have a pretty good foundational knowledge of everything with an AI unit, it’s kind of like leading up to this fabulous thing. Like they’re more bought in the entire unit because they know this thing is coming. And then they get to show all of their hard work the next day on that assessment, and that’s awesome about that. Your highest data is from those days, right after your transformations. Yeah,

Natalie 18:30
so you know, aside from like, because from the outside, I think oftentimes we will think it’s just like, offending and not super productive. But you know, just like we talked about, like the structure and everything that definitely not only shows with like their attitudes and their buy in, but definitely on the data that we get from that particular standard, or whatever we’re covering. So another thing to think about for teachers because at the end of the day, like that’s our number one goal is for students to show, you know, growth or achievement. So, definitely a big factor for us.

Katy 19:01
And for the time being, I think too, if you if it’s something that you enjoy, or you enjoy or like you decide to do your first transformation, you enjoy the process, a lot of what we do will laminate or create in a way that we can use it again the following year. So this year, our transformations have been very simple to do because as far as since like the order of operation, they we already had everything laminated the like all the files made and everything. So when we went to go prepare for our room setup, it was like even we even save all the tablecloths that we use. So we just have it all in a bin. So when it’s time to do that transformation, we just grab it and set everything up. So I think most of the ones that we’ve repeated take us maybe like 30 minutes to actually put everything up and be ready because we’ve saved it so that’s just I don’t know when people say it requires a lot of time it does the first time like an investment but yeah, if you’re gonna invest time into it, I would definitely only suggest creating, like a long term plan. Yeah, hi, you’re gonna keep using your stuff because I think we bought like three new tablecloths for three bucks. And even like the table quality from the table and stuff, we just save everything. So we don’t have to buy much.

Johanna Kuiper 20:19
That’s smart cutting it, putting it in like a bin and keeping it from year to year. That’s a smart idea. I think I see a lot of teachers do that with like, curriculum and stuff is have it very organized in such a way where it makes it easy the next year to just pull it out and do it. Yeah. So you said that you do four transformations a year, are you talking those are like the four major or and like you do like minor ones? Are those the only four transformations that you do in a year?

Natalie 20:49
We do we only do like three to four a year. This year, we’ve done Starbuck stay CSI day, Operation day, and then our fourth one is going to be I forgot what we’re calling it. But like a throwdown competition day.

Katy 21:05
Yeah, like a sports.

Natalie 21:06
Yeah. So yeah, we’ve kind of found that’s like the sweet spot we talked about in the past, like doing more. But we’ve kind of, I guess, came to the realization that if we use them too much, they might not be as exciting. And I guess students might not be as bought in if it becomes a norm. So it’s like a nice little surprise every now and then every couple of months.

Johanna Kuiper 21:30
Nice. That’s a smart idea of keeping it just rare enough, that it creates that hype and that excitement. Yeah. So if a teacher wanted to get started, what would you suggest the first step be?

Natalie 21:45
Find a Teacher bestie

Johanna Kuiper 21:47
it seems like it’d be so much easier with someone else. Um,

Katy 21:51
well, I think it depends on how much time you want to put into it, honestly. Because if you want to put a lot of time in, and it’s exciting to you, then you could create your own. If you don’t want to, then you could go out and you can look for what to purchase. And then you have all the resources there to print. And I sort of walk you through how to set it up and things like that. So that’s what we’ve spent a lot of our time doing is creating those types of resources for people.

Natalie 22:16
But if a teacher wants to, like take one on and start from scratch, I would say picking the standard or like the skills that they want to cover. And kind of deciding on a theme. Whether it ties in or not directly with like, the order of operations example we talked about is probably a good starting place. Because then from there, you can kind of start mapping out okay, what are the activities I want to do? Am I gonna do station? So am I gonna do whole class style? So you definitely do you have

Katy 22:43
that you can just start with like the structure part of it, of what you want the day to look like. But otherwise? Yeah, once you have the topic, the theme, the structure, then you’re good.

Johanna Kuiper 22:55
And what you said write up a question for me that I didn’t even think about asking is, is a lot of the stuff that you do. Is it a whole group thing? Or is it like individuals? Or is it teams? How do you? What do you do with that?

Katy 23:08
We’ve done both

Natalie 23:11
the majority of ours our station style,

Katy 23:16
CSI day, we did station style, our students were working in teams and the the actual work they were doing were set up, I guess, in stations too. So kids were working in teams, and they would go to a station, grab the resources they need and go back to their workstation to actually complete the task. And the same thing with the order of operation day, we set up operating rooms, but kids worked in teams to solve and do the math part of it. Those operating rooms were really just to hold the content that they were like actually solving the case and play up the theme. Yeah, and really just yeah, for the theme. And then the one we’re going to be doing next is going to be very different. We’re going to do like competition style, it’s actually going to be mindful class against trouble class. Yeah, so we just have a couple of years ago.

Natalie 24:08
And that was going to be like, each student’s going to be responsible for a certain domain of questions. And then we’ll do rounds where they you know, do their math. And then if it’s correct, they’ll get to do like a challenge or game for that round. So the cool thing about transformations is you can structure them a ton of ways, because I think we found like every year kids are obviously different. And so some things work some years and other years, not so much. So try to mix it up.

Katy 24:36
Yeah. And the Starbucks day one is actually I mean whole class because they’re actually we didn’t create anything different to go with it. They were working on taking a test. So they’re all just sitting at their desk with their normal scratch paper and the same exam on their computer. So we didn’t really create any new content for that, but I think that’s something to be said to you asked if a teacher wants to get started. What would you suggest you don’t always have to create Something like big and crazy to do with any transformation, you can use what you were going to use anyway. So if you were gonna have them do you know 15 practice problems for? I don’t know, that’s solving equations. Yeah, decimal Sure, then just take that same worksheet, cut it up. And now you just you have a couple of stations worth of questions to ask. So I think some of these things can be quite simple in that way, just use what you were already going to use just restructure, restructure it and put some sort of theme with it. Yeah. Big and crazy and complicated.

Johanna Kuiper 25:36
Yes, I’m a huge fan of that. Because something that we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast is taking what you already have and repurposing it in such a way that you can make it more fun and engaging and allow students to have a deeper understanding with that. And so it sounds like you could just take worksheets or problems from your textbook or your curriculum and use them to create those little station pieces. So what resources do you have to help teachers learn more about transforming their classroom?

Katy 26:12
Wow,

Natalie 26:14
we have a joint teachers pay teacher’s store where I think we have every transformation we’ve done up on there, with the exception of Starbucks stay. So we have we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve had enough teachers who are excited and interested in doing classroom transformations that we started turning our sixth grade transformations into edible templates as well. So we have our CSRD are operation day, we have a glow day, we will have this next one that pretty soon, probably by the time this gets aired. So we have sixth grade math ones ready to go for teachers, for someone who’s like, I don’t want to put in the time, like just give me what I need. And let’s go. And then we have editable templates, where you basically just plug in your own questions and print it off. And same thing, you’re ready to go.

Katy 27:03
Yeah, and that’s all on our Teachers Pay Teachers. And then we do have some highlights on our Instagram of how we set them up and sort of just walking through our day to get dirty with me. So those are always I mean, those can be some things for people to look at to when there’s first setting them up to see some real life examples. And then

Natalie 27:27
I think I might, I have a couple of blog posts walking through like the same process that we shared on Instagram. A couple years ago, I think I put operationally we have a couple YouTube videos. So we try to get information out there as much as we can, because we know it could be overwhelming for teachers to kind of get started or know what to do so

Katy 27:50
and we’re here if people ever want to message us or email us, we’re always happy to help with that process, too. Well, thank

Johanna Kuiper 27:58
you for that. That would be awesome. I I’ve definitely perused your blog on the Glo day, because we wanted to do it a couple years ago, but then COVID happened and we weren’t able to do it. But it is still in the works for us to do. And that’ll be super exciting when we get to do it. Well. All right. As we kind of wrap up today. Was there anything else about transforming your classroom that you wanted to talk about? We but we haven’t yet?

Natalie 28:25
I feel like we hit on mostly everything. Obviously, we’re super team classroom transformations. And we just feel really passionately about how they transform our students learning. But is there anything you can think of?

Katy 28:42
I think we’ve pretty much hit on it. I think the time and money is where people sometimes get stuck. But I think just going back to what Natalie had mentioned earlier, the you know, all of its hard. So whatever you want to put your time and effort into is going to be worth it. So well that is good advice. Yeah, whatever you find passionate and like, take it and go with it. So

Johanna Kuiper 29:03
yeah. And to when you have like when you show that passion for your like in your classroom in front of your students, it brings out more excitement for them too, because they understand like, Oh, my teachers excited about this, like, I should be excited about it too. And I kind of just hyped up everything even more when you play into those passions. And let’s see, and let students know more about who you are as well.

Katy 29:27
Definitely. All right.

Johanna Kuiper 29:29
One question that I always ask in every interview is what is your favorite math related joke or pun?

Natalie 29:39
Okay, I have one. I have one. Okay. I’m glad you do because I don’t Okay.

Katy 29:44
Well, I think I forgot to introduce it. Oh, oh. Oh, are you cold? New York says yes. Why don’t you move to the corner I heard it’s always 90 degrees. Nice. Oh

Johanna Kuiper 30:02
you are right about that Do you have one Natalie?

Natalie 30:10
I tell Katie

Johanna Kuiper 30:15
then you should go stand in the corner then. All right, can you share where people can find you to connect more and learn more?

Katy 30:25
Sure you can find our joint sells on transforming the middle and that’s on Instagram and Teachers Pay Teachers. And then you can find Natalie and her awesome self.

Natalie 30:37
Um, I am petitioning files on like every platform, so I’m on Instagram Tik Tok. My blog is a teaching panels on education. And then I think that’s everything, Katie is

Katy 30:56
I do have my own Instagram, but I really just don’t post a lot on there. But I’m macchiatos and Nath is my Instagram.

Johanna Kuiper 31:04
Well, I will definitely have those links down in the description as well as the show notes on my website. So if you want to just have a click and be there, you can definitely check those out. Well, thank you, again, so much for taking the time to share your expertise and experience about transforming your classroom. And I know that so many people are going to be so excited to have this information and be able to do it for their students. Thank you.

Natalie 31:28
Thanks for having us. Thank

Natalie 31:29
you for having us.

Johanna Kuiper 31:30
Absolutely. 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