75. The 5 Pillars of an Effective Math Classroom

Johanna Kuiper 0:00
Moving into the school year, we all want to lay the best foundation possible. But once I’ve foundation is laid, how do we raise up our students into mathematicians. In today’s episode, I’m going to be sharing the five pillars I use in my classroom to help mold my students into mathematicians. 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 a brand new episode. It is so nice to be talking to you again, after a much needed hiatus for me. And I’m excited to be sharing today all about the pillars that I use in my classroom that helped me mold my students into mathematicians. So I created something I call the comet method, c o m e t. And it’s my solution for reaching all the students in my classroom, no matter their academic, or apathy level. And really what that means is it allowed me to stop watering down the math, class content, and focus on molding my students into mathematicians, what can I do in my classroom to make sure that no matter where the students are coming from, that I can help them see that math is fun, exciting, and help them love math.

So let’s just jump right in and talk about C which stands for creativity. And I like to start off with creativity. Because when students come into the math classroom, typically they have preconceived notions of what math is, and how good they are at it, what’s expected of them. And that generally, math is a plug and chug type of class. And that’s not true, or at least not in my world, I don’t want that to be true for my students. So I really want to embrace the idea that discovery is a huge part of students learning math, then connecting it to things that they already know. And then moving that connection into the procedural and the conceptual pieces of math. And with that, that there’s more than one way to work on a problem, you can do it this way or that way to still achieve the answer. And there’s different ways that we can provide choice for students. And all of those pieces come to creativity in the math classroom, that it’s not my way, aka the teachers way or the highway. There’s a way that we can coexist together and bring out the fun in math.

Moving into the next pillar, O stands for Open problems. And this just continues to break the mold and allow students to see that they can be successful at math, because there is no one way to solve a problem. So to give you an overview, open versus closed problems, open problems mean that there are different ways to solve it to achieve the answer, or that there are different answers to the same problem. To give you two examples, an open ended problem meaning that there’s more than one answer could be like a which one doesn’t belong. Because each of those four pieces within that problem, each of those has a reason for not being part of the group. It makes it unique from the others. But when I think of an open middle problem, I’m thinking of a problem where there’s different ways to solve to achieve the answers. So thinking about system of equations, I can use a bunch of different methods to solve I can use equal values method, graphing it, substitution elimination, there’s lots of different ones that I can use to achieve what the answer or the solution is to the system. And both of those can be so powerful for students to see that there’s more than one way to be, quote, unquote, good at math. So that has open problems

Moving into M, that is for movement. Now, if you’re a part of the Math in Action Summit 2024, you got to hear my whole entire spiel about movement in math and how amazing it is for students. But movement in math is just again, breaking all the traditions of the stereotypical classroom where math is not a sit and get class. Students need to be actively involved and moving. So some ways that might look like in your classroom is making sure your routines allow students that break of getting up doing something and coming back. So the one I talked about in my summit session was a supply Roundup, and I’m not going to go into full depth here because I am coming out with an episode fully on what a supply Roundup is, but Basically, it’s just an opportunity, a one minute opportunity for students to get their supplies and get back to their seats. So that’s one way. Another way is to make sure that you’re giving students opportunity during an activity, so a longer period of time to be up and moving in the classroom in an academic way, one of the best examples of that is a scavenger hunt. I love scavenger hunts, probably almost too much, because I think by the end of last school year, my seventh graders were done with them, which is unfortunate, because they’re going to have me again as eighth graders this year. But neither here nor there. scavenger hunts are a great way to get students up and moving in an academic way. gallery walks are also another great activity to do.

Alright, moving into the fourth pillar, we get Erasability. So now that we’ve broken the whole mold of what a typical math classroom is, we need to increase participation. One of the best ways to do that is to lower the barrier between apathy and participation. And one of the best ways to do that is easily erasable surfaces like whiteboard, because who doesn’t love drawing and writing on a whiteboard. So we’re going to channel that and put it into a math sense. So you might if you’ve read the book Building Thinking Classrooms by Peter Liljedahl, he talks about vertical nonpermanent surfaces. And yes, I love those, I use them weekly, if not daily, in my classroom. But another great way, especially if you don’t have that capability yet, or you want to start small, is just those handheld whiteboards that you can get from, you can get it from Dollar Tree, you can order them on Amazon, which by the way, is a way better deal than Dollar Tree. But those are some great ways that you can use erasability. So I like to use it for my warm ups. And if you remember, many, many episodes ago, and I’m coming out with another one on it. But I do math, adjacent warm ups. So the warm up that we do for the day has nothing to do with the content that we are learning in class. And this ties in back to our creativity piece where the warm side you are like the which one doesn’t belong estimation, crack the code, tons of other things that doesn’t require the current grade level content that we are doing in class, because it allows any student in my classroom to participate. Therefore increasing participation. And all of those math, adjacent warmups, still use critical thinking skills that they will need later in the lesson when we do grade level content. So that is just a brief view of how I use erasability in my classroom.

And then let’s move into that last pillar. Teamwork. So teamwork is what brings everything together. Because the old saying is true, more minds are better than one. And using effective teams in your classroom engages students in a way that working alone just doesn’t. So my quick tips for teamwork in the classroom is one using groups of three and using them regularly every day, even multiple times a day. So I like to have my students collaborate on the math adjacent warmup, I have them turn and talk several times throughout our lesson. And then I have them work together or collaborate on the practice piece. And a lot of times I use the vertical nonpermanent surfaces, which just means like the big whiteboards I have in my classroom, teams work there. And I have found that it has increased the engagement of each student because they’re in a group of three. And there’s more accountability in that than if they were working solo and I was their only accountability for doing work. So that is a huge factor in getting students to increase participation. But it also helps students increase their level of knowledge on the subject. Because students speak each other’s vernacular way better than a teacher ever speaks

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their language. So students are hearing how to do the math from a student or their friend. And that is a great way for students to the ones who are sharing the information to learn it better as they’re teaching it, but their peers who also learn it better, because they’re hearing it in their own language, per se. So that is teamwork. That is the last pillar of what I use in my classroom that helps me mold my students into mathematicians.

Now. I know this was just a brief overview of each of the five pillars, but eventually we will dive in deeper to each of them throughout the many coming episodes.

One last thing before I end today’s episode, if you want to hear more about teamwork, I am hosting a free webinar challenge on building effective teams in your classroom. And it is We’re going to begin August 13. So if you want access to that training, you will need to sign up for free in the description or you can go to https://misskuiper.com/challenge that is m i s s k u i p e r .com/challenge. If you are listening to this episode after August 19 2024, then you will want to go to https://misskuiper.com/training to receive all of that information on building effective teams for your classroom. And as always, if you have any questions regarding this episode, or any questions about how you can mold your students into mathematicians, please go ahead and send me a message on Instagram @misskuiper. I’m happy to answer any and all questions you have. And with that, I’ll calc-u-later

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 misskuipersclassroom.com and click on podcast.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai