B Positive

B Positive is my blood type, and it has served as an important reminder about my attitude toward all things work-related (and non work-related).

I attended Dynamic Landscapes last week at Champlain College and had a wonderful time. The best presenters are those who are super enthusiastic about education and its potential. Though cynical about the way things are, wonderful speakers like Gary Stager, Thursday’s keynote, has an optimistic vision.

Gary says...

I am not surprised when kids do extraordinary things. I am surprised when adults are surprised when kids do extraordinary things.

What are kids really capable of? We need to find out.

Gary Stager is worth getting to know if you are an educator. He’s an advocate for kids working to their fullest potential with technology, and having high/low tech maker spaces in classrooms. His book is called Invent to Learn. Gary makes me want to be more radical.

At Dynamic Landscapes, I also attended a panel of educators who recently hosted the Smarter Balanced Assessment (Common Core) field test in their schools, facilitated by Peter Drescher of the Vermont Agency of Education. My district isn’t part of the field test, so it was great to hear from folks who know more. There was discussion of the nuts and bolts of the new assessment like the fact that students could take the test on a tablet but are supposed to have an external keyboard. There was talk of how to schedule the test to make it work, how to test the wireless capacity of the schools, how to prepare students and teachers.

I noticed that many of the educators who have administered the Smarter Balanced field test to students remarked that students enjoyed it. They like the tech format rather than dealing with pencil and paper, they liked the multimedia content, and the challenging questions.

A principal in the audience spoke up. I didn’t know him and didn’t catch his name. He said attitude is everything. This is a positive opportunity to learn. Let’s pull our sleeves up and make this work. There will be challenges, but we will learn a lot. Like any new thing there will be bumps in the road. His positive attitude was adopted by his staff and students.  

There is and will be lots of complaining about the Smarter Balanced assessments. Adult negativity is quickly taken up by students, and could rob them of important opportunities. As a math coach, I will model positivism.

B Positive.

Breathe collaboration

From Dan Meyer's You Pour I Choose Math Task

Steve Leinwand came to Killington, Vermont, on Wednesday night and I made sure I was there to see him. Dinner and the presentation by Steve was hosted by the fledgling local chapter of National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) called Vermont Math Leadership Council (VMLC). I made them a website at www.vermontmathleadership.org, where you can find resources shared by Steve, including his powerpoint from the dinner.

Here are a few things from the notes I typed on my iPad instead of eating dinner:

Take risks, make mistakes. The stuff we have now is bad. Enter the Common Core. Hope and change have arrived, like the calvary. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to rescue ourselves and our teachers from all the problems we have had.

Effective teachers create language rich classrooms.

Effective teachers take every opportunity to build number sense.

Effective teachers embed math content and connect to the real world.

Effective teachers devote the last 5 minutes to formative assessment.

See Steve’s document called High Leverage Mathematics Instruction Practices for more.

I am not an effective leader if I don't breathe collaboration.

Stanford University: How to Learn Math

Image from Geometry Daily.

I can’t say enough about how fantastic Jo Boaler’s online math class was. I finished it yesterday.

Jo is a Stanford University professor, and she created a free, online class for teachers and parents called How to Learn Math. Students (there were approximately 35,000 people registered) watched videos, wrote responses to prompts, and completed other tasks at their own pace. Some are still finishing; the course ends September 28.

Jo is working on a course for young people now. She has published a book called What’s Math Got To Do With It. I’m convinced that whatever Jo does in the future, it will be great. Keep an eye on her.

In a nutshell, Jo is all about dispelling myths about who is good at math and who isn’t, evangelizing about the growth mindset work of Carol Dweck, and giving teachers ideas about effective math education. She advocates for math as an inquiry activity, and really seeing it in a totally different way than most of us were taught in school and continue to teach today.

In Jo’s words:

Mathematics classrooms should be places where students believe:

• Everyone can do well in math.
• Mathematics problems can be solved with many different insights and methods.
• Mistakes are valuable, they encourage brain growth and learning.
• Mathematics will help them in their lives, not because they will see the same types of problems in the real world but because they are learning to think quantitatively and abstractly and developing an inquiry relationship with math.

Making Mistakes

Here's a TED Radio Hour show featured on NPR entitled "Making Mistakes". Excellent, and very relevant to mathematics education and life in general.

The Future of STEM Education

Hear Professor Roni Ellington’s inspirational talk from TEDxBaltimore, 2013.

Salt + Fat

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food by Michael Moss, Published Feb. 20, 2013 in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

I enjoyed this article in last weekend’s New York Times. In it, you will find important information about the workings of the food industry and will have a better understanding of the obesity epidemic. Also, I couldn’t help but notice how mathematics is such an important part of the story. When you get to the part about the food guru Howard Moskowitz, (“I’ve optimized soups, I’ve optimized pizzas. I’ve optimized salad dressings and pickles. In this field, I’m a game changer.”) notice his ability to use statistical analysis to take bucketfuls of taste test data and turn it into usable information. This is why he has become a legend in his field.

Radiolab Numbers

Radiolab is so cool. It’s a public radio show you can listen to on your public radio station or online. My dad recently told me about a Radiolab show called Numbers. It originally aired in November 2009. Each show is an hour long and has several segments on a single topic. If you listen to the Numbers show, you’ll first hear a Johnny Cash song, then learn about the innate number sense of infants, and move on to other fascinating topics like Benford’s Law, a surprising observation about the first digits of numbers, and a forensic accountant who uses it to investigate fraud, and on and on. The show is a very human take on numbers. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

The Struggle

John J. Flynn Elementary Principal Graham Clarke alerted me to a very nice piece on NPR today. It’s called Struggle for Smarts? How Eastern and Western Cultures Tackle Learning.

A researcher was studying students in a Japanese school, and ended up observing a fourth grade math class.

"The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper," Stigler explains, "and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, 'Why don't you go put yours on the board?' So right there I thought, 'That's interesting! He took the one who can't do it and told him to go and put it on the board.' "

Have a listen. It’s only 8 minutes.

Fact Fluency

What is it about fact fluency that is so challenging for some students? It’s not uncommon for students to lack automaticity with their addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts into middle school and beyond. Struggles with fact fluency sometimes accompany low achievement in math, but that is not always the case. Sometimes struggling math students know their facts. Sometimes high-achieving students do not know their facts.

I am reading John Tapper’s excellent new book entitled Solving for Why: Understanding, Assessing, and Teaching Students Who Struggle with Math.  Tapper devotes a section of the book to students who face challenges in short term, long term and working memory. He weighs in on the fact fluency question there.

What students need to understand are underlying mathematics concepts. Multiplicative and proportional reasoning are, for example, critical to moving on from elementary mathematics. Fact retrieval certainly facilitates learning in these areas, but the inability to retrieve facts will not prevent students from reasoning at higher levels. Knowing math facts is important, but fact retrieval is to mathematics what spelling is to literacy: we want students to be proficient at the skill, but the skill is a small part of the overall picture. If a student is able to spell but cannot write a coherent essay, the spelling does them little good. The same is true with math facts. (p. 138)

This is interesting for students, parents, and teachers to ponder. Try spending ten minutes a day or less studying math facts. Learn them in a way that reinforces conceptual understanding and is fun. Enjoy higher level, rich mathematics. Like the Fibonacci spiraling Hurricane Sandy picture above.

Teachers’ Expectations

When I arrived at work last week, several people were excitedly talking about the NPR piece they’d heard on the radio during their drive in. Here is a link to the Morning Edition show, Teachers’ Expectations Can Influence How Students Perform, which aired September 17.

I recommend listening to the audio, but you can also read the transcript. Back in 1964, Harvard professor Robert Rosenthal began studying how teachers’ expectations influence student achievement.

[Rosenthal] found that expectations affect teachers' moment-to-moment interactions with the children they teach in a thousand almost invisible ways. Teachers give the students that they expect to succeed more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval: They consistently touch, nod and smile at those kids more.

"It's not magic, it's not mental telepathy," Rosenthal says. "It's very likely these thousands of different ways of treating people in small ways every day."

It is difficult to truly change our beliefs, but there is a way. Recent studies have shown that teachers who actively worked on their teaching through videotape analysis and targeted work with coaches in their classrooms to change their behavior also experienced a significant shift their beliefs about students.