What I am Reading....

September 2020 

Jon Sanguiovanni, Susie Katt, Kevin Dykema  

Productive Math Struggle 

I'm reading this with Robin Conti and Emily Bruning of The Indiana Department of Education as a Book Study. I LOVE the idea of statewide book studies for math educators. I'm always looking for more people to engage in growth with and I know that I can't always find that at my school or district so grateful I can find it at the statewide level. 

I like doing these IDOE book studies even if I am so far behind in completing modules that I cram the week before the wrap up. lol. 

I did a bunch of reflecting on this book for the book study and you can read my thoughts here.  This book has lots of easy to implement ideas and I think it would be a good one for newish teachers to start introducing more struggle into their math classrooms, perhaps less overwhelming than some of my other favorites? 
(I'm thinking about the book I want to read with the math teachers next year.) 

August 2020

Elena Aguilar The Art of Coaching 

Seems like a good fit as I start the year of coaching. I focused on the first section of this book: Foundations for coaching. 

I only read the first chapter of this book. I'm saving the rest for later after I experience a little bit of coaching in person. One of the things that I found impactful was Aguilar's reflection that it takes a LONG time to get good at our craft. I'm so resistant to leaving the classroom full time because I don't really feel like I'm there yet in terms of "good" at teaching and I also want to have time to develop those skills. 

I have watched SO MANY of my peers get promoted into admin or leadership jobs without actually being masters at the craft of teaching yet. I guess that is ok because they are different skill sets....but I want teachers to be respected for their craft....then we have to give them time to master it without saying, ok, now you teach others. 

I really hope that this blened teacher/coach role gives me time to keep being a master teacher AND time to help support others. 

July 2020

Flipped 2.0 Practical Strategies for flipping your class. 

I read this with a co-worker when we were pretty darn sure that we were going back to some sort of hybrid schedule. Not so, apparently we are going back 5 days a week....that will be interesting and I felt ok about that while cases were declining but recent rises in cases (and the disasters of Texas and Florida and Arizona) have me rethinking whether this will happen at all. 

I still feel like it helped me develop some ideas of what the best parts of class to do remotely are (including any sort of "Direct Instruction") and helped me plan for how to prioritize in class environments for the problem solving and conceptual group work that is so important to growing as a mathematician. 

June 2020

Geoff Krall Necessary Conditions

This was super twitter popular last summer. I'm so happy I finally got around to reading it. The best thing about this book is that Geoff Krall is a great writer. This is good teaching and it's fun to read. 

The basic premise is that good math teaching is a triad of three really important things. I'll talk a little about each of those as I read the chapters. Like a true math teacher, Krall provides some visuals to help understand the relationship between these three. Some things exist between each corner too....like teaching group work and norms falls in between academic safety AND effective facilitation. 

Academic Safety: There are two main points here. Kids need to feel safe in class to talk, question, and wander. And they need to know that they can do real math and that mathematicians look like them. 

• Showing kids mathematicians who look and talk like them. Ted Talks, Short articles, excerts of books like Joy of X. Desmos anonymize name feature. 
• What do real mathematicians do? Communicate ideas. 
• How is what they are doing actual and real math. Some of this connects to quality tasks. 

Quality Tasks: These chapters review what a quality task is and where to find them. It's nice to see so many of my favorite activities listed as well as a chapter that helps teachers understand what a task is. I'm thinking back to my struggles with other teachers at Lawrence North. I think the basic first step is, "What is a task?" and helping people understand that it is not how you explain it. 

Effective Facilitation: This is the biggest section and maybe the most challenging to get right. 

There are so many awesome ideas I want to try from this chapter: 

• Introducing question cards (one a week) and having students practice all week on the question cards. Grading them on this practice. (Page 108)
• Teaching group work Norms and grading students on group work ( Page 114) 
• Naming strategies to get "unstuck" and having students recall what they did to get "unstuck." (185)
• Principles of mathematical smartness (Page 190)
• list of starter supplies that includes dry erase markers, more dry erase markers, and even more dry erase markers.... yep. (218)

I love the facilitating a task flow chart....

Zooming Out: The last chapters provide insight into big picture strategies like assessment, teaching norms, and creating school learning cultures. 

**I've been thinking a lot as I read this about how next year is really not going to look like this. I'm not sure how much I'll be able implement these ideas. I'm eager to to talk about this with others and wrap my head around what school will look like in the fall.**

May 2020

Steven Strogatz The Joy of X

Three years ago I had the opportunity to go to Boston as a part of the Sontag Prize for Urban Education.  http://www.doe.mass.edu/amazingeducators/sontag/  It was what I think was the beginning of my experience of working with teachers outside of my school and state to improve my own skills and development. I got the chance to attend Professional Development from Andrew Chen http://www.edutron.com/ and he gifted us this book. I hate to admit that it--but this book totally sat on my bookshelf for THREE years. 

But suddenly the world was crazy and I couldn't wrap my head around what teaching would look like for the next few years and I felt like I needed to remind myself of WHY I teach math. This was exactly what I needed.

This book explores the aha and fun aspects of math starting with basics of counting and place value and moving through high school math concepts. I love the section groupings, numbers, relationships, shapes, change, data, and frontiers. 

I keep thinking back to a blog post by Dan Meyer about why people go into math. They either love math or they love kids. We have to help them love both. Read more here. https://blog.mrmeyer.com/2019/it-isnt-enough-to-love-kids-or-math/. I've been thinking a lot about this because I'm transitioning into work as an instructional coach at a school where 3 out of 4 of the math teachers come from non-traditional teaching backgrounds. They wanted to work with middle school kids AND they wanted to work at this particular middle school. Math happened to be the positions that were open. They love kids but they don't necessarily love math. I've been thinking a lot about how to help them love math and connect that to their love of kids. Maybe this book, full of aha moments is a way to get there. I gifted a copy to a teacher new to math teaching. 

It also felt a little disconnected to be reading this book while I felt like the world was on fire and I was busy trying to wrap up the pandemic school year. But I hope we can learn how to use math to find beauty and make the world a better place. Math is beautiful and problem solving is amazing and  #BlackLivesMatter and I want my black and brown students to have that experience with math also. 

April 2020

mark haddon  the curious incident of the dog in the night time

I took March off because I felt like the world as we knew it just ended and I needed to mourn. I still haven't been much into reading PD books because I'm just not sure how my job will be changing in a Corona Virus or Post Corona-Virus world.

This novel was fun and cute and very mathy. I was 100% inspired by remembering fondly when I taught The Number Devil. I'm not as sure I could make this novel span middle school math curriculum so easily.....but it would still be fun to read with students. Many thanks to my math teacher colleague Joel Bezaire for sharing his idea for Novel Studies in math with this book (and others). https://prealgebraone.wordpress.com/novel-studies/

February 2020

Jo Boaler Limitless Mind

When I first heard about this book, I knew I wanted to read it, so I signed up right away when I saw that Robin Conti and Emily Bruning of the Indiana Department of Education were holding a book study on this book--I signed up right away. It was the encouragement I needed to read it right away, as soon as it came out.

Limitless Mind builds on the amazing research that Jo Boaler has done and shared in Mathematical Mindsets but with a broader audience in mind. This would be a great book for a whole school to read.

There are so many great gems in this book but here are a couple of my highlights.

• The story of how when the San Francisco public schools took away ALL tracking until junior year of high school. The result was that ALL students performed better on standardized tests. 
• The amazing research of neuroplasticity and the work of Barbara Arrowsmith-Young who works with students with severe learning disabilities and helps them retrain their brains to learn. 
• The research around how to help struggling students at a post secondary level, a college created math circles where students were grouped by identity or community and given extra time to talk about and think through math problems. 
• Grades are bad. They don't tell us much and they encourage a fixed mindset. We should be moving away from them as much as possible. (I hope that includes school letter grades IDOE....hint hint.) 

My one concern about this book is that for me (as an educator in a high poverty urban district) it made even more clear that we are failing students on purpose. We know what it takes to help ALL students achieve but implementing the kind of math program that provides the supports students need to succeed AND also the kind of intense interventions to help students with disabilities that Arrowsmith-Young advocates and Boaler describes is not cheap and not easy. We are so far from having staff that can do this in every school. Even though Boaler didn't address this at all, this book reminded me that we do KNOW what to do, we just don't have the political WILL to do it.

January 2020

Zaretta Hammond Culturally Responsive Teaching

Grateful to Emily Wallace, Instructional Coach at Harshman MMS for suggesting this. I might be a little late to the basics but I get there eventually.

Hammond begins Chapter 1 by saying, "The chronic achievement gap in most American schools has created an epidemic of dependent learners unprepared to do the higher order thinking, creative problem solving and analytical reading and writing called for in the new CCSS." (page 12). This is very much the story of secondary math education. We are tasked not just with filling in gaps in conceptual understanding but while doing that, helping our students make sense of problems when they are so often just looking for a series of steps or an algorithm.

Hammond's answer to this problem is to use Culturally Responsive Teaching Practices to draw in and engage struggling learners from non-dominant cultures.

Some math specifics that connect to Hammond's vision are using storytelling to introduce problems instead of the more dominant culture norm of Notice and Wonder. Inspired by Lauren Baucom and Cristelle Rocha's "Turning the Diamond on Desmos" session at the Cohort 4 Desmos Fellows Weekend I saw Michael Fenton do this as he introduced an the activity Charge! I think this is an easy way for math teachers who are already familiar with Notice and Wonder to be more culturally responsive in our teaching. Instead of "What do you notice?" Michael asked us to make a list individually of what we noticed and then come up with a story that went with the image. We shared our stories with our partners and then with the group. Micahel and Christopher Danielson later blogged about it here: https://blog.desmos.com/articles/how-might-you-launch/

Hammond's chapters on Brain Science are probably a great segue into my second February book by Jo Boaler. Stay tuned for more on that.

I felt drawn to Hammond's suggestion that educator's pick a focal student and work on developing a learning partnership with that student. It reminds me of an exercise that a former principal Dr. Maggie Bishop suggested staff do with their students. It seems like an easier entrance into this daunting and often difficult personal work of becoming more culturally response.

December 2019

Robert Marzano Classroom Instruction that Works

I am switching jobs in January and the school I am moving too references two books in guidelines and instructions for teachers. This is one of them. It occurred to me as I read their guidelines that I haven't actually read this book since i was a pre-service or first year teacher.

I wanted to re-read with the knowledge and experience of 8 1/2 years in the classroom behind me. I'm so glad I made this decision. 

Marzano is amazing because of the centering of RESEARCH. It's such a good reminder to return to what we know works. What an oldie but a goodie. 

Marzano reminds us that effective pedagogy has three parts: Instructional Strategies, Management Techniques, and Curriculum Design. The bulk of the book describes effective classroom strategies.

• Chapter 2: Identifying Similarities and Differences--This is a great reminder about the many ways to do this. I think Notice and Wonder really falls mostly into this category or Which One Doesn't Belong. Another way to do this that I forgot about was analogies. Thinking of so many good ones for the students to finish like:
• Chapter 3: Summarizing and Note Taking--This is not teacher prepared notes. This is students summarizing their learning, the math they used, the rule they developed. I do some of this but just a reminder to continue. If we do a few problems together, I'll ask students to look for patterns, describe them in writing, share them outloud, etc. This happens so much in Desmos with all of those "Explain your thinking" prompts.
• Chapter 4: Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition--I definitely use the Pause, Prompt, and Praise strategy (pause work when it is difficult, prompt to help them get going, and then praise when they do). And sometimes Concrete Symbols of Recognition.(stickers, etc.)
• Chapter 5: Homework and Practice--I'm not sure I agree with this chapter. Marzano seems pretty pro-homework. It's clear from this chapter that HW should be commented on and students should get feedback on it. I'm not sure that I have time to do that. I do agree with fewer problems instead of more and time for student to explain reasoning.
• Chatper 6: Non-Linguistic Representations--I think for math this might also include non-numerical representation like visual models. So much modeling to conect to here.
• Chapter 7: Cooperative Learning--Some great reminders from this chapter. This is where I feel like I have so much room to grow. (as do most teachers.) I think that the challenge here is that there has been such a push to do this in our school that we haven't slowed down to discuss how to make it most effective. Great to return to the research. 
• Keep groups small. Actually a percentile loss in content growth for groups over 4 kids. 4 or less is key. 
• Do not group by ability level. Net percentile loss for the lower kids here. 
• Don't overuse cooperative groups, kids need time to practice on their own too. Seems like best opportunity is once or twice a week formally and in smaller chunks informally. 
• Chapter 8: Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback--This has been so much of the focus of current professional development of my school and their work with LSI. I'm also really impressed by the work that Harshman has done to integrate this with the rubric modeling from the IDOE. 
• Chapter 9: Generating and Testing Hypothesis--This can have such profound connections to math. Think three-act tasks where a prediction is made and then more information is provided and students refine their prediction. 
• Chapter 10: Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers--We use alot of questioning in math to help students focus their learning on specific topics. I am thinking of how this chapter might fit with the idea of selecting student work and sequencing it to help students discover new thinking. as well. 

Marzano's last two chapters delve into specific applications. But there is a shortage of secondary math exmaples. I'd love to take time to align some of the best practices of math instruction I have learned with Marzano's research based ideas and present them to teachers. I think a lot of what we are doing is very Marzano centered but we aren't always naming that for new teachers. How can we help new math teachers use this book and find math success in their classrooms?

November 2019

Eve Ewing Ghosts in the Schoolyard

I am late to this book. One of the twitter communities of math teachers I am a part of read this book as a part of a #placevalue study in preparation for NCTM's annual conference in Chicago.

I am a observer from 3 hours away from the battles of Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) with the city of Chicago but everyone I know is on the side of the CTU. I was surprised and shocked when a local black teacher (who has worked as a charter school teacher and admin in Chicago) called the CTU and their platform racist. I said, "Are you sure you aren't confusing CTU with Chicago Public Schools.?" I was pretty shocked at her insistence that she was talking about CTU, even after I brought up the rank and file take over of the union 10 years ago and the battles CORE has led in Chicago since then. I felt like I needed to get to this book pretty quickly to make sure my opinion wasn't crazy. Yep. Still standing by saying that I am pretty damn sure that the racists were the city and their plan to close black and brown schools and not the CTU. (I can't speak for what has happened in the long history of unionization, and unions have their own dark history). But they are made up of people. And the teachers of Chicago, voted in reformers 10 years ago who have since then led the union to "bargain for the common good" not just wages and benefits. The biggest part of this is fighting racist policies that led to black and brown schools being under resources and over-crowded. They are setting the example for teachers unions across the country.

After finishing the book, I think Ewing does a great job of getting to the bottom of the issue I was concerned about. Are the CPS actions racist? Even if they are being carried out by black and brown people who are saying, "we cannot be racist." Of course Ewing reminds us that racism is systemic injustices done to black and brown communities and black people can be a part of this. There are so many decades and decades of injustice done to Chicago communities of color. My acquaintance (who worked in Chicago Charter School admin) and I might still drastically disagree about how to right those wrongs...but everyone should read this book. I think it puts every communities' fight for good neighborhood schools in context.