At the end of June, I attended (and presented at!) my first CGI National Conference. I also visited the Pacific Northwest for the first time in my life. Seattle was beautiful and the learning was great. I know there are folks out there who aren’t able to attend many conferences, so hearing from attendees is one way they learn from afar. So, in case you weren’t there, let me tell you what resonated with me from the conference.
One thing I especially liked about the conference was the essential questions. Speakers weren’t required to connect with them directly. Rather they were designed for participants to personally consider and reconsider as they attended keynotes and sessions:
- In what ways are your students allowed to bring “their whole selves” to the learning of mathematics in your classroom and school?
- What do you know about the cultural and lived experiences of the students in your mathematics classroom? (How can you broaden your knowledge?)
- How does your mathematics classroom interrupt and/or reinforce narratives of who is and who is not capable mathematically? (How could your classroom become more interruptive vs. reinforcing of these narratives?)
Not what you’d normally expect at a math conference, right? The focus on culturally responsive pedagogy was a breath of fresh air.
I also appreciated the emphasis on making connections – both in person and virtually. A special thanks to Tracy Zager for giving folks a nudge as well as support. There were quite a few #MTBoS members in the audience, and I hope by the end of the conference that number increased.
The Opening Keynote was a panel discussion called “Talking Math With Kids.” The panel included Christopher Danielson who blogs at the aptly named talkingmathwithkids.com; Allison Hintz and Tony Smith from the University of Washington; and Megan Franke, Angela Turrou, and Nick Johnson from UCLA. They told stories of their experiences working with young children around mathematics. The (extremely important) theme of their talk is that young children have mathematical ideas. We should listen to, value, and encourage them.
Then we moved into our first of six sessions. I happened to present during the first session. It was a little stressful, especially since the projector was not cooperating at first, but I was happy to get it out of the way right up front. 🙂 My talk was called “Numberless Word Problems in the Elementary Grades.”
In the talk we solved a numberless word problem together to create a shared experience. Then I shared the story of Jessica Cheyney using numberless word problems in her classroom to help students connect the act of separating to the concept of subtraction. Next I shared the story of Casey Koester, an instructional coach who used intentional planning and numberless word problems to help 2nd grade students make better sense of word problems. I closed by sharing resources teachers can use to implement numberless word problems in their classrooms.
Since we started in the afternoon, the opening keynote and session #1 were all we did on day 1. Day 2 opened with another keynote called “Equal Math Partners: Families, Communities, and Schools.” The keynote included Erin Turner, Julie Aguirre, and Corey Drake from the TEACH Math Project; and Carolee Hurtado from the UCLA Parent Project.
I loved this keynote! We often talk about what teachers and students are doing in schools and gloss over or ignore the role parents can and should take in their children’s mathematical development. We also ignore the role that students’ family, community, and culture play in their learning of mathematics. The two projects shared in this keynote were inspiring to listen to and so important for us to hear.
The first story was about the UCLA Parent Project, a multi-year project that invites parents in to become partners in their children’s math learning. It also builds up the parents into leaders.
The second project was the TEACH Math Project. Pre-service teachers were required to take a community walk to interview people and learn more about the community in which their students lived. We often ask teachers to create tasks and problems based around student interests, but this often leads to generic problems around what we assume the students’ interests are. In this project the pre-service teachers had to get to know their students, their lives, and their interests for real. Then they had to use what they learned to create relevant tasks and problems. I loved it.
After the keynote we attend session #2. I went to Megan Franke’s “No More Mastery: Leveraging Partial Understanding.” This resonated so much with me because it matches my current thinking about how we should be analyzing and interpreting student work.
According to Megan Franke, mastery learning “breaks subject matter and learning content into clearly specified objectives which are pursued until they are achieved. Learners work through each block of content in a series of sequential steps.” The trouble with mastery learning, however, is that actual learning isn’t that clean. Further, it sorts students into two groups – those who’ve got it and those who don’t – which contributes to inequality.
A partial understanding approach, on the other hand, looks at understanding as something we can have varying amounts of. What’s important is finding out what students’ current understanding and capabilities are and build from there. Megan shared an example of a preschool counting task where students had to count 31 pennies. According to the mastery approach – they either counted to 31 correctly or they didn’t – only 2.5% of the students demonstrated mastery of counting. However, when they scored the students on a range of numeracy criteria – knowledge of the counting sequence, 1-to-1 correspondence, cardinality, counting the whole collection, and organization – the picture changed completely. Only 12% of the students demonstrated little to no number knowledge while 64% of them demonstrated understanding of multiple criteria.
For session #3 I got to attend Christopher Danielson’s “The Power of Multiple Right Answers: Ambiguity in Math Class.”
I especially love the power of the phrase, “Well, it depends…” and hope to help teachers in my district see the power in crafting questions and tasks that lend themselves to some ambiguity. I also love this thought by Allison Hintz retweeted by Christine Newell:
If you haven’t seen Christine Newell’s Ignite Talk from NCSM 2017, “Precision Over Perfection,” check it out because it touches on this very idea.
During session #4 I went to lunch, and I’m going to skip talking about session #5 because it didn’t really resonate or push my thinking very much.
Session #6 was fantastic though! I saw Jennifer Kolb and Jennifer Lawyer’s talk “The Importance of Counting in Grades 4 & 5 to Support Complex Ideas in Mathematics.” I noticed that counting in general and counting collections specifically appeared across the conference program. I have made the counting collections routine a mainstay in my primary grade curriculum materials. I was especially intrigued to hear stories of how intermediate grade teachers are using the routine. The two Jennifers did not disappoint!
In the example above, counting groups and then groups of groups helped nudge these 5th grade students into an understanding of the Associative Property of Multiplication.
This same idea of “groups of groups” led students to explore groups of 10 in a way that led to deeper understandings of place value and helped introduce exponents:
Counting is a skill we naively think students “master” in the early grades, but taking a partial understanding perspective, we can open up the concept to see that there’s so much more to learn from counting in later elementary grades and beyond!
On day 3 of the conference we opened with another enlightening keynote “Anticipatory Thinking: Supporting Students’ Understanding of How Subtraction Works.” This keynote was led by Linda Levi from the Teachers Development Group and Virginia Bastable from Mount Holyoke College.
Linda Levi’s portion of the talk reflected on the meaning of computational fluency. She reminded us that while many people think of fluent as being fast, the definition is much broader and more nuanced than that.
“Computational fluency refers to having efficient and accurate methods for computing. Students exhibit computational fluency when they demonstrate flexibility in the computational methods they choose, understand and can explain these methods, and produce accurate answers efficiently. The computational methods that a student uses should be based on mathematical ideas that the student understands.” (Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, 2000, p. 152)
We started with a video example of a student solving 5,000 – 4,998 using the standard algorithm. Is this an example of computational fluency? According to the above definition, no, it’s not. Producing an accurate answer like a calculator is not the same as demonstrating computational fluency. In this example the student did not demonstrate flexibility in the methods he chose, he didn’t understand and couldn’t explain his method, and his method is not based on mathematical ideas that the student understands.
We then watched videos of two other students who used subtraction strategies they invented. Were these students demonstrating computational fluency? The students clearly understood their strategies and they were based on mathematical ideas the students understood. However, we then watched these same students solve another problem and realized that these students were not flexible in their thinking. They used the same strategies for subtracting even though other strategies would have been more efficient for the new problem. It’s really important to remember how multi-faceted computational fluency is and attend to all facets as we work with students.
One of Linda Levi’s main messages was that understanding how operations work is the foundation for computational fluency. She shared with us how we can use equations that represent students’ strategies as objects of reflection for discussing why a strategy works and to help make explicit important mathematical ideas.
Virginia Bastable followed up with a talk about mathematical argument which was along the same theme of helping students understand how the operations work.
One thing that resonated with me from her talk was the important work of opening up mathematics learning beyond the narrow focus of answer getting. Rather, mathematics is a landscape that also involves sense making, exploring, wondering, and even arguing.
After the keynote I attended Kendra Lomax’s session “Learning from Children’s Thinking: A CGI Approach to Formative Assessment.” This session dovetailed nicely with Megan Franke’s session on partial understandings because the whole point of the CGI assessment is to get a sense of where the child is at in a variety of ways rather than a binary “yes, they have it” or “no, they don’t.”
If you’re interested in this assessment approach, then I have good news for you! A slew of assessment resources are available at Kendra’s website, Learning From Children. Look at the resources under “Listening to Children’s Thinking” in the menu at the top of the page.
For my final two sessions I went to hear more from Linda Levi and Virginia Bastable. Linda’s talk “Understanding is Essential in Developing Computational Fluency” gave us practice recording student strategies using equations as a way to make explicit the properties and big ideas embedded within the strategies.
Virginia’s talk “Support Math Reasoning by Linking Arithmetic to Algebra” dove more deeply into the role mathematical argument can play in helping students develop a deeper understanding of the operations. When I think back to the skill-based worksheets of my youth, I’m jealous of the deep thinking elementary students are given the opportunity to do in classrooms today.
We came back together for a closing session and that was the end of the conference. Spending three days with like-minded educators who care so deeply about mathematics education and nurturing children’s mathematical ideas helped recharge my batteries before coming back to work for the 2017-18 school year. It will be another two years before the next CGI conference – this time in Minneapolis – and I can’t wait to attend!
Teaching to the Beat of a Different Drummer 