Tag Archives: reflection

Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education – Part 1: Preparing to Read

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Table of Contents for this Blog Series

I recently asked on Twitter for advice about how other people engage with professional reading. I got a lot of great advice! To add to my good fortune, a few days later I came across this helpful article (Link) called “How to Remember What You Read” which included even more great advice. So, to put what I’m learning into practice, I’m going to apply it while I read my next book, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education (Link) by Alex Shevrin Venet.

Today I’m going to prepare to read the book which is something I’ll admit I’ve never done before. From the article I read: “A lot of success in reading boils down to preparation. What you do before you read matters more than you think.” I’m curious to see how I feel about that statement after I’m done preparing to read this book.

The article shares five strategies for this step in the reading process:

  1. Be choosier
  2. Get some context
  3. Know your why
  4. Intelligently skim
  5. Match your book to your environment

I’m going to focus on numbers 2-4 in this post.

Get some context

I actually feel like I’ve already got some context on this book:

  • I’ve followed the author on Twitter (Link) for a while now, which is why this book was on my radar in the first place.
  • Equity has been a theme in my work as a district curriculum coordinator supporting 34 elementary schools serving roughly 20,000 students. And I wasn’t alone! The entire curriculum department made equity a focus of our learning and planning together during the last few years I was in the role.
  • I don’t have a ton of experience with trauma-informed education, but I did learn about trauma-informed care when I was preparing to become a foster parent. I’ll be curious to see what’s the same/different as trauma-informed care applies to education.

Know your why

Why am I reading this book? Now that I’ve moved to New York, I’m hoping to get a position where I work with students and teachers more directly. I learned a lot being a district leader, but I want a job in a school building right now. I’ve already applied to be a substitute teacher while I work on getting my Texas teacher certificate transferred to New York. I’m also interesting in being a classroom teacher again since I haven’t had my own classroom since 2009. Because I want to work more closely with students, I want to ensure I have a solid skill set for building community, engaging with students, providing them the support they need, and being very considerate of their backgrounds and experiences. Out of all the books I could have chosen, I was drawn to this one because I really valued what I learned about trauma-informed care as I was becoming a foster parent. I immediately realized this was knowledge that would have helped me be a better, more compassionate teacher.

Intelligently skim

The article shared ideas for how to do this. I also like the way Dr. Andy Mitchell described his version of it on Twitter:

For my intelligent skim, I’m going to read and reflect on the back of the book, the table of contents, the introduction, and the conclusion.

Back of the Book

Just in case you’re interested in knowing what this book is about, I’ll copy the blurb from the back of the book and then reflect on it.

In this comprehensive guide, Alex Shevrin Venet urges educators to adopt trauma-informed practices as part of a systemic effort to advance social justice rather than as a set of peripheral moves intended to help selected students who are perceived to be in need of rescue. Using a framework of six principles, Venet offers practical action steps that teachers and school leaders can take from any starting point, making shifts in practice, pedagogy, and policy to address underlying inequities that can cause or heighten trauma. Teachers are able to do more than they realize from within their own classrooms to shift equity to the center, and to help prevent the trauma that originates inside schools. This book shows them how.

Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education

I’m definitely interested in the idea of making systemic change. At a district leadership event a couple of years ago, one of the speakers told the story of baking a cake without sugar and trying to make up for it by sprinkling sugar on top. The cake is still going to taste bad! He said we need to view equity the same way. If equity is not baked into our systems of education, but rather sprinkled on, it’s not going to make the system better. The term “equity sprinkles” became a popular phrase in our district after that: Are you intentionally baking equity into your decisions or are you just adding equity sprinkles?

Table of contents

  • Bringing Equity to the Center
    • Chapter 1: Defining Trauma-Informed Education
    • Chapter 2: Defining Equity

I like how the first two chapters are about definitions – what is trauma-informed education and what is equity? Even though I have thoughts about the meanings of those two terms, I look forward to reading the author’s definitions to help us get on the same page before going further.

The book is organized around four shifts in practice:

  • Shift 1: Adopt a Universal Approach
    • Chapter 3: Trauma is More Than a Number
    • Chapter 4: Trauma is a Lens, Not a Label
    • Chapter 5: Four Proactive Priorities for Decision Making
  • Shift 2: Rethink Your Role as an Educator
    • Chapter 6: Build Relationships Rooted in Equity
    • Chapter 7: Cultivate Unconditional Positive Regard
    • Chapter 8: Make Connections, Respect Boundaries

This is intriguing. I’m curious how I’ll view my role differently after reading this section. I might need to reflect on what I think my current role is as an educator before I read this section. At the moment I would say my role is to support my students in knowing more and being able to do more than they could before working with me. I want to help them develop positive identities around learning and doing a wide variety of things. I want to help them feel like they are part of a community where everyone belongs and supports one another. I want to create a space where they feel safe and cared for.

  • Shift 3: Move from Mindset to Systems Change
    • Chapter 9: Support Teacher Wellness
    • Chapter 10: Foster Professional Growth
    • Chapter 11: Work Toward Policy Change

I’m looking forward to this section! Many of the issues we have with racism and white supremacy in our country are rooted in systems that have been in place for a long time. I look forward to learning what advice she has for how educators can help to change these systems.

  • Shift 4: Change the World from Inside Your Classroom
    • Chapter 12: Examine the Curriculum, Disrupt Harmful Narratives
    • Chapter 13: Get to Work: Activism and Action as Healing

As a former curriculum coordinator, I understand how important it is to examine the curriculum. In mathematics, some of the harmful narratives have to do with who does math? I found it interesting in Texas that there are state science standards that require teachers to teach about scientists:

  • 1st Grade Science TEKS – Describe what scientists do
  • 2nd Grade Science TEKS – Identify what a scientist is and explore what different scientists do
  • 3rd-5th Grade Science TEKS – Connect grade-level appropriate science concepts with the history of science, science careers, and contributions of scientists

But there are no comparable math standards, at least not at the elementary level. It’s almost like the people involved in mathematics are erased. Rather than being a living, breathing subject that people study and use in careers today*, it’s just a collection of knowledge and skills everyone has to learn.

* There’s one math standard that lightly touches on this: “Apply mathematics to problems arising in everyday life, society, and the workplace,” but it’s about applying mathematics rather than learning about the history of math, math careers, and contributions of mathematicians.

Introduction

  • Page xiii – Appearances can be deceiving. – We can’t know how our students are doing just by looking at them. We don’t know what’s happening at home or elsewhere in school or how they’re feeling.
  • Page xiv – Childhood trauma does not guarantee a life of failure and struggle. – But it does impact who children become as adults.
  • Trauma matters
    • Page xiv – Prevailing view in the past “Kids are resilient. They’ll get over it.” – Kids are resilient, but “They’ll get over it” isn’t the right attitude.
    • Page xiv – About half of all children in the US will experience at least one potentially traumatic event before age 18. Because so many students are possibly exposed to trauma, I wonder if this is why we want to make trauma-informed education a central part of our work because we never know when it’s happening or to whom, but we can agree it’s not some rare event that only inflicts a special few.
    • Page xiv – Child trauma is hard to measure because of where it happens (behind closed doors) and inability/unwillingness to talk about it. It also doesn’t only happen at home.

[Internal monologue: I’m not liking this approach to skimming. It doesn’t feel like skimming at all. I feel like I’m stopping constantly and writing down way too much. I’m going to try reading each section and then summarize it for myself and see if that feels better. I also need to find a balance between marking in the book and recording in my blog post. I don’t necessarily need to transcribe everything into my blog post so long as I can refer to the book later.]

Take 2: I continued reading this section and focused on jotting in my book rather than coming back to the blog post to capture my ideas. Here’s what I took away as I skimmed the rest of this section:

  • Not every student is hurt long-term by trauma, most likely because they have systems of care including family, community, and access to resources.
  • Other students do have trauma which the author describes as “enduring negative psychological, physical, and spiritual harm.’
  • A person can’t just “push through trauma.” Rather there are several factors involved in healing from trauma:
    • A feeling of safety, emotional and psychological
    • Building relationships with trusted people
    • A feeling of unconditional acceptance
    • Therapy can be helpful but is not enough on its own, we also need a community that cares about us
  • Trauma can happen in and out of school – Schools can be places of trauma for some students.
  • The author shared her personal experience working at an alternative school that redesigned things from the ground up. They had a mission “grounded in unconditional care” for their students that guided all of their decision making. However, outside of this context, she realized there are many of the same old attitudes and beliefs out there that result in trauma not being identified or addressed, often because teachers don’t feel equipped to do anything about it.
  • What the author has learned over time:
    • School can be a site of growth and support for students surviving the most challenging circumstances
    • School can be structured in intentional ways to promote this growth
    • Together, educators can advocate for systems change that addresses and prevents trauma

[Internal monologue: This went much smoother. I was able to focus on reading and then when I was done it was really easy to capture the key points in the blog post. Let’s stick with that!]

  • Trauma-Informed Education: A Healing Force or a Buzzword?
    • There’s a lot more awareness of trauma and trauma-informed practices in our culture today, but we run the risk of it becoming a buzzword without meaning, or worse, causing harm for students because it results in a deficit model where the “trauma kids” are treated differently than the other kids in the school. Also, there’s a lot of trauma caused by the inequalities in our systems, and if we don’t link trauma-informed care with equity and social justice, then we may do more harm than good.
    • One problem the author notes is that there are individual teachers and programs that have been studied, but not enough work has been done to identify what’s working at a whole-school or -district level. These approaches seem to work for some but not others. We need to understand why so that these practices aren’t abandoned because we just assume they don’t work or aren’t worth the time.
  • Book Overview
    • Goal of the book: My hope for you as the reader is that you will finish this book with a more complex understanding of trauma-informed education and a drive to bring your own trauma-informed work to the next level, with equity at the center.
    • This book is not “Trauma 101.” The author is assuming you have some understanding of trauma and trauma-informed care before reading since her focus is instead on the work of connecting these practices to equity work. She also makes it clear that she’s coming at this from the lens of an educator, not a clinician, though she recommends partnering with school and community mental health experts in this work.
    • The book is a mix of education research, philosophy, and rubber-meets-the-road strategies. She makes it clear that some ideas she hopes you can take away and apply immediately while others will take time and effort, but hopefully you’ll be inspired to start the work by the time you’re done reading.
    • The focus is on the adults in a school building, not the students. What work do we need to do as adults to create an equity-centered trauma-informed environment for our students?
    • Chapter 1: Expanded definition of trauma-informed practices
    • Chapter 2: Two big ideas (1) inequity causes trauma and (2) School isn’t equitable for trauma-affected students
    • Chapter 3: Diving deeper into the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) framework
    • Chapter 4: Making sure universal interventions are helpful not harmful
    • Chapter 5: Four priorities for infusing an understanding of trauma into our decision making
    • Chapters 6-8: Unconditional positive regard – Making sure we don’t position ourselves as saviors
    • Chapters 9-11: Focus on school leadership and policies
    • Chapters 12-13: Focus on classroom pedagogy

Conclusion

It’s funny. When I read research articles, I almost always skip down to the discussion and conclusion sections to hear what the researchers found out and what they recommend. I’ve never done this with a nonfiction book before though. Now that I’ve read the table of contents and introduction, I’m kind of interested to read her concluding thoughts before diving into the chapters in between.

To be trauma informed is to be committed to the end of the conditions that cause trauma. Venet’s concluding chapter is a rallying cry to get started on the work. No single one of us is going to solve all the problems our students face or fix all the systems that create and perpetuate trauma, but that shouldn’t stop us from beginning the work and doing our part to help move toward the kind of world our students deserve.

She’s clear that she has no easy answer for the reader, and definitely no checklists! Rather, she provides a list of questions to get the reader wondering, planning, and dreaming about what is possible.

An important point in the last chapter is standing in solidarity with our students. Letting them know, “I am with you and I will fight for you.” Some specific areas where we can make a stand are demanding the removal of police from our schools, fully funding counselors and mental health support, and ending token economy behavior systems such as PBIS. She acknowledges there’s risk in standing up for our students and demanding change, and we have to reflect on how much risk we’re willing to shoulder for our students and then whatever amount that is we have to be willing to take it on.

Ready to Read!

That was an experience. I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time before preparing to read a book. It definitely felt different. I’ll be the first to admit it’s time consuming, but at the same time I feel way more engaged with the book than if I’d just cracked it open and started in on chapter 1. I feel like I’ve seen the big picture and now I can dive in and look more closely at the details with a greater appreciation for what they mean.

I’m not sure I would do this for every book I read, but another piece of advice from the article I read is that we really should be much choosier, not just about which books we read but about which books we finish.

“Life is much too short to finish a bad book. You need to be ruthless and heartless. Don’t let sunk costs guilt you into wasting your time.”

So far I’m excited by Venet’s book and I look forward to diving into the remaining chapters. As she says in the concluding chapter, this is urgent work, and I am definitely ready to learn and get started.

What I’m Reading – TeachingWorks High-Leverage Teaching Practices

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Recently on Twitter I asked for advice about how other people engage with professional reading.

I got a lot of great advice. (Thank you to everyone who contributed!) A recurring theme was how much more people get out of their reading when they interact with others. One way I’d like to try to spur some interaction while I read is to use my blog as a place to share my thoughts on my professional reading. At worst, no one will respond, but I’ll still have done some reflecting on my own so that’s not so bad. At best, folks will comment and I’ll get to engage more with the ideas from whatever I happen to be reading.

I’m not quite ready to dive into a professional book at the moment, but I did want to spur myself to get started, so today I reread over the material at TeachingWorks (Link) on high-leverage teaching practices to refresh my memory. I jotted down notes while I read that I’m putting in this post. If you read through them and they spark any thoughts, feel free to share in the comments! I’m particularly interested in the topic of high-leverage teaching practices. I’d love to hear what others think about them or hear what other resources on this topic that you think I should read!

The Work of Teaching (Link)

“Great teachers aren’t born. They’re taught.”

“Having a skillful teacher has been a matter of chance and students of color and low-income have unequal access to good teaching.”

Identifying and teaching high-leverage practices – “an action or task central to teaching” – is one way to support new and early career teachers.

Core Ideas (Link)

  1. “The goal of classroom teaching is to help students learn worthwhile knowledge and skills and develop the ability to use what they learn for their own purposes.” – I’m curious how “worthwhile” is defined. Worthwhile to whom? Deemed worthwhile by whom? I do like the idea of using “what they learn for their own purposes.” Schooling isn’t about what anyone else thinks a student should ultimately do, but about the knowledge and skills a student learns and their agency to make choices about how they use them.
  2. “All students deserve the opportunity to learn at high levels.” – I just listened to an episode (Link) of the podcast “Teaching While White” where Tim Wise talks about the history of schooling in this country and he shares a quote by Thomas Jefferson where he says 6 years or so of schooling should be provided to all (white people) in order to elevate those with talent from the “rubbish.” Clearly the goals of public education in this county from its inception have not been to ensure that all students learn at high levels, but rather to find a small population who we deem capable of learning at high levels and letting them rise to the top.
  3. “Learning is an active sense-making process.” – This is the nature of human brains. Even if we could provide every student the same inputs, our brains are making sense of them against the background of our own unique experiences which is why the outputs can be so vastly different for each person. Regardless of what those outputs are, it is the sense that each person’s brain has been able to make of what they’re experiencing. It’s no wonder that you can have such a broad range of skills and abilities within a single classroom. It also demonstrates the challenges teachers face in identifying and responding to what their students have learned.
  4. “Teaching is interactive with and constructed together with students.” – If you’ve ever tried to teach the same lesson to different groups, this will make sense. What stands out to one group vs. another may impact the conversation you have and where you focus your time and what the ultimate learning is for a given group. One group may need a different way of interacting than another group in order to be successful. Even if you teach just one class (like an elementary teacher), you’ll notice year to year differences between groups of students. Those variations and your interactions are the basis of constructing knowledge together. There might be similarities about what’s learned between groups, but there will inherently be differences.
  5. “The contexts of classroom teaching matter, and teachers must manage and use them well.” – This reminds me of the porous boundary between the classroom and the surrounding environments Dr. Deborah Ball talks about in her AERA 2018 Presidential Address (Link). According to Dr. Ball, these environments aren’t just physical, they also include historical racism, the legacy of slavery, colonialism, whiteness, housing policies, segregation, school structure, teaching as an occupation, the enormous health and wealth disparities in our country, and curriculum. It’s a big “multivariate soup” within which teaching and learning take place. “Environments permeate the classroom and have no bounds themselves.”
Source

Origin & Evolution (Link)

“The goal has been to identify a small set of instructional practices that are crucial for beginning and early career teachers to be able to do well, and a small number of topics and ideas that they should understand and know how to teach.” – From the elementary lens, this is a powerful idea because elementary teachers are required to “do it all.” They are expected to teach every subject well, and while there are unique challenges to teaching each content area, how might it benefit teachers (particularly new and early career teachers) to focus on a core set of skills that can be applied across content areas? It feels like a much better use of their time, especially when you consider all the professional development opportunities teachers can be bombarded with that are often siloed by content. Each of these PD opportunities may be amazing, but if they aren’t helping teachers develop big picture understandings about teaching and learning, the impact may be smaller than we’d hope. I’d much rather focus professional learning on these core skills and then look at how they can be applied in different content areas.

“…striving to isolate those aspects of the work of teaching that matter most for the quality of students’ educational opportunities.” – From reading this page it sounds like their group has done a lot of work to involve a variety of stakeholders in order to create and refine their list. I wonder how others who weren’t part of this work can create buy-in with teachers that these practices “matter most for the quality of students’ educational opportunities.”

“We also seek to identify the highest-leverage content knowledge needed for teaching. High-leverage content is particular topics, practices, and texts that are both foundational to the K-12 curriculum in this country and important for beginning teachers to be able to teach.” – This would be useful to connect with standards at a given grade level to help teachers understand where and how to focus their time and attention with their students.

High-Leverage Practices (Link)

“These practices are used constantly and are critical to helping students learn important content. The high-leverage practices are also central to supporting students’ social and emotional development.” – I like how this acknowledges that we’re teaching people, not just content, and so the skills of teaching need to include skills related to building relationships and working with people.

Here’s the list of high-leverage practices

  1. Leading a group discussion
  2. Explaining and modeling content, practices, and strategies
  3. Eliciting and interpreting student thinking
  4. Diagnosing particular common patterns of student thinking and development in a subject-matter domain
  5. Implementing norms and routines for classroom discourse and work
  6. Coordinating and adjusting instruction during a lesson
  7. Specifying and reinforcing productive student behavior
  8. Implementing organizational routines
  9. Setting up and managing small group work
  10. Building respectful relationships with students
  11. Talking about a student with parents or other caregivers
  12. Learning about students’ cultural, religious, family, intellectual, and personal experiences and resources for use in instruction
  13. Setting long- and short-term learning goals for students
  14. Designing single lessons and sequences of lessons
  15. Checking student understanding during and at the conclusion of lessons
  16. Selecting and designing formal assessments of student learning
  17. Interpreting the results of student work, including routine assignments, quizzes, tests, projects, and standardized assessments
  18. Providing oral and written feedback to students
  19. Analyzing instruction for the purpose of improving it

It’s overwhelming when you look at it all at once, especially when you consider there’s quite a bit of depth to each of these statements, but I like the idea that if these are the things that matter most, then this list provides solid avenues teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators can pursue to help improve the quality of students’ educational opportunities.

High-Leverage Content (Link)

“Although many teaching capabilities are used across subject areas, some are subject-specific.” – This is where I’d like to see subject-area PD focus. The high-leverage practices keep us focused, but we can learn the nuances of how to use them successfully in each subject area without feeling like we’re always learning something brand new or disconnected from previous learning.

TeachingWorks hasn’t provided a list of high-leverage content yet. It says they began the work of identifying high-leverage content in 2011. I’m curious where they are 10 years on.

Practice-Based Teacher Education (Link)

I guess everything gets a list on this site. This page shares 10 critical features of practice-based teacher education – “professional training that is deliberate about making sure that novice teachers can use specific practices of teaching” in an effort to create “a more just society, achieved through classroom instruction that disrupts racism and attends to all students as individuals and as members of multiples communities.”

Here is their list of critical features of practice-based education

  1. Shared vision
  2. High-leverage practices
  3. Models of skillful teaching
  4. Opportunity to practice
  5. Ambitious learning goals for children
  6. Deliberate attention to Black and brown children
  7. Content knowledge for teaching
  8. Ethical obligations
  9. Performance assessments
  10. Coherence, sustainability, and continuous improvement

Part of why they share this list is because there’s not one model program or way to teach teachers. Rather, we need to create programs for particular contexts and students, but these critical features can help shape that work.

One thing they talk about in this section is how they decompose the high-leverage practices and provide opportunities for teachers to learn and practice individual parts of each practice. This makes sense given how dense the high-leverage practices are.

If you want to see some of these critical features in practice, I recommend watching the entirety of Dr. Deborah Ball’s talk that I mentioned earlier. In particular she demonstrates deliberate attention to two Black children in her class and the power we have as teachers to build up or tear down these students with decisions we have to make in-the-moment.

Fast forward to 46:31 for the start of Dr. Ball’s talk

Final Thoughts

I’ve been drawn to this idea of high-leverage practices for several years now. Having worked as a curriculum coordinator in a school district with 34 elementary schools with over 1,000 elementary teachers, I constantly bumped into the limits of teachers’ time. Teachers are pulled in many directions from administrators, instructional coaches, the curriculum department, state requirements, not to mention teachers’ own interests about what they’d like to learn. I feel like we can work smarter, not harder, by centering our professional learning efforts around a set of common practices like those shared by TeachingWorks. It would create common language and would reassure teachers that any professional learning they are doing is tied into the bigger picture of what it means to provide quality instruction to all students. Unfortunately I wasn’t a very good salesman because I never found any traction with the idea in my district, which is fine, but it doesn’t mean I’m letting it go. I don’t know how or when I might be able to work with these ideas further, but I know that I’d like to.

What We Presume

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I once heard an analogy that teaching is a lot like being a doctor…if the doctor had to diagnose and treat 25 patients all at the same time. It’s cute and helps drive home the point that the work of teachers is complex as they tackle the daily challenges of meeting the needs of many students simultaneously. However, this analogy hits too close to home as it reflects a shift in the profession I’ve been noticing over the past few years. The role of a teacher really has become more like being a doctor, and that bothers me.

These days, education is driven by capital D Data. Data, Data, Data. And why? Because like a doctor, we want to diagnose what’s wrong and help fix it.

And that’s where the problem lies. We presume illness.

This post from Tracy Zager exemplifies my concern. In the post, she recounts the diagnostic test her daughters each had to take on the very first day of 2nd and 4th grade.

Welcome to the new school year!

Unfortunately, nowadays teachers feel pressured to collect as much Data as possible as soon as possible so they can diagnose the illness and begin treatment right away. Does that really need to be our focus on day one? Or even day 2, 3, 4, or 5? As Tracy says in her post,

“On day one, I really don’t care if my students know the vocabulary word for a five-sided polygon, can tell time to the half hour, and can calculate perimeter accurately. I’d much rather know how they attack a worthy problem, how they work with one another, and how they feel about the subject of mathematics. I am much more interested in the mathematical practice standards than the content standards in the fall.”

The concern Tracy shares dovetails with the message Ken Williams gave in his keynote back in July at CAMT 2017. The overall talk was about disrupting the status quo with regards to labeling and limiting students. This message jumped out at me during his talk:

And yet this is exactly the kind of experience Tracy shared in her blog post! Ken Williams challenges this practice and the limits it places on our students:

When we presume there’s an illness – a problem with a student or group of students – then we’re setting our expectations about what we’re going to find. If we train ourselves to seek out faults and deficiencies, then that’s what we’re going to get good at finding.

Here’s what I’d love for us to presume instead. To quote Andrew Gael, let’s presume competence. Presume that when our kids walk in the door on the first day of school, they have funds of knowledge to draw on and the ability to learn even more. As we get to know our students, we’ll observe variation – it’s natural – and once we’re aware of what those variations are for individual students we can start brainstorming ways to accommodate to ensure each and every student can continue to have access to the learning in our classrooms.

When we presume competence, we aren’t looking for illness, we’re looking for strength. We’re sending important messages to our students from day one that we value who they are and who they can become as they journey with us through the school year.

 

 

Take It Away – CGI National Conference 2017

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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.

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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:

  1. In what ways are your students allowed to bring “their whole selves” to the learning of mathematics in your classroom and school?
  2. What do you know about the cultural and lived experiences of the students in your mathematics classroom? (How can you broaden your knowledge?)
  3. 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.

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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:

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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!

More Than Words

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Yesterday Tracy Zager shared a heartbreaking post that every teacher should take a few minutes to read.

The gist of it is that teachers need to be mindful about the messages they send students and parents about learning and doing mathematics. Sometimes damaging messages come across in the form of words – “You may not talk to anyone as you work.” – but they also come across in our choices of lessons and activities we do in our classrooms – such as a long pre-assessment that most students will “fail” because they unsurprisingly don’t yet know the content from their new grade level.

But there’s hope! This Tweet sums it up nicely:

I’ve been especially encouraged while reading the latest blog posts from the members of my Math Rocks cohort. Back in July we watched Tracy’s Shadow Con talk. Afterward everyone took Tracy’s call to action to choose a word to guide their math planning at the start of the year.

Flash forward a month and the school year is finally getting underway. Our latest Math Rocks mission was to re-watch Tracy’s talk and to watch my own Shadow Con talk since the two are very much related. Then they had to choose one of our calls to action to follow and write a blog post reflecting on their experiences as they kicked off the school year.

The results have been so inspiring! I’ve collected all of their posts in this document. Take a look. Just reading the titles of their posts makes me happy, and if you go on to read them, I hope you’ll finish with as big of a smile on your face as I have.

Math Rocks Redux Part 1

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This time last year, @reginarocks and I kicked off our inaugural Math Rocks cohort. We spent two awesome days of PD together with a group of 30 elementary teachers which you can read about here and here.

And this time this year, we kicked off our second Math Rocks cohort which you can read about in this very post!

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For those who want to stick to the present and not go back into last year’s posts, Math Rocks is our district cohort for elementary teachers to grow as math teachers. Our two focus goals for the year are building relationships around mathematics and fostering curiosity about mathematics. The cohort meets for two full days in July followed up by 9 after school sessions, September through January, and a final half day session together in February. It’s intense, but so rewarding to get to work with teachers for such an extended amount of time!

I want to write a post about this year’s Math Rocks cohort to give you some insight into what stayed the same and what changed. Now that we’ve gone through this once, we knew there were some things we wanted to tweak. Without further ado…

One thing that stayed the same was kicking off Math Rocks with a little Estimation 180! The purpose behind this was twofold. First, we did it as a getting-to-know-you activity. Once everyone was ready, we had them mingle and make friends while answering questions like:

  • What is an estimate that is too LOW?
  • What is an estimate that is too HIGH?
  • What is your estimate?
  • Where’s the math? and
  • Which grade levels could do this activity?

Second, throughout day 1 we snuck in a couple of activities like Estimation 180 that were created by members of the Math Twitter Blog-o-Sphere (#MTBoS for short). Later in the day we introduced the cohort to the MTBoS, and it’s nice to be able to say, “Oh by the way, remember those Estimation 180 and Which One Doesn’t Belong? activities we did? Those are created by members of this community we’re introducing you to. Isn’t that awesome?!”

Last year we did a community circle after the Estimation 180 activity, but I scrapped it this year in order to streamline our day and add time for the biggest change to day 1, which I’ll talk about in a bit. Instead, we moved right into the ShadowCon15 talks from Tracy Zager and Kristin Gray that serve the purpose of setting up our two Math Rocks goals.

Just like last year, we had the participants reflect before Tracy’s video. They had to create three images that symbolized what math was like to them as a student. It’s fascinating (and concerning) to see how many images involve computation facts practice of some sort:

Even more fascinating (and sadly disturbing) was listening to participants’ horror stories about fact practice as a child. One person talked about the teacher hitting students on the back of the hand for getting problems wrong on timed tests. Another one said the teacher had everyone in class hiss at students who got problems wrong. Hiss! Can you believe that?!

We only made a slight change to this portion of the day. Last year we prefaced each video with a description we got from the ShadowCon site. This year I let the talks speak for themselves. It seemed more powerful to let Tracy and Kristin build their own arguments without priming the pump so much.

I mentioned earlier we left out the community circle in the morning to make room for the biggest change to day 1. Let me tell you about that. Introducing goal #2 leads us into one of the biggest components of Math Rocks, joining Twitter and creating a blog. In order to build relationships and foster curiosity, I want my teachers to experience being members of the MTBoS during their time in Math Rocks.

Last year I gave directions here and here on our Math Rocks blog. I shared the links to those two blog posts and set them loose to get started. To say we ran into problems is a vast understatement. I severely underestimated the support needed to get 30 teachers with widely varying comfort levels with technology connected to Twitter and blogging. No offense to them – they were great sports about it – but I definitely threw our first cohort in the deep end and I’m lucky (and thankful!) they all came back for day 2.

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This year I slowed things down quite a bit, and together we walked through the process of creating a Twitter account and a blog. I ended up spending about an hour and fifteen minutes on each part. That’s how much I learned from last year’s experience! Slow and steady wins this race. For those who were comfortable getting started on their own, I gave them their tasks up front here and here so they didn’t have to sit and wait for the rest of us.

Oh, that reminds me of another behind-the-scenes change this year. Instead of using a blog to share missions, I decided to try Google Classroom. I made separate assignments of creating a Twitter account and creating a blog, and the documents I linked in the previous paragraph were linked to those assignments. I haven’t done much else with Google classroom yet, so I’m not sure if it’s going to be a better choice or not, but so far it’s working out okay.

Doing all of that pretty much took up the rest of day 1, with the exception of a little Which One Doesn’t Belong? to give us a break between introducing Twitter and blogging.

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All in all, I’m happy we were able to keep so much of day 1 intact. I feel like the structure of it does a nice job of establishing our goals for the year and I’m happy I was able to find a way to get everyone connected to Twitter and blogging in a less stressful way.

Day 2, on the other hand, is completely different from last year, and I look forward to writing about that in my next post.

 

What Do We Do With All Those Lazy Teachers?

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In some form or another, I see this question posed on Twitter again and again. I think the assumption is that connected educators who actively blog and tweet are in the class of awesome, engaged, and doing-the-right thing teachers while everyone else is in the class of sucky, lazy, or just-kind-of-meh teachers.

With the daily attacks trumpeting the failures of schools and, specifically, teachers, we should really be banding together, showing solidarity because we all know full well teaching is an undervalued profession in this country, and as a whole we are doing our damned best. Instead, numerous tweets and blogs from real teachers are serving to divide us and tear us down.

Those non-connected educators. Those are the ones worthy of scorn. They don’t try and they clearly don’t care about doing a good job.

We connected educators. We’re the awesome ones, the ones everyone should model themselves after. Don’t associate us with those lesser teachers. You should be proud of us.

I know I’m being hyperbolic and somewhat inflammatory. I’m not trying to call out any one educator. This is just a recurring theme I’ve picked up on during my past two years being a part of Twitter and blogging.

I want to play devil’s advocate today. Instead of asking about what to do with lazy teachers, what if we asked this question instead:

Are some teachers just trying too hard?

Obviously there are people who pour their heart and soul into their teaching job, but is that a realistic expectation for the profession as a whole? I know it can feel good to exceed expectations and be proud of your work, but can’t it be okay for some portion of teachers to meet expectations, do an adequate job, and feel content with what they’re doing?

I know there are negative connotations to some of those words, but think about it. If you have met expectations, you have done what is expected of you, what your employer agreed to pay you to do. For some people, that’s enough. They don’t want more from their job than that. And is it our place to judge them?

Full disclosure: I was one of the overly passionate, dedicated teachers when I was in the classroom. Every day I arrived at school 45 minutes to an hour early so that I had time to prepare. And most every day I stayed at work until 5:30 or 6 o’clock at night grading papers, writing plans, and the countless other responsibilities I had. Sometimes I stayed until 9:30 or 10 o’clock! I also worked at least one full day on the weekends, sometimes two.

I won’t make any claims that all of this work resulted in me being the best teacher there ever was, but it was an effort I wanted to put in, no questions asked. It felt like the right thing to do in order to be the best teacher I could be to my students.

However, is that a realistic expectation for teachers as a whole? Absolutely not. While this was passionate work, it was still work, and it took its toll over time. I got burned out.

I doubt anyone would say that teachers need to put in the kinds of hours I did, but they do seem to make other claims about what a “good” teacher should do. Say, for example, joining Twitter and following blogs.

I won’t discount the benefits of doing these things (I’ve been doing them for two years, so clearly I see a personal benefit that makes it worth my time), but I will make the challenge that no teacher should be judged for not doing them.

As any teacher knows, your job is unlike most other jobs. You don’t get to do one job all day. You have two jobs – teaching and everything else. The bulk of your day, 6-7 hours, is spent doing the teaching job. You’re focused on and engaged with your students and that’s about all you have time for. The “everything else” part of your job – grading, planning, filing, photocopying, emailing, returning phone calls, meetings, etc. – fits into whatever time you have left.

This is where it gets tricky. How much time should teachers put in for this other work? Is there some magical amount that distinguishes the good teachers from the bad teachers?

Also, what exactly does this “everything else” part of the job entail? While certain responsibilities can’t be ignored like grading and report cards, things like planning and prep are gray areas. What kind of planning and prep makes you a good teacher? A bad teacher? An adequate teacher?

Is being a connected educator a required part of this “everything else” role? Is it realistic to expect that teachers should get online when they get home to engage in evening Twitter chats, read a few research articles, and comment on some blogs? Again, I don’t discount the benefits of these things. And I have no ill will to those teachers who choose to do them. My time on Twitter would be boring if you all weren’t there. However, is a teacher slacking because she goes home to eat dinner, spend quality time with her spouse and kids, and maybe watch some television before bed?

If you answered yes to that question, then I recommend this article. I channeled it in my previous post where I expressed my frustrations about the “do what you love” mentality. In the case of teaching, I think the mantra is slightly different.  Instead of “do what you love”, or perhaps in addition to, we have the mentality of “do it for the children” which is just as dangerous.

I feel that the teaching profession has fallen into a trap with this mentality. The article specifically refers to academia and those with PhDs. However, as you can see from this modified quote, it fits the teaching profession eerily well:

“There are many factors that keep [teachers] providing such high-skilled labor for such extremely low wages…but one of the strongest is how pervasively the [“do it for the children”] doctrine is embedded in [schools]. Few other professions fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output…Because [teaching] should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts, if they are considered at all.”

So if you’re a connected educator, and you enjoy participating on Twitter, writing your own blog, or reading other people’s blogs, then keep doing what you’re doing so long as you find meaning in it. If you don’t do those things, and you really aren’t interested in doing them, then you’re probably not reading this blog post right now, so it doesn’t matter what I have to say.

13/30

Why I Chose To Teach

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Well how’s that for a last second change of plans? I was all set to talk some more about curriculum writing today. I even had the first paragraph or two of a draft started, when I happened to see this tweet in my feed:

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Considering what a powerful, life-changing decision it was for me to become a teacher, I realized that’s what I need to talk about today.

Growing up, I always knew I wanted to be a teacher.

Cliché, right? Ask any random sample of teachers, especially elementary teachers, to write about why they became a teacher, and I’d wager this is the first sentence written by more than a handful of them. Looking back, it’s definitely the case for me.

I loved school. I loved everything about it. I loved my teachers. I loved my friends. I loved learning. I loved making good grades.

School made me happy. I was one of those kids who would see his teacher cleaning out bins of extra worksheets at the end of the year, and I would gasp in delight. I’d run up to her desk and beg for some to take home so I could play school with my friends over the summer.

But my cliché story gets derailed pretty quickly. The trouble is, as I grew up, I convinced myself that I needed to do something “better” than teaching. I was a smart kid. Clearly I was supposed to get some big time job where I’d change the world and earn lots of money when I grew up. That’s what all those years of education were for, right?

So with the idea of teaching a distant thought in the back of my mind, I went to college and attempted to start forging my successful career path. It didn’t go so well.

I started off in the business school at The University of Texas at Austin. I felt out of place immediately. Here were all these people wanting to work for companies to help those companies make more money for their owners and shareholders. This is not a knock to anyone who works in business, but I very quickly learned this just did not match my personality at all. The idea of working at a job which boils down to helping someone else earn money just turned me off so much.

Thankfully, I had a fantastic macroeconomics professor, so I thought I had found my salvation. After a year and a half in the business school, I transferred into economics. It didn’t go so well.

It turns out economics doesn’t really fit my personality either. In my college courses, it seemed like economics was all about turning everything in the world into variables in order to construct equations to explain how different financial processes work. And while on an intellectual level I get why that’s done, on a personal level it felt dehumanizing.

You could sum up everything in the most beautiful equation, but that’s not going to change the fact that many people in our world go without food, education, clothing, shelter, or safety on a daily basis. They’re not just numbers.

I became overwhelmed with doubt. Here I was, halfway through my college degree, the smart kid who everyone knew was going to do great things, and I had no clue what I wanted to be when I grew up. Jobs in the “real world” seemed pointless and not worth striving for.

My personal life wasn’t in a much better state. For most of my second year of college, I was dealing with upheaval and turmoil in my friend group. That strain and my doubts about the future kept chipping away at me until I just went sort of numb and started having thoughts about how nice it would be if I just didn’t exist anymore.

I called these my “bad thoughts” and I kept them to myself for months. Thankfully I never tried to act on them, and eventually I got the courage to tell my two best friends before the start of my junior year. They didn’t really know how to help me, so it was a bit awkward, but I don’t think they realized that just having two people I trusted enough to talk to helped me more than anything in the world.

During the fall semester I went to counseling, was diagnosed with depression, and was prescribed Prozac. If you haven’t experienced depression before, it’s hard to describe, but the medicine helped get me to a middle ground. It didn’t make me happy, but it took away my sad. Side effects aside, it was amazing. Well, at the time I didn’t really feel much of anything – that’s sort of the point of being in a middle ground – but in retrospect it was amazing. It gave me the clarity to realize that I couldn’t continue with the way things had been going. Something had to give. I decided to drop out of college.

It was a tough decision, and one that my parents weren’t terribly thrilled with, especially since I didn’t feel comfortable enough to tell them the whole story (read: that I was having suicidal thoughts). But it was exactly what I needed to do. It wasn’t without a price of course. Withdrawing in the middle of the semester meant that I wasted thousands of dollars on tuition and fees. But it’s a cost I’d gladly pay again. Once the deed was done, it was like I came out of a dense fog. For the first time in a long time, I could finally just stop and think about what I wanted to do with my life.

And that’s when, after years of letting it linger in the back of my mind, I let the thought of teaching come out to play. I was hesitant at first, remembering the reasons I had pushed the idea away for so long. But after some reflection, I realized that in order to be happy in life, I wanted to work with and help others. Sure, I may not be able to change the whole world, but working in a classroom, I could have a very real impact on the lives of 22 children. I liked this idea. I wanted to pursue it.

So, that spring I re-enrolled at UT as an education major, and I never looked back. For the first time in college, my classes were interesting to me, I was engaged, and I knew I had made the right decision. I found joy and happiness again. I even discovered passion for the first time ever.

So when I look back at why I chose teaching, I did it because I realized that in order to have a fulfilling life, I needed to do something that matters, something that helps others in a meaningful way. There are other careers that help others, don’t get me wrong, but this is the one that called out to me and helped pull me back from a very dark place.

8/30

What Starts as a Comment and Ends as a Blog Post

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Last night I read a post from @sophgermain asking “why your internet activity is anonymous (if it is) and why that is.” At first I started writing a comment on her blog post. Four paragraphs in, I realized I had a lot to say on the matter. So instead of posting my comment, I opted to turn it into today’s #MTBoS30 blog post.

I joined the MathTwitterBlogoSphere almost two years ago. Dan Meyer posted on his blog to recruit new folks into the fold, and I decided to take the plunge. There was even a nifty website to help new members start blogging and using Twitter. (I couldn’t have joined a more helpful and welcoming community, by the way. Who else sets up  a website to get like-minded folks to join them online?) One piece of advice that I followed was using my real name so that people could know they were connecting with a real person.

So from the start, I technically didn’t keep myself anonymous. However, I did find myself avoiding talking about my job. I wasn’t keeping it a secret by any means, but I was still hesitant to bring it up.

I joined the MTBoS because I missed teaching and I wanted to reconnect with folks in the classroom. At the time, I had been out of the classroom for over three years, and I missed working with students. (I still miss working with students!) Maybe I hoped I could live vicariously through the folks I followed online? I can’t say that following blogs and Twitter has quite filled the void of working with students, but it has been incredible to connect with so many talented people.

Since I do work for an educational publisher, I was worried about talking about my job or the curriculum I write because I didn’t want these awesome people to think I was hanging around to hock a product. Considering how much I personally dislike most salespeople, the last thing I wanted was for people to think I was trying to be one!

I also wanted to do something that was for me. The work I do writing curriculum doesn’t belong to me. Sure, it’s something teachers and students use, and I do enjoy the challenge of designing lessons, but at the end of the day, the lessons I write are a product that belongs to a company, not to me.

So, moving forward, I am going to try to be more well rounded in what I write/talk about, which means talking more about my job and the work I do. I may even talk some about the curriculum I work on, but don’t worry, I’m not trying to sell it to you. Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen how powerful it has been for teachers to reflect on their practice, and I want to see what insights I can gain reflecting more openly about mine.

3/30

Re-Introduction

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I started this post by writing about how I felt bad that I haven’t written on this blog in a while. Then I remembered that I hate posts like that. My blog is here anytime I need it, and with everything else going on in my life the past few months, I just didn’t need it that much.

Now I do.

And thanks to @sophgermain starting a 30 day blogging challenge, I got the motivation to get going again. I’m not sure if I’ll succeed at #MTBoS30, but the idea was motivating enough to get me blogging tonight.

One thing I’d like to blog more about over the next 30 days is the job I do. I’ve written a little bit about my job since starting this blog, but for various reasons I always tried to keep my MathTwitterBlogoSphere life separate from my curriculum development life. I’m not entirely sure why, but now I’d like to change that. I see a lot of teachers benefiting from reflecting on their teaching on a regular basis (sometimes daily!), and I hope that I can gain my own insights by reflecting more directly on my work. I also hope it can give a small window into the world of curriculum design for those who are unfamiliar.

So for anyone stumbling on my blog today: Hello! My name is Brian and I am a senior content developer at McGraw-Hill Education. I work on a team developing the t2k math curriculum. I’ve been with MHE for a year and some change, but I actually started working on this curriculum back in 2009 as an employee of a company called Time To Know.

Looking back over the past 5 years, it’s hard to believe that when I started this job, iPads didn’t even exist! The educational landscape has changed so much in such a short amount of time. I remember my last year in the classroom, our school was just getting SMART boards. I never got one in my classroom *frown*, but I was over the moon with my document camera. That thing was amazing!

The reason I mention iPads specifically is because back in 2009 our curriculum was developed in Flash, and that really shot us in the foot when tablets started flooding the market. Over the past couple of years, Time To Know has rebuilt their entire Digital Teaching Platform so that it works on multiple devices – quite an impressive feat.

Now that they have completed their big task, I have the daunting task of leading a team converting our entire grade 4 and 5 curriculum into this new system. It’s quite an undertaking, but at the same time, it’s like visiting an old friend. When I first started at Time To Know, the math team was about halfway through writing grade 4, and grade 5 was the first full year of curriculum I helped write.

In some ways it’s exciting to see these lessons again, and in other ways there’s that awkwardness of revisiting pedagogical decisions I made just as I was starting the job. While the lessons have gone through some upgrades since I first wrote them, I can’t help but think of ways I want to make them even better.

1/30