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Classroom Jobs to Give Students Ownership | BetterLesson Coaching

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Teaching Math Isn’t Just About Numbers. It’s About Us.

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Teaching Math Isn’t Just About Numbers. It’s About Us.

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February is Black History Month. However, educators should not limit their focus on the inclusion of Black voices to just this month. Culturally responsive teaching and learning can be integrated into any subject, every day of the year. Below, Dr. Shakiyya Bland, a BetterLesson Master Teacher, shares how equity is an essential part of mathematics.
Culturally relevant and responsive mathematics teaching is trending now and has been for quite some time. However, it is not a movement to me. It is a vital pedagogical mission that must be sustained and progress the ways in which mathematics is communicated and applied. My joy for mathematics began early in life, yet it was in the eighth-grade that I perceived mathematics as more than a puzzle to solve. It became an instrument to navigate predominantly white educational spaces.

Mathematics belongs to all of us, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability. Mr. Stavropoulos, my eighth-grade algebra teacher not only told me but he showed me. His classroom was a space of affirmation. He modeled mathematics in dynamically engaging ways that spoke to me. He unwrapped polynomial equations into bite-size chunks. He rearranged functions on dry-erase boards as a street artist uses the local coffee shop wall as a canvas. Pure and simple, he shared his love for mathematics. Although the textbook authors were predominantly white and male, Mr. Stav created space for me.

I still believe I belong and yet, I do not see significant diverse representation in secondary mathematics classrooms. Representation matters. I desire for all students, especially black female students to see themselves as valuable contributors to mathematics.

Once I came to understand how basic algebra could break down the most complex calculations, I knew that all I needed was a sharpened no. 2 pencil and some loose-leaf notebook paper in order to effectively resolve any mathematical problem in a real-world narrative, whether it was exposed or hidden. Sitting in my university math methods course, one of two pre-service educators of color, I found solace in the fact that my mathematical

answers were factual, undisputed calculations that afforded me a sense of security that I found to be so comforting.

In the words of Notorious B.I.G., "It was all a dream." Fast-forward to my third-year of teaching and first at the middle school level. To put it mildly, a 90-minute block of time for sixth-graders in mathematics is akin to a game of Othello - students versus teacher; each of us taking turns attempting to convert the other and gain control of the classroom. I learned my greatest lessons from students at this junior high level: forgiveness, grace, community, joy, authenticity; and never take yourself too seriously. Teaching middle school scholars mathematics during these precious class periods pushed me to work on my personal relationship with each individual's brilliance and with mathematics in order to effectively communicate its beautiful complexity to a new audience of scholars.

We couldn't just talk about mathematics - we had to play and interact with it. Learn how it operated within the classroom and beyond. Returning to eighth-grade as an educator, my students and I explored angle relationships within their geometric cities ruled by the precision of parallel and perpendicular streets, constructed clinometers investigating the language of trigonometry, studied geometric nets for packaging, collected relevant statistics from student-generated surveys in partnership with food manufacturing companies, vicariously traveled to Morocco with a parent architect to learn the significance of the role of culture and history in design. We drew a scale model replica in collaboration with a local muralist. Listening to the sounds of Pi and Phi (the golden ratio), we

tessellated our mathematical rhythms while the percussion of parabolic functions projected by catapult pulley systems filled the air. We created our own olympics to understand rates and proportional relationships. Whether we were inside or outside, mathematics was there and we listened with our full selves to notice, to understand, to question and wonder.

Prior to teaching middle school mathematics, I miscalculated the beauty of the algorithmic designs of math. I ignored the proof and focused on the linear equations without respecting math's testimony of full-circle rainbows,

asymmetrical embroidery of Ghana braids and Navajo Nation math circles. In quiet moments, I catch fractals pirouetting through cherry blossom branches. The orchestrated tones of trigonometric sequences move my heart to love. There is no more vacant pause after students ask, "When are we ever going to use this?" The instructional strategies for exchanging mathematical cultural capital remains present in my teaching and learning as ways of being and engaging with others.

There are so many visionary mathematicians from Katherine Johnson, to Toya Jones Frank, Ph.D., Francis Su, Ph.D., Rochelle Gutierrez, Ph.D., Danny Martin, Ph.D., classroom educators, and up and coming scholars who show up in preschools and grad schools. Watching my 82-year old grandmother arrange carefully cut swatches of fabrics and delicately arrange them with precision using transformational geometry to design, I smile. I smile with consideration, for her mathematically intuitive gifts are not new to my ancestral line.

So, how can we help students find their own cultural connections? I cultivate critical consciousness through the process of examining and rewriting lessons that promote authentic student representation, increase student engagement, and incorporate multiple perspectives through the lens of racial, cultural, gender, physical, and learning differences. I have been developing my own personal-professional action plan to guide the process in constructing lessons and units. Critical consciousness leads me to identify culturally-sustaining values and key concepts for each lesson design. It is important to consider identity, systems, hegemony (i.e., the economic,

political, social, or cultural authority or influence of one group over another), and humanization (i.e. recognize humanity) when developing curriculum.

I advocate for more family events that invite the community to experience and contribute to mathematics as participants in learning activities at schools, libraries, and communal recreational areas. By providing opportunities in class for students to highlight and map community cultural assets and resources, learning is accelerated and students' cultural capital is centered and affirmed.

As educators, we co-construct neurological bridges with students and families as we engage in learning from and with each other. As a photographer, I appreciate the negative space as an offering of balance to the focal point. Productive struggle and critical mathematical discourse offer that same energy to a learning space. Let's begin the community conversation with these questions: How can the teaching of mathematics be integral in advancing classroom and local community relationships? How are students positioned and encouraged to contribute to the discovery of mathematics in your learning spaces? How do you integrate history, music, and art in mathematics courses as a means of communication and understanding of mathematics? How do learners recognize that their very DNA is composed of mathematics?

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Teaching Math Isn't Just About Numbers. It's About Us. - BetterLesson

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Master Teacher Shakiyya Bland shares her journey with mathematics and how math belongs to all of us, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or ability.

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IEPs - Family Survey in English and Spanish

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WASHINGTON - Creating a pro-social school environment increases the frequency of children's positive behavior, develops their social skills, and may limit future aggressive behaviors. According to research being presented at the 108th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (APA) this week, two years of a school-wide climate changing program called PeaceBuilders gave children greater social competence and more positive behavior patterns.

Psychologists Daniel J. Flannery, PhD, and Alexander T. Vazsonyi, PhD, along with several colleagues, evaluated the PeaceBuilders program in seven Pima County, Arizona elementary schools. Students were surveyed about their aggressive behavior (e.g., "I hit someone"), and their peace-building behavior (e.g., "I helped build peace at school"). Teachers also rated their students' social competence and aggressive behavior using two tools, the Walker-McConnell Scale of Social Competence and School Adjustment, and Achenbach's Teacher Report Form. The PeaceBuilders program was instituted immediately in half the sample and a year later in the other schools.

The PeaceBuilders intervention teaches simple rules: praise people, avoid put-downs, seek wise people as advisers and friends, notice and correct hurts inflicted, and right wrongs. These principles were taught school-wide to both teachers and students in an attempt to change the setting that triggers aggressive or hostile behavior and to provide role models for good social behavior. The authors say the intervention was "purposely woven into the school's everyday routine to make it a 'way of life,' not just a time or subject-limited curriculum."

After beginning PeaceBuilders, teachers noted significant improvement in student social competence, rating students higher on factors like empathy, cooperation, and sensitivity. Students also reported increased peace-building behaviors like helping others and giving compliments for good behavior. The majority of improvement in social competence and peace-building occurred between and six and 12 months into the program.

There was a small decline in aggressive behavior after the first six months, but by the end of the program aggression levels had returned to the baseline. However, in the six months that aggressive behavior was declining in the test schools, the control school's aggressive behavior actually increased. So, PeaceBuilders may have an effect on future aggressive behavior. In order to reduce aggressive behavior significantly, say the authors, future programs should include more targeted behavioral efforts to complement the universal approach.

PeaceBuilders is different from previous violence prevention programs, say the researchers, because it attempted to change the school climate instead of individual risk factors, it lasted longer than many other programs and the program focused on universal prevention beginning in kindergarten. The authors believe that a school-wide climate intervention such as PeaceBuilders "can improve child social competence, increase the frequency of positive behavior and may buffer expected increases in aggressive behavior."

Presentation: "Longitudinal Effectiveness of the PeaceBuilders' Universal School-Based Violence Prevention Program," Daniel J. Flannery, PhD, Kent State University, Alexander T. Vazsonyi, PhD, Auburn University, Dennis Embry, PhD, PAXIS Institute, Kenneth E. Powell, MD, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Henry Atha, MPH, Pima County, AZ Community Services Department Program, Wendy Vesterdal, MA, and Shenyang Guo, PhD, Case Western Reserve University. Session 4108: Monday, August 7, 10:00-11:50 a.m., Capitol Hilton Hotel, Federal Room B.

Daniel J. Flannery, PhD, can be reached at his Kent State University office at (330) 672-2775.

Full text of the article is available from the APA Public Affairs Office
The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists. APA's membership includes more than 159,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. Through its divisions in 53 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 59 state, territorial, and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession, and as a means of promoting human welfare.

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Positive school climate equals positive children's behavior, Peacebuilders program teaches social competence

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Creating a pro-social school environment increases the frequency of children's positive behavior, develops their social skills, and may limit future aggressive behaviors.

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Introducing Bryanna

When I first met with Bryanna, I learned that she was teaching third-grade humanities at a charter school in Camden, New Jersey. She was teaching in an inclusion setting using the EL Education curriculum . When I began that first coaching session with Bryanna, I could see how much expertise she had in close reading strategies, social-emotional learning, and data-driven instruction. She also shared that many of her students were well below a third-grade reading level. I knew that she would have big goals and I was excited to personalize her coaching to her goals.

To begin our work, I shared a little bit about coaching, the try-measure-learn process , and how we use outcomes (goals) to guide coaching and achieve clear milestones. Bryanna chose her first outcome in the focus area of formative assessment and differentiation :

I can create a culture of feedback with my students by developing trust in order to drive their academic growth.

When discussing her goals, she shared, " I want students to hear feedback and emotionally be motivated to act on it and then I want a revision process to happen."

She continues, "It was clear early on that students were invested in being back in the classroom and with a teacher full time. I quickly learned that the needs of students were so varied that one strategy or mindset couldn't work alone. My feedback would need to be consistent and targeted for each student. The word that became my foundation and guide was: goals! The goals were varied but the steps we could take to achieve them could be universally applied."

At the end of our first session, Bryanna was already excited to try something new towards her overall plan to create a culture of feedback for goal setting. She planned to use her lesson's learning targets to create "criteria for success," or thinking steps so that students could begin to self-assess and take feedback centered around those learning targets. This began their process of learning target self-assessment .

Bryanna reflected on this process: "Students began to self-evaluate their work and progress during work time without having to be reminded of the next step-the thinking steps and criteria for success were given on their actual work or visible on the board/screen, giving the class a common language for feedback. The steps gave students the opportunity to advocate for themselves when stuck on specific parts or celebrate when they monitored their work because they could see success immediately. These strategies were very logistical in nature but it became the norm: we have work to do; here's how we are going to do it.

These components were the foundation of feedback and self-evaluation. When I first introduced each structure, I explained the purpose behind them and why they were important to include in our daily routines.

Here was our plan:

Learning Targets

Learning targets/goals would need to be super clear at the beginning of the lesson but also used in the language throughout the lesson. EL Education has strong learning targets that are standard specific, which helps the class adopt a common language for goals.

Thinking Steps

No one gets where they want to be right away - there is a process, timeline, or a set of steps to climb before we can achieve success. Steps given in lessons or within units could be agendas, timelines, thinking steps, etc. I aimed to frame thinking steps as open-ended questions to enhance critical thinking. Giving students thinking steps that can be answered with a yes/no can limit their engagement in higher-order thinking.

Checklists

One of my favorite strategies (in life and school) is checklists! Checklists organize the process and the outcome in such clear ways. They give students the opportunity to know exactly how to get the outcome they desire, understand what pieces they might be missing, and create accountability. Paired with the thinking steps (see example below), a checklist gives the class a common language of the standards, process, and outcome. Having the checklist as a visible, active part of the lesson also gives me as the teacher a chance to be specific when giving feedback."

Building on that Foundation with Goal Setting

After Bryanna created a culture of feedback using learning targets, thinking steps, and checklists, we reflected on the next step. We moved into planning out goal setting. Students would use their self-assessments to set goals using a red, yellow, and green half-sheet tracker. If they were in the red or yellow, they knew that was an area they should focus on for goal setting.

Bryanna planned to roll out this process using SMART goal setting . She would teach what SMART goals are, show her own goal to model for her students how to set a goal and make a plan, and give examples of goals. She would then allow her students to set their first goals while she conferenced with them each individually. She would do this while students worked independently during flexible time on iReady lessons or assessments.

"Goal setting was a natural progression for the work we started around thinking steps and having rubrics and checklists during the lessons," Bryanna shared. "Students were building confidence, the content was elevated, and we were out of the newness of routines and procedures. We started off analyzing our learning target progress with an easy self-assessment tool on their desks. At the end of every lesson or section, students would be asked to choose a color based on how they were feeling about their progress towards mastery of the learning target."

Here's how Brynna communicated the code:

Red: I can't do this independently yet; I'm confused.

Yellow: I know I will do this independently; I have a question OR I need more practice.

Green: I'm very confident I can do this independently; I'm ready for a new challenge.

Making Improvements to Goal Setting

In another coaching session, we discussed how Bryanna had achieved her outcome around a culture of feedback. Bryanna reflected: "I think creating a class vocabulary and class routines has allowed kids to be okay with where they are at and to celebrate their wins and create their personal goals/next steps."

Bryanna was ready to move to her next outcome around tracking progress:

I can support my students to track their own progress by having them understand and take ownership of their learning data.

Bryanna's goals were to help students track their progress with self-assessment/goal setting and to use data from assessments and goal setting to recognize and celebrate when they had achieved a goal.

As Bryanna continued implementation, we used our next few meetings to acknowledge successes, or "glows," and make tweaks where necessary. Students loved the red, yellow, green self-assessment tool and wanted to use this tool for everything-not just academics! Bryanna also found that quieter students felt more comfortable sharing their status using this tool.

"Over time, this became so routine that if students noticed others progressing faster or having an easier time with the lesson, they would discreetly use their pencil to point to yellow or red when I walked by to signal to me that they needed help. Some would be verbal with their progress. 'Ms. Costello, I'm at a yellow right now,' and then follow it up with their question or something they just didn't quite grasp," Bryanna told me.

Bryanna scaffolded goal setting by sharing the week's focus at the start of each week so students could use that to create relevant goals. For example, for a focus around the main idea of what they were reading, one goal could be "I can use two pieces of text evidence to support the main idea."

One area that needed tweaking was the organization of it all. She wanted to change the format so that everything was in one place and students didn't need so many papers. Bryanna's idea was to create goal notebooks for students. This was the start of what eventually became "goal passports."

"Our theme for the year has been 'reading takes us places!' and having students set goals in a passport just seemed like the perfect holding place for all the 'places' we could go within our reading journey," shared Bryanna. "We spent time each week creating goals based on what skills were coming up for the week.

Here's an example of the weekly plan:

1. On Mondays, we spent time with our agenda for the week of skills that we would practice.

2. Throughout the week, we could use standard language and reference thinking steps and CFS.

3. On Fridays, students would evaluate their work from the week. Inside their passports, students would write reflections on their progress. If students met their goals, they would receive a stamp in their passports!

Feedback throughout this process anchored their motivation. Students discussed their progress, and goals and connected with (and encouraged!) others. Students felt confident giving each other constructive feedback."

Final Reflections

This process of tracking progress and recognizing growth allowed Bryanna to reflect on her own growth. She not only created a culture of feedback, but she now had a classroom community of students who took ownership of their learning data and were motivated to improve!

Upon reflection, Bryanna said, "I think that students are better able to advocate for their strengths and weaknesses and they also have enough self-awareness to ask 'how do I reach this goal?' if they don't know how to get there, which is helpful in their ownership and they're super motivated by data which is awesome!"

In our final few meetings together, Bryanna shared what these systems look like in her classroom now. They don't look the same as they did in October and November.

"It's evolved with them," she shared. "The red, yellow, green was necessary at the point that I did it because they needed to be able to be reminded that they can advocate for themselves and then we got to a point where they didn't need that because they were more verbal on their own. One kid said to me, 'I think I'm okay with summarizing the problem and solution, but I'm stuck here on this call to action; how do I question them?' He picked apart the checklist and said 'okay, this is what I got and this is what I can do on my own and this is the piece I need help with....' In the beginning of the year, he was a kid who would shut down and slam his pencil and say, 'I don't know how to do this.' Now, he just evaluated the entire list on his own and is telling me what he needs from me!"

This was a special moment for me to witness as a coach. Bryanna allowed her students to grow not just academically, but emotionally. She helped them to advocate for themselves, grow their confidence, and become more independent and self-driven learners. It was wonderful to see this develop throughout the year!

"The culture I built with my students this year, around feedback and academic growth, mirrored strategies and routines that can and will be helpful as transferable skills in other areas of life. As adults we set goals, make plans to achieve them, and understand that we meet our goals with clear action steps and often the encouragement of a support system that believes in us and is able to guide us or watch us grow.

Having Morgan coaching me through the year has been such an asset to the ways I could cultivate a strong school year. We worked together to make my ideas come to life in the classroom. She guided me to strategies for anything that I needed over the year. It was incredible to form a strong relationship with someone I could trust and count on in such a small amount of time."

If you're ready to learn more about coaching with BetterLesson, contact us today.

Let's Talk

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Create a Culture of Growth with Goal Setting - BetterLesson

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See how one teacher created a culture of feedback with her students in order to drive their academic growth.