Balancing The Equation

By The Recovering Traditionalist

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Welcome to my piece of the Balancing The Equation blog hop book study! If you are just joining in, the blog hop is almost over…however, there are links at the bottom of this post to everything so that you can go back to the posts about the other chapters. Make sure you head over and watch the replay of the webinar I did yesterday with Matt Larson, one of the authors of Balancing the Equation. The webinar was FANTASTIC and there were tons of comments from the live attendees like “This webinar should be seen by ALL educators!!” So after you read this blog post, go watch the webinar.

My part of the blog hop is the 2nd half of Chapter 4, which is all about how to stop the pendulum swing and find an Equilibrium Position….which, being a Recovering Traditionalist, is right up my alley!

Chapter 4: The Equilibrium Position and Effective Mathematics Instruction

“Let us teach mathematics the honest way by teaching both skills and understanding.”

-Hung-Hsi Wu, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, UC-Berkeley

Pages 75-85 of Chapter 4 has four main ideas: Perseverance, Practice, Feedback, and the Use of Technology. I’d like to focus in on Perseverance and Practice.

One thing I think that helps build perseverance is ensuring that the tasks we provide for kids allow for productive struggle and help develop kids’ growth mindsets around mathematics. Balancing the Equation does a nice job of explaining each of these but here are two more resources:

Watch this short 5 minute Ignite talk by my friend Robert Kaplinsky all about Productive Struggle. It’s fabulous and I use this video in PD that I do all the time.
If you haven’t heard about Growth Mindset, then you need to get the book Mindsets by Carol Dweck….like NOW.

Both perseverance and growth mindset are, at their heart, pushing kids to become more than they are right now by getting them to a place where they are slightly uncomfortable and they might potentially fail. Now this is super hard to do as a parent and as a teacher because we want our kids to succeed. So, to illustrate the point I’m going to pull a line from the movie Kung Fu Panda 3 where the Kung Fu Panda (Po) is talking with his master:

Po: “I don’t know why you ever thought I could teach that class”

Master Shifu: “Oh I knew you couldn’t”

Po: “What!?!?! You set me up to fail? Why!?!”

Master Shifu: “If you only do what you can do, you will never be more than you are now.”

The practice section of the chapter does a good job of giving parents and teachers ideas of what practice in class and homework should look like. I’m honestly not a fan of homework and during the webinar, but Matt explained it perfectly when someone asked a question about the use of homework and reminded me to keep a balance. He said:

Anyone who is good at whatever it is that they do practices. Learning mathematics is no different. Students need practice. Now, that practice needs to be appropriate. Practice should be based on understanding. It doesn’t need to be lengthy…Has there, in some cases, been way too much homework? Absolutely. Has there been inappropriate homework? Absolutely. But we also can’t throw all of that out because someone tells us now that it’s inappropriate.

When he said that it hit me that homework is another area that the pendulum swings one way and then the other. Some people assign a ton of homework, some assign none. It’s time to stop the pendulum swing and find a balance of using homework appropriately. In the primary grades there may be no homework or the homework is a math game. But kids do need practice if we want them to get better and I can also see how practice can help build perseverance and the growth mindset.

Implications

A lot of times when we swing towards helping kids develop their conceptual understanding we might only do one or two problems during math time. This can be wonderful for helping develop their understanding and their perseverance…however, kids aren’t getting a lot of practice. So, one of the challenges is determining when to have kids persevere and when to be practicing.

My belief is that when the concept is new, then we should be spending more time doing rich, interesting tasks that allow for productive struggle ( don’t forget about that talk by Robert Kaplinsky) and building of conceptual understandings. Once kids start gaining familiarity with a concept and have a base of that conceptual understanding then we can move into purposeful practice. For example, kindergarten kiddos should NOT be doing timed tests and worksheets full of addition and subtraction problems. They should be modeling and acting out problems that they encounter in their lives that require them to add & subtract. On the other hand, if you have 6th grade kiddos who still don’t know their math facts AND you know that teachers in previous years have been building the conceptual understanding and they still don’t have it…I think there comes a time when we just need to focus on practice.

Calls to Action

These three items come from a presentation I do on Family Math Nights for local schools and the message is for parents, but is equally important for how we “help” in the classroom.

$Helping kids with math$

Be Less Helpful – Don’t jump in right away and try to ‘help’ children do math problems. Instead ask questions like “What do you notice?” “What do are you wondering?” “What do you think?” and “How do you know?”
Ban the phrase “I was never good at math” – kids pick up and internalize the way we act towards everything…including academics. Even as a teacher, you may not be outwardly saying “I was never good at math” but you might be portraying your dislike of it to your students. Think about your enthusiasm when it is time for reading and then compare it to your enthusiasm when it’s time to do math. I’m not saying you are more enthusiastic about one over the other, just something to have you think about. If we are excited about math time our students will be too. (Personally, I know I’m more excited about math time than reading and it’s something I’m working on.)
Keep Reading, start Mathing – I don’t want teachers or parents thinking they need to stop helping their child with reading, but I want all of us to start to think differently about what Math is. When most of us think about doing math it is a set of bare number problems on a worksheet that we have memorized a rule to solve without much understanding. If a child did that in reading we would say they aren’t a proficient reader…kids need to read but make sense and analyze what they just read. Same is true in mathematics. I don’t want my kids to DO Math in classrooms, I want them Mathing….doing math in contexts that are interesting, important, and relevant to them. They explore, take risks, share ideas, and gain confidence in their ‘mathing’ abilities.

If you want some ideas for things to do in a Family Math Night at your school, download my PDF of 3 recommended set-ups (and resources) for a Family Math Night.