Math teachers: Here is one thing you can do tomorrow to improve your math class
Author: Kathleen Almy
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I would wager a guess that if you asked any math teacher what their goal for their students is, he or she would say “to learn the material” or “to understand the material well enough for their next course or for life.” The reality that many math teachers, me included, focus on teaching more than learning. This is a bold statement but there is more truth in it that we might like to admit.
It is extremely easy to get bogged down by material that has to be “covered.” In colleges this is particularly the case because articulation agreements hinge on the expectation that certain concepts were included in the course. However, my teaching a section of content is not the same as my students learning it. Fundamentally every teacher knows that, but if time is short, most teachers will cram in a few more concepts to ensure students have been exposed. We can check off the boxes and rest easy knowing we got through everything. That may be true on paper, but the reality is quite different.
“The reality is that many math teachers, me included, focus on teaching more than learning.”
As faculty I’m guilty of joking that a course exists regardless if no students are present or 30 are in the room. This train is heading through all of precalculus or statistics and you might be with me or not. I’m still going. After being out of the classroom for two years and working in state-level reform with high schools, colleges, and employers, my perspective shifted. I started to question everything I did for years without thinking twice. Not to get too existential, but I wondered, “what is the point?” Does everything matter? What does matter? What is the goal anyway?
When I came back to the classroom last fall, I looked at everything with a different lens. With every objective, lesson, and assessment, I asked myself this question:
Am I using this tool to further my student’s learning?
This seemingly small question can make your class better tomorrow and every day after that. But I’ll forewarn you: it will turn things upside down. As I started to use this metric to judge my instruction, I noticed how many things could be dropped and what things needed to be added. My students needed more time working with concepts with my guidance than just watching me. Fundamentally, I knew that. But again, it’s very easy to get mired in all of the content we need to teach and lose sight of the real goal: student learning.
Making this change was a hard pill to swallow. My students had always enjoyed my classes, partly because we move fast, I try to keep it relevant, and I use humor often to keep them engaged. Terrific, they had a great classroom experience. But what about the long term effects and retention? The one class where I had instruction balanced with learning was the developmental math pathways course Math Literacy. Granted, I was part of the design of the course and knew what could be cut and what was essential. It made a big difference. I also wrote the materials. But that’s not true for most teachers and it isn’t true for me in all my other classes. Still, I could bring in aspects of that balance to my other classes.
What does it take to create balance? Ruthless culling of content. As a semi-reformed hoarder, this is very challenging. I like to keep activities and examples in the same way I keep too many pairs of black pants.
As you look at your content with this lens, you might notice that some topics aren’t worth the time and other topics or concepts are getting shortchanged. It might throw off a beautiful pacing chart and mean scrapping a topic or problem you love. But the reality is this: not everything we teach has equal importance. And if students aren’t really learning it, then my “covering” a section is wasted effort.
My mantra for 2020 has been to do less and enjoy life more, which I’m somewhat successful at. A similar mantra can work in the classroom too: cover less and focus on learning more.
The negative is that you will get pulled in two directions: increasing learning for students and attending to all the required concepts. The positive is that you and your students will be happier. When I started cutting to only what was required by the articulation agreement, I noticed my students doing better on tests and quizzes. I wasn’t making my assessments easier. Some I had barely changed from previous years and I had dropped a whole out-of-class worksheet category that had provided some padding for a student’s grade. I did have some strong students, but I also had many students who were typical to the classes I’d always taught. This isn’t a rigorous randomized control trial, but I could see in the mood and in the grades an improvement towards the content. Before they had liked my instruction. Now they liked it and what they were getting out of it.
In the title of this blog, I intentionally said tomorrow instead of today. To incorporate this change of measuring everything used in instruction against the yardstick of the impact on learning, you need to give it a bit of thought. Once you start really considering this idea, it will require some adjustments to what you might be teaching or assessing. You likely already have your plans for today’s class made, so this can be incorporated for the next class you plan.
These are tough ideas with no simple solution. Saying we’ve taught something but few learning it is a failure of education. But use that paradigm without caution and you end up with 400 versions of college algebra in this country. And the next teacher has no confidence of what a student has seen. As hard as it is to accept, this is already true. Prerequisites give us a false sense of our starting point with students. I’m not saying scrap all of them, but I am suggesting we accept that having a credit on a transcript for a course does not equate to a working knowledge of the content.
If I could have my wish, it would be a nationwide conversation on what needs to be cut in every math course and how we can order and align curriculum better. We’ve added and added to course syllabi for decades. But the world has changed and with it, there are things we can focus on less. It will take compromise to agree on what those topics are, but it’s completely possible. I’ve seen it happen time and again with math initiatives. It takes a real willingness to examine the problem and not quit when obstacles occur, which is guaranteed to happen. Keeping the end goal in mind, student learning, can help us to not get lost in our own egos and the love of what is familiar.
Would you like more ideas like this that you can incorporate immediately and improve the classroom experience for you and your students? This free handout has this idea and four others to help you improve your math class tomorrow.
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