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In this Math Mentoring Moment episode we speak with a year 1 (first grade) teacher Sierra Classen in her second year of teaching from Melbourne, Australia. Listen in as we work through this common struggle we have all faced – either currently or in the past – related to students hyper focusing on answer getting over process.

This is another Math Mentoring Moment Episode where we speak with a member of the Math Moment Maker Community where together we brainstorm strategies and next steps for teachers to overcome pebbles they have in their shoe by growing all six parts of their Mathematics Program.

Resources

• Characteristics of Effective Teaching of Mathematics
• Peter Lilejedahl’s website
• Episode #11: Play Is The Engine Of Learning: An Interview with Dan Finkel 
• Tangrams
• Rush hour (game)
• Spiralgraph Set

Take the Make Math Moments Math Program Assessment Tool [Classroom Teacher & Leader Versions]

Join the Academy – Free for 30 Days

District Leader Resources:

Take the Make Math Moments Math Program Assessment Tool 

The Make Math Moments District Planning Workbook [First 3 pages] 

Learn About Our District Improvement Program

Are you a district mathematics leader interested in crafting a mathematics professional learning plan that will transform your district mathematics program forever? Book a time to chat with us!

Other Useful Resources and Supports: 

Make Math Moments Framework [Blog Article]

Make Math Moments Problem-Based Lessons & Units

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Camden King:

… I also think about the triage component, right? Where I’m literally parachuting into a kid. I’d love to be patient as hell and let them figure it out and struggle in all of that fun stuff, but a lot of times of that IXL piece, the objective is to get to our 80 smart score and then move along, and I get frustrated with that because it’s not okay with me. I want kids to actually understand.

Kyle Pearce:

Week we speak with Camden King, a high school mathematics teacher from Redmond, Oregon. Camden is teaching his diverse proficiency lab class and is striving to make gains by anticipating what students might do during a lesson and building an intentional inventory of questions to breadcrumb them along their journey.

Jon Orr:

This is another math mentoring moment episode where we speak with a member of the math moment maker community, a person just like you, where together we brainstorm strategies and next steps to teacher’s pebbles that they have in their shoes, and we help them grow all six parts of their mathematics program.

Kyle Pearce:

We’re going to dive in with an academy member and problem-based unit user from the Make Math Moments community. Camden, here we go.

Kyle Pearce:

Welcome to the Making Math Moments That Matter podcast. I’m Kyle Pearce.

Jon Orr:

And I’m John Orr. We are from makemathmoments.com.

Kyle Pearce:

This is the only podcast that coaches you through a six step plan to grow your mathematics program, whether at the classroom level or at the district level.

Jon Orr:

And we do that by helping you cultivate and foster your mathematics program like a strong, healthy, and balanced tree.

Kyle Pearce:

If you master the six parts of an effective mathematics program, the impact of your math program will grow and reach far and wide.

Jon Orr:

Every week, you’ll get the insight you need to stop feeling overwhelmed and gain back the confidence and get back to enjoying and planning and facilitating your mathematics program for the students or educators you serve.

Kyle Pearce:

Today we’re going to be digging into the branches of the tree. As you all know by now, all parts of the tree are present and important, but today we’re going to take that deep dive into the pedagogical content knowledge. We’re going to be talking about some teacher moves. We’ll be exploring some differences and some of them are minor, but others are pretty major between teaching in a tier one instructional environment versus a tier two or tier three environment.

Kyle Pearce:

So let’s dive in to this episode with Camden and we’re going to go strengthen those branches. Here we go. Hello there. What’s going on?

Camden King:

I don’t know. I got a double guy crush going on here. I get to see you guys.

Jon Orr:

Hey. Hey, we’re all here for you. We’re all here for you.

Kyle Pearce:

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. How’s it going? Where are you coming to us from?

Camden King:

I live in a little town called Redmond, Oregon, about 30,000 people, if you put your finger in the middle of the state of Oregon map, you’re probably on this.

Jon Orr:

That’s like a tech hub. Isn’t Redmond Microsoft area?

Camden King:

Redmond, Washington is.

Jon Orr:

Oh, that’s true. I got it wrong.

Camden King:

Redmond, Oregon is High Desert. Just kind of, yeah.

Jon Orr:

All right. All right. That’s all right. Thanks for meeting with us and what’s on your mind? I think we reached out to you to kind of just chat about where we may have missed the mark on some PD and thinking about how we can best serve you. So let us know what’s on your mind.

Camden King:

I super appreciate it. Again, I was a little confused, but I’m like, is this real? These guys have thousands and thousands of people in their network and they’re reaching out to me. I’m going to take it.

Jon Orr:

That’s awesome.

Camden King:

I guess I’ll just briefly give you some context and then one of the things that I do is I sign up for PD. I fall in love with you guys and you’re thinking, I got my master’s in teaching just a few years ago.

Kyle Pearce:

Oh, congrats.

Camden King:

Yeah, it was a brain fart, which I won’t go into, but then the guy who runs the school where I teach at, his name’s John, and he goes, “how would you like to be a high school math teacher”? I was teaching fifth grade out in Prineville, which is about 20 miles away, and I said, heck yeah. So just kind of tucked under one of the teachers that was here. Passed my math test on the second try, and last year I was teaching algebra and geometry. We’ve now combined those. I was also teaching integrated, which technically should be a spiral in reality, it’s more remedial math, more than you want to know.

Camden King:

But I’ll tell you, my last year going into our second semester, my dad had a major stroke. He lived back in Michigan, so I left for the rest of the year and he’s since passed away. But coming back this fall, we are a proficiency academy, so we have a section called, we call it the proficiency lab, so we do credit recovery, and this year we we’re targeting some sophomores as well to try and solve problems before they happen.

Camden King:

And so I’m kind of the math head, but as much as anything, I got my dad hat and my coach hat and my everything hat on all the time, and I’ve just been geeking out with math, and so this year I’m working in our proficiency lab, so I basically have carte blanche to do whatever the heck I want and I love it. So for example, I got one kid who I’m marching down the algebra two track and I’ve got other kids. It’s like, okay, take off your shoes. Let’s count to 20.

Camden King:

So I’m all over the map, but one of the struggles, I have one class that I teach, it’s got three students. I’m trying to get them caught up and do a bunch of stuff, but I get to use it as a laboratory and I use three act tasks. I’m all about building the conceptual understanding first and foremost, but a lot of what I do is sort of triage, individual tutoring. I got about three to five minutes. I got to mansplain a whole bunch of stuff, try to be as patient as I can, but I belong to the Make Math Moments. I’ve gone in there and looked at the tasks and I try to orient them and tweak them and use them.

Camden King:

The anchor I started off with this year was hot chocolate. You can go everywhere with it, and I probably only say it about three to five times a day that principles stay the same, the numbers change, and so I’ll take them all the way back to three scoops, one glass. Here we go and keep going. So I’m want to shut up for a minute and let you guys either ask questions or whatever.

Jon Orr:

This is great to hear context. One thing I’m wondering before we dig deeper, because it was lots of interesting things you said. I’m curious, and maybe I missed it so I apologize, but can you describe your district? Is your district large? Is it a one high school district with some feeder schools to that? What does that look like and sound like?

Camden King:

Geographically, we’re one of the larger school districts in the state and we have Redmond. There’s two high schools and then we’re a public charter school within district, I don’t know, three or four middle schools and however many K-5. The town I live in is about 30,000. Bend, Oregon, and it might be a place that you’ve heard of, but Bend’s actually where I grew up, about 20 miles down the road. It’s now a city of about 120,000 and they’re much larger. They got I think 5 high schools and some charter schools and stuff. But anyway, that’s where I’m coming from. The high school I teach in is 600 and our middle school is 300.

Jon Orr:

I really like the name, the proficiency lab of the class that you teach. That’s such a all telling idea of what is probably your values in the room thinking about let’s focus on proficiencies, but then also on lab. I get this image that if I’m in the proficiency lab, I’m here to dig deep but also experiment and kind of try different things and it’s just a great name for a course. I’m curious, what would you say right now is a pebble in your shoot? You talked about working with all various levels of students in that room. What would you say is a pebble you’re experiencing right now that we could focus in on here today?

Camden King:

Well, I’ll throw out a number of pebbles and you can decide which one we want to crush. One of them’s pretty logistical just in terms of curating things, finding the right stuff to align with the things that I want to do and then knowing how to tweak it. And then logistically from that standpoint, a small editorial comment for you guys, if I could just suddenly get those into my Google Drive rather than messing with PowerPoint or whatever, that would be awesome. Getting the videos and tweaking those because I make slide decks and customize them.

Kyle Pearce:

I like it. I wonder if that’s on our list of to-dos and it’s nice hearing that because for us it’s all about do we sick our team on it to get that taken care of? We’ve heard it a couple times, so, we’ll bump that up a couple notches for sure.

Camden King:

Then I also think about the triage component where I’m literally parachuting into a kid. I’d love to be patient as hell and let them figure it out and struggle and all of that fun stuff. But a lot of times of that IXL piece, the objective is to get to our 80 smart score and then move along. And I get frustrated with that because it’s not okay with me. I want kids to actually understand what the heck’s going on and why you’re doing it and how that might fit someplace that would have some application they can get their head around.

Kyle Pearce:

I really like this. This is really helpful and it’s interesting when we talk about your lab class from, based on what you’ve described, it sounds like these are students who have struggled in the past. And there’s a piece, we have done an episode a while back where we were chatting. I’m trying to remember who we were chatting with, but it kind of reminds me of a little bit of that piece because I feel like when we’re sharing problem-based lessons, for example, there’s a structure that we use under the assumption that students are sort of just bumping into this idea for almost maybe the first time or maybe it’s a refresher, but there’s a different approach that we start to use when students have been struggling and oftentimes have been struggling for some time. And what that might look like and sound like is that we’re getting to the point “a little bit faster”. And I’m guessing what’s the class size for typical one of your lab classes here?

Camden King:

An individual class on my own that’s got literally three students. And what I’ve done in that, because that’s really my laboratory if you will, is I take a concept and I unpack it and we run with it and we check it out from over here. We did a build a bear thing, but so I’m sitting there tying percentages and what does percent actually mean? And we move around all this stuff and I kind of cover some topics, and then I’ve got one kid who’s doing ACT prep lessons. I got another kid who’s running IXL.

Camden King:

I got another kid who’s in there just because they like me and then I kind of dump different things on them. We go through kick this stuff and then I dump this pile of IXL on them and they just chew it up and spit it out. They’re like, oh, got this. And I wish I could do more of that. When I was teaching more in the regular classrooms in multiple… I had five sections of 24 students, I would try and do the same thing and I kind of got yelled at a little bit by the highers up, but it was working. The rest of the time I’m working with either a group of juniors and seniors or a group of sophomores and they’re running through their own individual programs through this IXL backbone. So I’m constantly popping into wherever they are because they’re moving into pace. This idea of whole group instruction just doesn’t happen very much in this situation.

Kyle Pearce:

I think when we look at smaller group settings, that’s excellent for students who have had some struggles in the past. So now we’re sort of moving out of that tier 1 approach in a tier one classroom, I want to, if possible, we want to start sort of everyone in this place, this problem solving place, and we want to give them opportunities to access the task. It’s low floor high ceiling, but what we tend to do, we still use a lot of the same materials in a more tier 2 setting for example, or even a tier three setting, these problems can be helpful, but you’re going to notice that we’re not going to spend as much time, we might not even do a notice and wonder, for example, we might get right to the guts to that struggle prompt because as soon as you’re working one to few, it’s a lot different than when you’re working one to many.

Kyle Pearce:

As soon as you get a number. I remember the research, and it’s a book on our book list where they were just referencing, once you go past six or seven people in a group, it’s like human nature where you start to believe the person isn’t talking to you anymore. But when you’re in a small group just like this, all three of us are engaged in this conversation. If there were eight people in this room or nine people in this room, all of a sudden I’m checking my email, I’m like, they’re not really talking to me.

Jon Orr:

It’s kind ff like the bystander effect.

Kyle Pearce:

Totally.

Jon Orr:

Oh , this is not me they’re looking at or talking to.

Kyle Pearce:

Exactly, exactly. I guess the reason I mention it is that with those problems, you can get right to work with those students so that you can get them going and really get into the math. And then really what it becomes more about is the engagement with the student. And I think that’s why small group is so helpful for students. You can be super intentional with that particular student, which might also mean maybe there is less tech involved, or maybe you just have your laptop there and you just want to show them one piece or one thing, or maybe you just have the prompt and an image on a printed piece of paper, but it’s going to look a little bit different.

Kyle Pearce:

I wonder if thinking of it in that way might allow you to be maybe a little more intentional where you can still serve each student where they are at, but still give them an opportunity to engage in interesting problems that cause some productive struggle for them if they’re selected well without sort of feeling like you’ve got to do a full fledged lesson for every student.

Camden King:

And that’s a great idea. I’m kind of smiling to myself because I have just sort of stumbled into doing some of that. I mean, I walk around with literally a pad of paper and a box of colored pens and start drawing stuff. And then I saw Jon, I was researching something, I saw Jon going through a fractioned stuff and he goes, “oh yeah, here’s this thing called mathagon”. And I went what? Where the hell was that during the pandemic for me? And so I was walking around my laptop and I was pulling up some of the stuff that I was using in some other settings and going, here, check this out. What do you think about that? So it’s interesting to hear you say that and maybe I just need to do more of that and build more of a catalog of lessons and make those a little easier for me to access quickly and frankly get a little more familiar with each of those concepts and where I can take them.

Kyle Pearce:

And honestly, one thing that came to mind when you said that, the most in that setting, in my opinion in a big class, I’m always thinking, and this is especially true when I go visit new classes, so it’s like first day of school, every time I go to a different class, I would go across my own district and maybe go do a math talk here, a math talk there. I’ve got to build trust. I got to get them to lean in. I need all these students to be interested. Well, in your setting, the most important part in my opinion would be the prompt. It’s like, what is the question I’m going to ask that student and how do I ensure that I’m ready to help ensure that they’re ready to access it? So is it a printed visual for them that they can write on that might be really helpful or the concrete manipulatives that are going to be helpful to model the concept that we’re looking to explore?

Kyle Pearce:

I think honestly in a regular class, the prompt is most important as well, but it’s not that important if no one’s looking, right? So that’s why we spend so much time on building the context and ensuring students are estimating and doing all of these things. Estimation is great for students in a tier 2, tier 3 setting as well, but time is of the essence for those students. You think it’s like they’re there because they’ve explored and they’ve done a lot of the tier one things and it didn’t quite work for them, whether it’s because it just didn’t work for them in that setting, whether they’ve been transient, maybe they have a rough home life.

Kyle Pearce:

It could be any of those things. But then it’s like, I want to take this time and I want to get right to the guts and we want to try to get right to helping them address that. You were talking about crushing those pebbles. It’s like find that pebble that you want to crush today with that student and you want to smush it with them and you want to get right to it. So we don’t waste any time or energy or attention because some students may have an attention challenge as well I’m going to guess in these settings.

Jon Orr:

I think what I would add to you is not to throw out the estimation. You did say that Kyle, it is important. I think the estimation can be that easy gateway into allowing a student to work on and think about a strategy or a problem that they are interested in. So when we set the whole stage of let’s get the notice and wonder out, we’re trying to get students to ask a question that they’re interested in, and if you take that away, which we can in this small group situation, but leaving the estimation portion in, keeps that I think I can estimate in round in this range.

Jon Orr:

But then it’s like we got to kind of pursue that pathway of what’s next. I want students to still think about what do I need to narrow down that estimate because that’s the real problem solving. We don’t want to go straight into the math portion here. We want to keep that kind of openness to think about where can I sense the student is on their journey on this topic? And that estimation part is that great way to like, “Hey, you’ve estimated what’s next and then what are you going to do if I give you that thing that’s next”? And because I want to hear that because that can help me fuel where my instruction goes. And that’s a great thing to have while you’re in a small group.

Camden King:

Education’s not facts, it’s training the mind to think. And estimation falls into that. And I try to guide kids through that and I try to walk all the way down to the ACT problem and here’s how they’re trying to get you. Don’t let that happen. Think your way through it. What do you know? So here’s how the math moves go, but think about what’s happening here. But that estimation, running it through and then tightening that up and putting a little structure on that so that they can solve more complex things is, yeah.

Jon Orr:

I guess what we can ask you right now is that we’ve chatted about some ideas. What would you say you’re going to think about and do tomorrow or maybe later today? What’s something that we chat about here that you’re like, you know what, I felt like this gave me a little bit more clarity or this gave me an idea and I’m going to do that tomorrow or maybe next week. What would you say that is right now?

Camden King:

I like the idea of building an inventory of readymade tools that I can either pop up on a laptop or have ready to go because I kind of know what pond we’re playing in. I’m not going to get surprised by anything here. And being able to have some things a little more thought out and then taking that another level deeper so that I can ask the right kinds of questions starting with things like estimation, getting them to think for themselves, figuring out how small I need to make the crumbs and how far away I need to put them to coax them into figuring it out on their own.

Camden King:

I’m kind of back to one of those other brain farts that I had with just that curation and finding out what are these tools because there’s so many of them and how do you distill them down into the usable bit that I need right now.

Kyle Pearce:

Totally. And I’m hearing kind of two things there. I heard you sort of talking about almost this anticipation piece, so they might not catch you off guard. You had mentioned, and I agree, the level of the math is probably not going to catch you off guard. So you’ve got that tool chess that you’re sort of building up and that’s on your to-do list, which is great, but then it’s almost what is the specific question and anticipating where they’re going to get stuck so that I’m ready with that next question. And it allows you to sort of reduce the ad-libbing, right? So it’s in the moment we’ve all been there as a teacher, you have to become a good ad libber, but the less ad-libbing we do and the more intentional planning we can do, the better we become, right? And then eventually it just becomes where all of this planning is just a part of your tool chest and you’re like, I sort of know that these students are probably going to go down this path and here’s the question I’m going to have for them when they get there.

Kyle Pearce:

And I know for me, I get so excited. I was doing this last week, my son was working on a math problem and my wife is there and we’re just kind of working on dinner. And I said, wait for it. Wait for it. Because my son was asking these questions and I was just asking him a question back. It was routine out of the chest, what’s the next question? Well, what’s the next question? And then all of a sudden it led them right to where we needed him to get to. And then I just looked at my wife and she just sort of laughed and shook her head like, ah, I’m excited about it. And she’s just like, go and peel the carrots for goodness sake.

Kyle Pearce:

But building that repertoire is so helpful and just spending just a tiny bit of time thinking ahead about it can set you up to prepare yourself to get over that next little hurdle. And again, eventually the ad-libbing does come, but the more we do of that, I think the better off you become sort of being nimble in the moment in order to take a student where they are and getting them to the next place. So from what I’m hearing, it sounds like you’ve got some awesome next steps.

Camden King:

Well, I just got to tell you, you guys are freaking awesome and I love all the stuff you’re doing and I mean, I’m learning and growing and I just like math. I’ve been teaching for three years, man, I always kind of like math. Same story to you guys and all sit there and I go, oh. It’s favorite sound, I love hearing from students too, by the way. I mean I hit that every once in a while. I was watching you were unpacking fractions and division of fractions. I was like, hmm. Oh, okay. And the example I always give is multiplying fractions. Yeah, sure. Numerators denominators, calculate correctly, get the right answer, check the box, get the A, move along. I’m smart. And all of a sudden I was going, what does this mean? So what? And I love sharing that around with the other kids and I just appreciate you guys taking the time.

Kyle Pearce:

Yeah. Without educators like you who care and who want to keep pushing. And like you said, one of the best questions you can ask is, what’s this for? Why do we care about this? And soon as you go down that rabbit hole, you start to bump into all kinds of meaning that I always say openly. I never saw why math worked in a lot of ways and it could have been on me. Maybe it was just the way it was taught or maybe a bit of both, but good on you. But sounds like you said only three years, was it? I must have missed that earlier.

Kyle Pearce:

So good on you, my friend. Awesome stuff. Listen, we’d love it if we could stay in touch with you, maybe we can touch back with you 9, 12 months from now, see how things are rolling. And unfortunately I’m just going to let you know more pebbles are coming. That’s just sort of the way this industry works. But you know what? We can start crushing some of those pebbles when the time comes.

Camden King:

Yeah, I feel like I’m walking through the rock quarry with my flip flops on.

Kyle Pearce:

There it is.

Jon Orr:

Thanks so much, Camden, thanks for chatting with us.

Camden King:

Thanks. Appreciate it.

Kyle Pearce:

Have a great day my friend. Take care.

Camden King:

You too.

Jon Orr:

Welcome back Math Moment Makers. In today’s episode, you have noticed that we have been diving into the branches of our effective mathematics program, our tree, the Branches being the pedagogical content knowledge of every effective mathematics program and the branches are of your spending valuable professional learning time on too many things that don’t make an impact. The trees canopy can get heavy and begin to sag or hinder its growth. And we want to make sure we’re focusing on effective teaching practices and proficiency.

Jon Orr:

And you heard that here while talking with Camden, and he was carefully thinking about how to develop his questioning techniques and an inventory of questions that can breadcrumb students along. We talked about that. We talked about how his use of the resources can impact what’s happening in the classroom on the strategies. We talked also inside this branch’s kind of idea about different uses of the teaching strategies versus tier one whole class, big class grouping teaching strategies versus small group teaching strategies.

Jon Orr:

So a lot of branches talk here and all of our episodes when we talk about the elements of the tree, there’s a lot of overlap because we talked about how to use effective resources, which is the leaves of the tree. And then we also talked about some of the mindset that we have to have while we’re teaching these types of classes.

Kyle Pearce:

Well, hey, listen, I know you’re getting a lot of information about the different parts of an effective math program and how they relate to our tree, but guess what? You can dig a little bit deeper and learn something about your own classroom or district level mathematics program, as well as receiving some support on some steps you can take individually or even as a group here with the Math Moment Maker community.

Kyle Pearce:

Head on over to makemathmoments.com/grow if you are an administrator, a district leader, or looking out for some other educators and taking them under your wing to try to push mathematics programming forward. If you are in the classroom and you’re teaching your own littles or big goals, I’m not sure we would call them. But if you’re in the classroom, you can access a report that is customized just for you and your context by visiting makemathmoments.com/report.

Kyle Pearce:

Once again, leaders head on over to makemathmoments.com/grow and our educators in the classroom, head on over to makemathmoments.com/report and get your assessment and customized report right now.

Jon Orr:

In order to ensure you don’t miss out on our new episodes. Don’t forget to hit subscribe on this podcast platform. Wherever you’re listening to, you can hit the button, subscribe and that will give you notifications and let you listen to our new episodes as they come out on Monday mornings, folks.

Kyle Pearce:

I love it. Love it. And if you’d like show notes, links to resources, complete transcripts, and I mean really the rabbit hole to All Things Make Math Moments, including our 60 plus problem based math units, you can head on over to makemathmoments.com/episode233. That’s at makemathmoments.com/episode233.

Jon Orr:

Hey, thanks for listening to the Make Math Moments That Matter podcast where we help you grow your mathematics program like a tree so you can impact students far and wide.

Kyle Pearce:

Until next time, my math moment maker friends, I’m Kyle Pearce.

Jon Orr:

And I’m John Orr.

Kyle Pearce:

High fives for us.

Jon Orr:

And high five for you.

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