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In this episode, we had the pleasure of speaking with Amy Buchheit, an instructional coach from the Chicago area. In our chat, Amy discusses her current mathematics leader pebble related to creating measurable professional development (PD) goals in mathematics that can truly shift teacher practice and in turn, increase student achievement.

One of the speed bumps educators face in implementing the professional learning they have engaged with is finding the time to do it well. Stick with us as we share practical strategies to address this common issue and much more. 

If you’re a mathematics leader looking to find ways to deepen the implementation of the professional development practices you’ve been focusing on, tune in to hear what was shared and learned through this conversation with Amy.

This is another Math Mentoring Moment episode where we chat with a teacher like you who is working through some problems of practice and together we brainstorm ways to overcome them.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Amy Bilek:

We’re thinking about moving to an accelerated curriculum. Our school generally has more of an enrichment model, which is important, but just kind of the illustrative math accelerated program. And so I just worry a little bit with them feeling like they have more topics and lessons to cover how I can still help them keep the practices and keep the problem solving. We’ve all done a-

Jon Orr:

In this episode we had the pleasure of speaking with Amy Bilek, an instructional coach from the Chicago area. In our chat, Amy discusses her current mathematics leader pebble related to creating measurable professional development goals in mathematics that can truly shift teacher practice and in turn increase student achievement.

Kyle Pearce:

One of the speed bumps that educators face in implementing the professional learning that they’ve engaged with is finding the time to do it well. Stick with us as we share some practical strategies to address this common issue and much more.

Jon Orr:

If you’re a mathematics leader looking to find ways to deepen the implementation of the professional development practices you’ve been focusing on, tune in to hear what was shared and learn through this conversation with Amy.

Kyle Pearce:

This is another Math Mentoring Moment episode where we chat with Math Moment Makers just like you and work through some problems of practice, so together we can brainstorm some ways to overcome them. Let’s do it. Welcome to the Making Math Moments that Matter Podcast. I’m Kyle Pearce.

Jon Orr:

And I’m Jon Orr. We’re 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’re going to get the insight you need to stop feeling overwhelmed, gain back the confidence and get back to enjoying planning and facilitating of your math program for the students or educators you serve.

Kyle Pearce:

Let’s dig in, my friends. Well, hello Amy.

Amy Bilek:

Hello.

Kyle Pearce:

How are you?

Amy Bilek:

Oh my goodness, how lucky am I? I get both of you?

Jon Orr:

Hey, two for one.

Kyle Pearce:

[inaudible 00:02:39] Afternoon we get to hang out with awesome educators like you, so we’re super excited to chat with you today.

Amy Bilek:

Great, I’m excited to chat with you as well.

Kyle Pearce:

So tell us a little bit more about yourself. We know you’re an instructional coach, we know you’re an amazing Math Moment Maker. We’ve been in touch over the last, I guess, couple of years through that through email. Paint us a picture, what’s going on in your world?

Amy Bilek:

Yes. So I’m at kindergarten through eighth school and kind of work with all those teachers across the gamut and I would say all our teachers, I feel like one of our strengths is that we’re rooted in the math philosophy that we help to craft together and that does mimic kind of the practices that you guys talk about as well. And so I feel really lucky to be in this role and to just really help support teachers bring this to life because this is just surely not the way most people learned math growing up from their experiences. So that’s all been going well.

Amy Bilek:

Well, there was COVID, so this is the fourth year in my role, but I feel like kind of the first real year where we’ve been operating with less restrictions and things like that, so I am just here for feedback or to pick your brains on how to continue to support teachers with the goals that we all share.

Jon Orr:

Got it. Thanks for filling us in there. We’re going to have to ask you a question about what is your mentoring moment in, hey, every question we ask every guest on the podcast is, what is your math moment? What is that moment that when we say math class, it sticks in your mind? Would you mind answering that?

Amy Bilek:

Well, it’s funny because I feel put on the spot right now, but every podcast, I mean, I’ve listened to all 300, and every time I think of one. And so I’m like, “Why don’t I have 20 of them ready?” I would say mine is a positive math moment. Through my elementary and middle school years I had a wonderful math teacher that was just often giving us open-ended tasks, often letting us explore how to solve them, and I remember I just somehow figured out some problem that had to do with the triangle. I don’t remember more than that, but I just remember I kind of figured it out, I had this aha moment and explained it to the rest of the class and she just said at the end, “Wow, you should teach math.” And here I am.

Jon Orr:

There you’re there.

Kyle Pearce:

That is awesome. That is fantastic. It’s so great. I would say the ratio is definitely heavily lopsided to the negative memories, so it’s awesome that you have a positive one.

Jon Orr:

What would you say then is your biggest pebble when you think about the teachers you’re working with and the work that you want to do? So envision what work you are hoping to achieve over the next little bit, maybe going into next year and thinking about the end of this year, if you think about that, what are the pebbles that you’re experiencing currently that we could try to uncover here?

Amy Bilek:

So I think the biggest one that I know you guys hear about often is when I’m kind of framing it as far as what teachers come to me with, trying to help them problem solve is just the issue of, you’re going to guess it, time and just like the feelings, so maybe we should focus a little bit on middle school, if that’s okay. Our sixth, seventh, and eighth, there’s three teachers, one for each, and they’re an awesome team, they’re all Math Moment members. We’re thinking about moving to an accelerated curriculum. Our school generally has more of an enrichment model, which is important, but just kind of the illustrative math accelerated program. And so I just worry a little bit with them feeling like they have more topics and lessons to cover how I can still help them keep the practices and keep the problem solving.

Amy Bilek:

We’ve all done a two-year book club with Peter Liljedahl’s book, so they know that work and really work to bring that out, but I think that sometimes they’re trying to do that on top of more traditional practices. So when you’re trying to do note-taking, do you really have time for a note to your forgetful self? And so it’s like how do we let go of some things to make space for some of these other things that might feel a little more vulnerable right now, but I think are worth it?

Kyle Pearce:

Well, it’s interesting because when you bring up time, immediately where my mind goes is that time is one of those things. And yes, time is finite, there is never enough of it in any part of our life, but the part that where my head immediately goes to, and you sort of hit on it in this last little portion, is that is it because you’re trying to, and I say you’re, educators are trying to layer on more or are we actually trying to transform what we’re doing? And really what I think you’ve kind of are articulated, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that it sounds like teachers are trying to do these other things that they think are helpful but on top of the things that they’ve already been doing.

Kyle Pearce:

And that’s where we sort of run into this challenge because I have a funny feeling that before they tried to layer in thinking classrooms or other types of problem-solving models, they probably didn’t have a big block of time where they were just sitting around. So I mean, they’re trying to squeeze this in, but I guess my question to you would be if you had to look at the whole school, maybe even beyond six, seven, eight, and look at the whole school and say with all the awesome things that educators are trying to do, sounds like they’re doing really well and doing a lot of great things, would you say that their effectiveness or their results, their outcomes are actually potentially being hindered because we’re actually trying to do too much and almost like conflicting things, if that makes sense?

Kyle Pearce:

So you use the example of note versus note to your forgetful self. Well, if I’ve already done a note, I don’t need to do one of those ones over here. So tell me a little bit more about that in terms of how they’re implementing.

Amy Bilek:

I would say as a school holistically, I think sometimes like you said, we’re working against ourselves by trying to do both to your example, as well as not always feeling maybe confidence or freedom as an instructor to be really responsive to your students. And one piece was knowing the content knowledge to know, “I don’t need to teach every lesson in the unit, these are the big ideas and this is how they can come out in one or two really strategic problems.” And so I think kind of that piece as well of not trying to go through and get everything that might be found in a good lesson done, but being really responsive to their students.

Amy Bilek:

And I think there’s moments of success. And as a coach, I’m just trying to think through maybe how to give them the experience of like, “Oh look, we did this unit this way, we cut out these things so we had time for this and it was successful. Or with the schools you’ve worked at, if there were some ways to help teachers have those aha moments.”

Kyle Pearce:

I guess my wonder might be, so it sounds like there’s a lot of good things going on. Can you tell us a little bit more about… So you use an example of Peter’s work and doing a two-year book club. When is the PD sort of happening or just in general professional learning? This can be structured but also some of the unstructured stuff. Was the book club truly that, it’s like an after school if you’re in into it, hop on board, if you’re not, no? Is there any sort of job-embedded PD happening in the building and what might that look like and sound like? Take us down that path for a little bit here.

Amy Bilek:

Okay. And we have a fair amount of teachers that have been here a while, so I’ll speak a little bit to a couple years ago. So when we had our curriculum review about five years ago, we had a week of PD that was really centered around this work. We’ve had Sarah Schaefer from [Math]odology, think!Mathematics. We work closely with her, so she visits every year. We’ve had probably seven or eight lesson study cycles, none this past year, but there’s a lot of teachers that have got to experience lesson study.

Amy Bilek:

Every year the schedule changes a little, so this year’s structure has been PLCs by grade band. So for kindergarten through second and third through fifth, there’s members from each grade level on that team. But because they are self-contained, different grade levels, not every teacher that teaches math and the whole school would be on that PLC. Some are serving on social studies or reading, but our PLC in sixth, seventh, and eighth because it’s departmentalized and those PLCs meet for about an hour six times a year and they have a specific student data goal and have been working towards that.

Kyle Pearce:

Now, was that a PLC goal or is it a school-wide goal and then-

Amy Bilek:

PLC goal.

Kyle Pearce:

Okay, so a PLC goal and then where my head’s going, I’m sorry for hopping in, but I got excited, is I’m wondering about what about across the school? You had mentioned that philosophically you feel like the school is in a good place in general, but would you say that that’s just a vibe thing? Or if the grade eight teacher talked to the grade two teacher, would they be actually saying like, “In this building we are trying to achieve this, this, and this” or whatever that statement might look like? Is that sort of clarity happening or is it just sort of like, “We’re heading in the same direction and we’re all kind of feeling good about it, but we might be in different paddle boats,” if you know what I mean?

Amy Bilek:

Right. I would say when we did this curriculum review, we really articulated and did a lot of training around the math philosophy and it has about seven bullet points that I think everybody knows should be in outbreak classroom, so CPA approach or learning through problem solving, or some of those bullet points, and I think everyone’s on the same page with that. I think what you’re making me reflect on is maybe though we need to narrow our focus and what are we trying to get better at this year? We know what we are and what we want to be, but we can’t work on all those at once. And so maybe we could do work with that.

Kyle Pearce:

And one thing I want to toss in there too, and that doesn’t discount that Jon might also be working on this other thing that isn’t necessarily what we’re all kind of focused in on. You’re not restricted to only do work in that area, but it’s like here in this building we’re going to commit every effort towards whatever it might be, one, two or maybe three things. But I would argue it’s probably less would be more in that case so that it’s like, “Hey, if Jon’s at a PLC, I know what they’re working on. If you’re at a PLC, I know what you’re working on.”

Kyle Pearce:

And then also, I’m wondering too, the question I had was rolling back to the lesson study and Sarah’s work, we love Sarah. I guess my wonder would be what shifts is that having or is it sort of the same idea? We know it’s the right work, it’s good work, but we’re not really sure if actually we’re getting closer. We know it’s good, we know it was great in the moment, but did it actually help us change something that we can actually say, “It was like this here and now it’s like that and we know that because we measured it”?

Jon Orr:

Right. Has there been in any initiative, and maybe there is for sure, can you tell us about some initiatives that have taken place where you set the baseline and go, “This is where we are and then we did this, we put this in place, Sarah came into in service of this kind of objective or we worked on building thinking classrooms to meet that objective and then we measured again to go, ‘Hey, we’ve seen change…'” Now, when I say measure is thinking more along the lines of successful districts that we’ve partnered with will measure the teacher practice instead of just waiting to see what student outcomes are on standardized tests is going, “We wanted this to happen and we put this in place and let’s see what happened afterwards.” Did anything change in our classrooms? Is there any sort of measurement system that you guys have used to make sure that there was some sort of change?

Amy Bilek:

I would be super curious what ideas around that you guys have or have seen from other schools. What we’ve done, I would say previous to this current year, the PLCs, I would work with them. We create a goal and mostly our PLC focus was around instructor practice, so we’re like, “We’re going to focus on the one chapter Peter Liljedahl, which is the challenge XY coordinated of thinking about how we can be responsive in a lesson and really focus there and have all our meetings on that. And try something, come back and share the next month and that would focus on teacher practice.

Amy Bilek:

And then this year a whole school push was that our PLC goal should be tied to student-level data. And so that, for example, with that data, our middle grade bands for three to five was going to use the student data of actually student response to a survey on journaling and kind of their growth as a mathematician, as a journaler, their precision, their modeling in their journal, and do kind of beginning, middle, end of year survey data and then our lower band was going to look at map data and just kind of student growth. And our middle school was looking at ALEKS data and usage and completion around ALEKS, a self-paced online adaptive program as a practice program.

Amy Bilek:

So those would be the examples we have and I felt torn because sometimes I feel like the PLC time with a goal that’s instructor-based is valuable cause let’s try doing this in our instruction, but then like you said, to measure that as just end of year math scores or something like that feels like there could be so many things that went on [inaudible 00:16:01].

Kyle Pearce:

A like really disconnected, right?

Amy Bilek:

You could have talked, right.

Jon Orr:

You want to try to narrow the influence of what’s around there, so probably a best practice is if we’re going to want to improve teacher practice and we put things into place, we’re going to want to set a baseline on what we want to measure and then that’s our pre-survey. And then when we put into place the action items to improve that practice at the end we’d use the exact same survey to see if there was a change in that practice instead of say relying on this other thing which has many factors that are out of our control or out of that that could be influencing. We don’t know if there’s any sort of cause and effect or just be more of a correlation of maybe there’s a correlation here but we can’t attribute it to any specific thing because there’s too many things that happened in there.

Kyle Pearce:

I think Jon just did a good job kind of coming back to your question around hearing what we’ve done with some of the other district partners that we’ve worked with and it really is very individual. We were on a call just the other day with one of the districts we partner with and they’re early in the process and they were sort of like, “So what do we do to get 10% gain in student achievement?” I’m like, “Well, if that’s really what you want, then we’re going to have to intently focus in on the students and then do intervention. But is that the real work you want? Because then it works for that group, but teacher practice hasn’t changed. Or do you want more of a long-term when you talk about the PLC and focusing on a teacher practice? The benefit you get out of that is that something that that teacher will likely continue to do over their career and will have an influence on more students.”

Kyle Pearce:

So it really does come down to what is the goal or the goals and then what is it that we want to actually do and what do we want to see change? Like Jon said, it’s like we want to make sure that we’re making it as clear a path from what it is that we’re going to do to what we’re going to measure at the end. We want to make sure that that’s as clear and straight as possible rather than it being something that’s way at the end of the line. So for example, you can implement everything in Peter’s book. By the end of this school year that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to see changes in student achievement because you could have implemented all his practices but not had the content knowledge to actually teach something valuable to the students, which would actually help them better understand math.

Kyle Pearce:

So ultimately it’s really trying to be strategic and planning. It sounds like the philosophy in your building is a great one, or in your school, is awesome and then now you’ve got almost like in the middle ground if it makes sense. You mentioned seven bullet points, lots of really good things there. You almost need to go a step further and go like, “What are we really doing those seven things for?” But then also coming back and going like, “What are we going to focus on this year as a team knowing that all seven are things that we actually want to strive for?”

Kyle Pearce:

So it’s like you’ve got a really good, and I’ll be honest, most districts we speak with, when we chat with them, they don’t really have anything. They just say they want to shift teacher practice and then they list a bunch of things, but then someone else in the group lists all kinds of other things, so there’s no alignment there.

Kyle Pearce:

So you’re in a really great spot to have already a lot of that traction going and now I think it’s more or less about continuing that work, some of that planning work, and then trying to essentially craft a plan for the shorter term but then also the longer term to kind of go, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to try to do over this period of time. We’re not going to set unattainable goals. Maybe this one in the distance might seem like an unattainable goal this year, but down the road that’s what we’re aiming for.” And then we get into the weeds and we start to go, “Okay. So now, what do we need to actually do in order to see that thing or those things start to happen?”

Jon Orr:

Where’s your head at right now on thinking about some of the action items you’re going to go on and do next? Fill us in on where your mind’s going.

Amy Bilek:

I think thinking through structuring our PLC and our PD focus on teacher practice and narrowing that, looking at our philosophy, so it’s rooted there but being like, “What are the one or two things we’re going to work on and how are we going to measure that?” It sounds like a pre-survey, post-survey responses from teachers might be a more accurate way to measure that rather than something that might have a lot of influences or something that we can tie really close to the goal that we’re trying to work for. And then having a commonality across the grade bands as far as what we’re working for I think will help everybody support each other with making these changes and improvements. Am I missing anything?

Kyle Pearce:

I really like it. One thought I had to maybe put in your mind to think on, because there’s no answer to what I’m about to say, but it’s something that maybe you think about, is that when you are talking about monitoring and then you’re asking the educators, that’s a good monitoring tool to have, but then you might also, in your role or maybe in an administrator’s role, have another tool, it’s not a evaluative, but to get a real sense of what is actually happening.

Kyle Pearce:

Because a lot of times, and this isn’t teachers trying to beat the system or not to be accurate or to be honest, it’s that they think they’re doing certain things and then maybe in reality they’re not. That happens all the time. So it’s like having another sort of measure can be helpful and it doesn’t necessarily have to be public or known. It might be for yourself and that might be only between you and anyone else on the leadership team to have these conversations about that.

Kyle Pearce:

It’s like, “Well, these teachers believe that they are doing X, Y, and Z, but when I’m observing I’m actually seeing this or I’m seeing it less often.” Sometimes we get a little overly efficacious as educators because we’re trying our best, everyone’s trying their best. So that could be helpful for you just so that what you’ll tend to see is that if you just base it on educator, their own survey and their own opinion, what you will see is growth every time on the survey. So it’s good to have, but what you really want to make sure is, is it real? So how do I make it more measurable and I guess more consistent so you’d be a consistent eye versus one teacher to the next is not going to be consistent in their interpretation.

Amy Bilek:

That’s a really great point. And then do you bring in much student data with this or-

Kyle Pearce:

I think it depends, it always depends. Is that something specific that you’re looking to address? Is it specific enough where you’ll see it? If it’s about modeling, if you want more modeling in math class and the teachers are modeling, you might want to see are students now using that? Because what will happen, it’s always lagged. The teacher can model all year long and the students may not take it. Nothing might change about what they do unless it’s very intentional and it needs to really be promoted in order to build that habit. So I think it depends, there’s certain things that might make sense to do that, but again, just have to make sure that what it is that you’re measuring with the students, you want to make sure it is something you would anticipate to change when this practice is changing in the classroom.

Jon Orr:

Which means you’re not say necessarily relying on external measurement systems, you’re designing something that you can measure what you’re intending to change. So like what Kyle’s saying, being specific is saying, “Let’s now design this capture tool to kind of measure what kids are showing us.” And then you can get flexible on what you want to see from students.

Amy Bilek:

Yes, that makes sense.

Kyle Pearce:

Because the tool itself doesn’t have to be, there’s no perfect tool. The perfect tool for your wonder is the one that you’ll design to match it, versus you can’t sort of find one that’s going to do it because that might be measuring something else.

Amy Bilek:

Right, that makes sense.

Jon Orr:

Something that also kind of goes in line with some of the suggestions Kyle had made about kind of floating between classrooms and using external kind of eyes, is you had mentioned, and this is related to what you had mentioned about time, and I think when teachers often quote that they don’t have enough time, it’s usually a case of priority, then the priority is usually a case of they see it as the priority but also what external factors make teachers think things are priorities? So where I’m getting at is helping our administrators understand what we’re achieving here in mathematics.

Jon Orr:

So you’ve got your seven points, you’ve got your objectives, you’ve got your action items that you’re going to move forward with. You might want to think about how do you help your administrators wrap their minds around that being the goal and helping them be supportive of the teachers in the classroom. And by the administrators now showing and knowing that these are the priorities for math education for us this year and then them communicating that back to the teachers, lighten up some of the pressure teachers feel about, “I can’t do this new thing because I’m going to go down this path and it’s a different path than I’m used to and I don’t know if I can cover all my standards and I know my principal’s going to be on my back if I can’t cover all the standards.”

Jon Orr:

There’s a lot of external pressures that prevent teachers from shifting practice. And one, just one, if the administrator can say, “Look, we are focusing on these things and these things are our priority for this year,” that can lighten some of that pressure for a teacher to kind of shift that practice and then everyone’s aligned. And because everyone’s aligned on the priorities, it’s easier for a teacher to say, “Okay. Well, I’ll make time for that because my administrator’s saying I should.” And there’s a lot of alignment here that has to happen to make teaching and changing practice a little bit easier.

Amy Bilek:

Yes, you’re so helpful. I was furiously writing some of these notes down over here. Thank you both for these thoughts, really helps form our plan for next year.

Kyle Pearce:

I love it. It sounds like you got a lot of good things to think on, at least for the intern.

Amy Bilek:

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Keep doing what you’re doing, I’ll keep listening to every podcast.

Kyle Pearce:

Everything that you said throughout this conversation suggests like it’s a building that I think any math educator who wants to do really great work, like a Math Moment Maker who would be listening to this episode, I feel like they would find a nice place in your organization, so good on you and good on the leadership team for that.

Amy Bilek:

Absolutely. We have a great group of leaders and teachers here. And thank you, we are all big fans of you guys, so thank you.

Kyle Pearce:

Oh, awesome.

Jon Orr:

Thank you. Well, [inaudible 00:26:28].

Kyle Pearce:

Thanks for hanging out with us.

Amy Bilek:

Yes, very good. Enjoy your weekends.

Jon Orr:

All right.

Kyle Pearce:

Take care. Have a good one. Well, friends, in today’s episode, we had an awesome conversation with Amy. As you heard lots of amazing things going on in that particular school and I just love the idea that it seems like everybody’s rowing in the same direction. And really I think one of the biggest takeaways that Amy articulated and something that we’re going to re-articulate here is just this importance of ensuring that even though we might have the same mindset, we might have sort of the same general vision or philosophy for students in our math program. We want to make sure that it is super clear both at the long-term level, we talked about into the future, into the distance, and then also those shorter term goals. What is it that we are working with as a mathematics community all together?

Jon Orr:

And at the end of these episodes, after we think about the conversation that we had, we always want to highlight your focus on the six parts of an effective mathematics program. And what you heard here today in this conversation was we focused on the trunk of the tree and the trunk of the tree happens to represent leadership, vision setting, backbone, PD, planning, and communication. And we talked with Amy specifically about setting measurable goals for her district and her school to work towards and that alignment across all key stakeholders so that everyone knows what they’re pushing towards.

Jon Orr:

And without that alignment then oftentimes districts and schools are still kind of left going like, “Maybe this will work, maybe this will work,” and we’re not exactly sure. So setting up that measurement so that we can see what is actually making a difference in our classrooms is so key to strengthen the trunk of your tree.

Kyle Pearce:

I love it. The piece that kind of jumps out at me, as you’re saying that, Jon, that I also wanted to articulate here at the end, was just this idea came out earlier in the discussion about oftentimes when we introduce new practices that we need to help educators see how it fits in a math block and what will it replace. So in some cases it makes sense for things to be layered on top, but oftentimes what happens is we run out of time, or at least we perceive we don’t have enough time because you think we have to do everything we’re currently doing and layer on this new thing.

Kyle Pearce:

So being very clear with your PD structure, which is the limbs of the tree, being very clear when we deliver professional learning, that we’re helping teachers to see where does it actually fit and does it integrate in with a particular practice that’s already happening? Or is this something that actually might take the place of a portion of your program? Keeping in mind we never want them to have this idea that everything is out the window, it’s usually everything out or I want to fit everything in. We need to help educators find that balance in between.

Kyle Pearce:

So again, it really comes back to our goal, our vision of that trunk, strengthen that trunk, but also when we deliver the professional learning. So those limbs, we have to be super clear that educators see where this fits in their practice so that we don’t run into that common first barrier, which always, always is this idea of time.

Jon Orr:

We want to encourage you to take action on the items you hear today to strengthen your tree, your classroom tree, your district-wide tree in your mathematics program. And if you’re also looking to chat with us so that we can kind of dive into what your tree looks like and how to strengthen your tree just like Amy did here, then reach out to us, head on over to makemathmoments.com/mentor. We chat with members of the Math Moment Maker community just like you on their problems of practice, and together we brainstorm strategies and next steps on how to overcome them. So head on over to makemathmoments.com/mentor.

Kyle Pearce:

Hey, and if you want to strengthen your tree, understand where your tree is flourishing and where you might want to focus your attention next, you can do this whether you’re in the classroom or a leader in your school or in your district or organization by heading over to makemathmoments.com/report. That will get you over to our math classroom screener, and essentially that’ll take you down a path to get a better sense of what’s working and where you might focus your attention to next. Once again, head over to makemathmoments.com/report. That’ll take you straight to the classroom version. And guess what? If you’re a district leader and you want to get right to where you need to get to, head over to makemathmoments.com/grow and that will get you to your district or organization-specific screener.

Jon Orr:

Show notes and links to resources you heard here today can be found over at makemathmoments.com/episode239. Again, that’s makemathmoments.com/episode239.

Kyle Pearce:

Friends, we love ratings and reviews, so keep them coming. It really helps more Math Moment Makers just like you find the podcast so that they can push their practice further as well. Well, until next time, I’m Kyle Pearce.

Jon Orr:

And I’m Jon Orr.

Kyle Pearce:

High-fives for us.

Jon Orr:

And a big high-five for you.

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