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What is the most fundamental question in math education right now? 

Can you guess? 

In this episode we make a bold claim about the fundamental question that needs answering in math education. We’ll share insights into how to be intentional in your math classroom so you can effectively plan, deliver, assess, and learn the standards for your current grade level. If you’re a math leader or administrator you’ll learn how to decide where to focus and make the most amount of impact so teachers and students are supported.

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• Making Math Moments Academy – Strengthen all six (6) key areas of an effective math classroom.

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Episode Summary:

Improving Math Education Through Reflection and Measurement

Jon and Kyle discussed the fundamental question in math education: whether a particular teaching method or approach is effective. They emphasized the importance of reflecting on the success of their sessions and activities, examining both what worked and what didn’t, and using this information to improve future sessions. They also stressed the need for a systematic, scientific approach to measuring success and growth, and for intentionality in driving growth and creating successful situations. Jon raised a question about how to measure the effectiveness of certain strategies, referring to a story or anecdote about creating or fixing problems.

World War 2 Bombers and Return Rates

Jon shared a historical analogy about World War 2 bombers and their return to base with various bullet holes. Initially, the response was to reinforce the planes’ parts with bullet holes, but it didn’t improve the return rates significantly. Upon further analysis, Jon shared that the areas without bullet holes were the ones causing the planes to crash. Therefore, leaders decided to reinforce those areas to save the planes from crashes, instead of focusing on the already damaged areas.

Improving Mathematics Education and Teaching Strategies

Jon and Kyle discussed the necessity of identifying and addressing overlooked areas in mathematics education. Kyle emphasized the importance of analysis and reflection before implementing solutions, warning against the “spaghetti at the wall” approach. Jon stressed the significance of assessment and self-reflection for educators to improve their teaching methods. Both agreed on the need for educators to improve their mathematical skills and knowledge to create strong learning environments. They concluded that these discussions will continue to refine and improve their strategies.

Addressing Less Obvious Math Classroom Issues

Kyle and Jon discussed the importance of identifying and addressing the less obvious issues in math classrooms to effect meaningful change. They encouraged listeners to reach out with feedback and to utilize the resources on makemathmoments.com, particularly the Math Program Assessment Tool, to examine their classrooms or districts. They emphasized that these tools could help identify areas for improvement, or “hidden holes”, in order to make a positive impact.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00:01 – 00:00:33:00
Jon Orr
What is the most fundamental question in math education right now? Can you take a guess? Well, in this episode, we are going to talk about that and how to effectively use that question to get better in your math classroom and also your math program at the school or district level. Here we go.

00:00:33:02 – 00:00:36:15
Kyle Pearce
Welcome to the Making Math Moments That Matter podcast. I’m Kyle.

00:00:36:15 – 00:00:40:06
Jon Orr
Pierce. And I’m John or we are from that moment, Scott.

00:00:40:08 – 00:00:50:07
Kyle Pearce
This is the only podcast that coaches you through a six step plan to grow your mathematics program, whether it’s at the classroom level or at the district level.

00:00:50:08 – 00:01:05:11
Jon Orr
And we do that by helping you cultivate and foster your mathematics program like strong, healthy and balanced. So if you master the six parts of an effective mathematics program, the impact that you are going to have on your teachers, your students will grow and reach far and wide.

00:01:05:13 – 00:01:19:16
Kyle Pearce
Every week you’ll get the insight you need to stop feeling overwhelmed, gain back your confidence and get back to enjoying the planning and facilitating of your mathematics program for the students or the educators that you serve.

00:01:19:18 – 00:01:36:19
Jon Orr
Okay, Cal, here’s a bold claim, and I was thinking about this. We meet with math educators every single day. We meet with math leaders every single day to talk about what their pebbles are in their shoe. That’s a phrase we toss around probably the most here on this podcast. And in our daily work supporting educators and leaders across North America.

00:01:36:20 – 00:01:59:19
Jon Orr
But here’s the bold claim. All right. The bold claim is that this question is the most fundamental question in math education. And I want to hear whether you think this is a bold claim. I know this isn’t coming. You haven’t heard this one yet. So I want to hear like your thought. But this is a bold claim that we’ve been floating around with our district partners in a question that we continually ask.

00:01:59:20 – 00:02:15:23
Jon Orr
Now we always ask the what is the pebble in your shoe? That’s a great question. But this question, I think, is the more fundamental question for all levels of educators right now. Here it is. Does it work? That’s the question. Does it work? And so what I mean by that, it’s like that sounds like. What do you mean does it work?

00:02:16:03 – 00:02:34:20
Jon Orr
I think the does it work question is something that we probably as educators ask ourselves every single day, but not really think about it that way. So, for example, like as a classroom teacher for 19 years, probably every single day, I walked out of that classroom and is like, No, that didn’t work or that worked. That lesson worked.

00:02:34:20 – 00:03:04:14
Jon Orr
And it’s like the real question, the fundamental question is, does it work and how do I know that worked? Because it gets at such a heart of so many things in education versus PD planning from assessment in with students to lesson planning. It’s everything. I think it’s like we continually go, Is that working? Is that not working? And it’s like, why I think it’s such a bold claim or of a fundamental question that we’re not really addressing is that we ask it.

00:03:04:20 – 00:03:14:04
Jon Orr
There’s books written on this works and that doesn’t work, but it’s like, are we asking that to ourselves every day and trying to get to the bottom of whether this worked or not?

00:03:14:10 – 00:03:33:24
Kyle Pearce
I love it. You’re zooming in on something, so you’re talking about a very fundamental question here and you’re applying it to math specifically in education specifically. And so you’re kind of zoomed in. And I want to just like zoom way out for a second, and I want you to think about the same question in everything we do in life, right?

00:03:33:24 – 00:04:03:09
Kyle Pearce
Like, if there is a potential problem that we’re looking to solve, essentially you’re asking yourself whether you explicitly ask yourself this question or not. It’s ultimately, at the end of the day, we’re going to try to solve problems with things that we at least suspect are going to work to help you address that problem. So when you think about it, this fundamental idea is something that in nature we’re essentially applying it all the time.

00:04:03:09 – 00:04:25:22
Kyle Pearce
But I think what I’m really liking about this discussion and how we can zoom back in on education in a math class is if we’re more explicit about it and more intentional about it, right? So you’re doing these things anyway, and I’ve heard you say this before. It’s like it’s very obvious when we can walk out of a room and go, Wow, that didn’t work right?

00:04:25:23 – 00:04:50:00
Kyle Pearce
Like we know when it didn’t work. But sometimes we fail to pay enough attention to when it does work. We might address it and say, You know what? That did seem to work. But more importantly is what about it worked? What about it didn’t work? And is the whole thing. A quote unquote, failure rate? We look at failure, you’re failing forward.

00:04:50:00 – 00:05:29:22
Kyle Pearce
You’re learning, but you’re only learning if you take that experience when you walk out and go, whoa, that didn’t go as planned. When we walk out and we go, why not? What about that? Could we do differently next time? Is this just a complete cheat? Throw it out and never light a match and walk away? Or is there actually some things like I’m sure that before going into the lesson or before going into your district wide planning session or before you plan that big district wide PD session that you did and then got terrible feedback from the participants, I’m sure ahead of time there was something there you thought would work.

00:05:29:24 – 00:05:50:11
Kyle Pearce
So now the real question is where did we not hit the mark there? How do we take that and how do we use that and not beat ourselves up over it, but rather analyze it? And the same is true when you walk out of a session, you get all ten out of ten. So everyone’s like, That was the best PD session I’ve ever been in.

00:05:50:13 – 00:06:12:01
Kyle Pearce
The question becomes why? Because we don’t want to leave it to chance, right? We talk about that all the time and it’s like the only way that we’re not rolling the dice for the next one to either be amazing again or crash and burn or anywhere in between is if we take that time to pause and go, what about it worked?

00:06:12:03 – 00:06:14:23
Kyle Pearce
Or what about it didn’t work.

00:06:15:00 – 00:06:34:08
Jon Orr
When you said that you got that negative feedback on a on a session, I was going to say, like all the sessions that I have ever seen the feedback on, it’s always like neutral and then it’s like, how do you tell it? It’s like, okay, that that method of grabbing, you know, the information wasn’t a valid method. And it’s like what you’re saying and what I’m hearing you say is like the does it work?

00:06:34:08 – 00:07:09:17
Jon Orr
Question We do need to think about this systematically. We do need to think of it scientifically in a way. And we’re math educators, like all the people listening to this, are math educators planning for math education, and they maybe have that scientific thought rolling around in their being like, how can I be intentional about what I want to measure about this lesson, this session, this program that I’m putting into place, this curriculum that I want to choose for my math educators is like these things are like, how can we be very intentional about knowing whether this worked or not?

00:07:09:19 – 00:07:40:14
Jon Orr
We often talk about like and this is true in the math class, but also if you’re planning for PD and supporting teachers like in a 1 to 1 coaching, it’s like if you want to see change, then you got to measure the change. We want to see that growth in our classroom. This is why we completely redesigned our assessment practices, you and me, ten years ago, to measure and see and reward growth in the what we saw from the students, because we saw that we were like, look, I want to make sure I can see the change.

00:07:40:14 – 00:08:06:07
Jon Orr
I want to know our lessons worked and I’m going to go, okay, that worked because I saw change from here to here. And that’s where our growth days really came from. It’s about creating a situation that allowed us to make it work, see what we were after. We had that intentionality. And I don’t know if this popped into my brain and it really has to pertain to like thinking about, okay, if I want to know something worked or didn’t work, how do I go about doing that?

00:08:06:07 – 00:08:28:23
Jon Orr
And it reminded me of a I think it was in switch. You know, we’ve talked about switch here, but I think it was in a couple other books like it’s a common story or anecdote when talking about measuring for change or creating change or creating or fix to a problem. And it was this story about, like in World War Two, the bombers and the bombers would, you know, fly on the mission.

00:08:29:02 – 00:08:55:19
Jon Orr
I’m thinking about the movie Memphis Belle or the new show out about Masters of Air, like the Bombers would leave from the base and fly hundreds of miles, drop bombs, turn around and come back, and not all of them would come back. But what happened was for a while, the generals, the leaders, the equipment, people on the ground that never went out, when these bombers would come back, they would look at all the bullet holes in the bottom of the bomber.

00:08:55:19 – 00:09:03:00
Jon Orr
They’d be like, Look, you got shot here, shot here, shot here. They’re seeing all the bullet holes. And somebody said, you know, like we got to reinforce.

00:09:03:02 – 00:09:03:21
Kyle Pearce
Those bullet.

00:09:03:21 – 00:09:21:06
Jon Orr
Holes, Like, we got to make sure we put on extra armor there, because if they get shot, they’re we don’t want that bullet hitting there. We want it to bounce off there. And they would send them out. And then the same number of bombers were coming back. Like it didn’t create the change that they were after. That one thought was like, I’m going to test this.

00:09:21:06 – 00:09:37:24
Jon Orr
I’m going to put reinforcement on these bullet holes in somebody else. And they came back and like, you know what? We’ve been thinking about this wrong. It’s not the bullet holes that we should be covering up with extra armor. It’s all the places where there’s no bullet holes because those are the ones that it’s likely that this one came back.

00:09:37:24 – 00:10:06:13
Jon Orr
It survived. When we hit that spot, when that bullet hit that spot, the points here, it came back. It didn’t crash. It’s likely, though, that if it hit somewhere else and that’s why we’re not seeing the planes back here. We don’t see the planes that crashed. So let’s patch all the places. The bullet holes are not showing. And it’s like that’s reinforced those spots because clearly those spots when they’re getting hit, they’re crashing.

00:10:06:15 – 00:10:27:20
Jon Orr
And really when I think about math, education and in decision making, it’s like, what are we not seeing? And if I want to see change and I want to see change in my classroom with my students, what are the ghost spots? What are the hidden spots that are like that? You think this, but it’s like, wait a minute, what about reinforcing these areas that often get overlooked, misunderstood?

00:10:28:01 – 00:10:48:09
Kyle Pearce
I love that. That’s a great analogy. And it really, for me kind of brings it all together when I’m thinking about they had good intentions, right? These folks working on the planes. Right. They’re going, okay, we’re going to make this better. But think about how much we do that in education and mathematics, specifically where we’re all trying to make things better.

00:10:48:11 – 00:11:08:23
Kyle Pearce
But imagine if we’re working on the wrong things and sometimes we do a lot of work on the wrong things. I know I’ve done it. I know you’ve done it. I know a lot of the district leaders that we work with are doing it and have done that. And it doesn’t mean we’re bad people. It doesn’t mean we don’t know quite a bit or bring a lot of expertise to the table.

00:11:08:23 – 00:11:37:05
Kyle Pearce
But the big takeaway is that if we’re not pausing to reflect and really analyze what’s going on and what we’re actually trying to address and then finding a way to measure that. And it’s interesting because you would think right away it makes perfect sense that you’re going, oh, my gosh, these planes that did come back, like, why are we trying to fix the areas that survived when in reality we need to fix something completely different?

00:11:37:05 – 00:12:11:19
Kyle Pearce
And the problem is this is I think the same is true here in math education, is that a lot of these other issues that are going on oftentimes are very difficult for us to see initially. Right. So this is where planning, focusing on those plans, but then also measuring in order to guide the next steps is so key because if we just keep on making a plan and putting it in place and then making another plan and putting it in places, it’s the spaghetti at the wall technique and who knows what’s going to stick or why it’s stuck.

00:12:11:19 – 00:12:33:15
Kyle Pearce
That’s the other piece that I think is really, really challenging. So for me, the big takeaway I hope folks that are listening is asking ourselves, did it work? Why did it work? Or do we think it’s going to work? And why do we think it’s going to work? Or if we think it’s not going to work, why do we think it’s not going to work?

00:12:33:15 – 00:13:03:24
Kyle Pearce
So these are the questions that if we keep it fairly fundamental and very basic principle like and continually remind ourselves to just ask those questions, I think you’re going to find that you’ll end up going down further down that rabbit hole to better identify the true challenges that you’re trying to help address instead of trying to fix these massive ones that are obvious to see, but very difficult for us to solve with any one specific action.

00:13:04:01 – 00:13:43:05
Jon Orr
Yeah, and we talked about assessment being one of those things that you want to take a hard look at on like what is it that you’re really assessing? What is it that you’re really measuring to see if things work? But to talk about that, reinforcing where the bullet holes aren’t and things? Are we working on the wrong things and what are the most impactful things we can do as educators to create the environments that we want in our classrooms to strengthen up, you know, our coaching programs with teachers like like we’ve talked a lot about those things with leaders and educators and a lot of the times that hidden part is our own strength around

00:13:43:07 – 00:14:07:23
Jon Orr
the proficiency of mathematics for ourselves versus our pedagogy. And I wanted to kind of leave it with this. This thought is because it’s like a ton of time is spent going like, let’s put this routine into place. Let’s focus on this pedagogical move, let’s focus on this classroom structure. Let’s get this curriculum. These are all like the bullet holes, in my opinion, and these are all the things like we’re going to strengthen those bullet hole areas up.

00:14:08:00 – 00:14:28:07
Jon Orr
But the parts where that’s like in order for those other pieces to like, really work well and to be strong and we have to take a hard look at that hidden thing, that non bullet hole reinforcement, which is where are we? Like, how comfortable do we feel doing mathematics the way we want our students to be doing mathematics.

00:14:28:07 – 00:14:47:04
Jon Orr
So if I want to like use the area model for multiplication, if I want to use a double number line, but am I using that myself regularly and do I feel comfortable multiplying using that technique or that model in the strategies I want? We all want these routines and these strategies in place, but we have to take that hard though.

00:14:47:04 – 00:15:03:07
Jon Orr
Like I actually have to like be strong in these other areas. So I feel comfortable to make these moves in the classroom. So to me, like an example of what you might want to do to kind of like think about whether these things are working is going like I can make things work better if I get stronger in this like hidden area.

00:15:03:07 – 00:15:27:05
Jon Orr
It doesn’t sound hidden because you’re teaching mathematics, but I mean, we all assume and I did this for a long time, I assumed I was really great at math and I didn’t have to like, think about my mathematics, but I was that procedural teacher. So when I started to learn the models, the strategies, it became much more fluent for me in the classroom to do a number, talk, to get students up and utilize building thinking classrooms on an impactful basis.

00:15:27:07 – 00:15:43:22
Jon Orr
So it’s like my big takeaway about thinking about does it work is is to be where can I be the most intentional and get the most impact? And that has to do with measuring, but also has to do with self-reflection. So there’s a lot that goes in to that question, which is I think when we come back, full circle.

00:15:43:24 – 00:15:46:13
Jon Orr
That’s got to be the fundamental question of mathematics.

00:15:46:15 – 00:16:10:05
Kyle Pearce
I love it. Friends, what are you taking away from this episode? For me, those bullet holes, the ones that are so obvious, they’re easy for us to identify and to try to fix and patch up. What we want you to do is really look for the parts that are hard to see, are hard to notice, because that’s where you’re going to see some true impact in change.

00:16:10:07 – 00:16:31:08
Kyle Pearce
So hopefully you’ve taken something from this. Reach out to us on social media, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. If you found this to be helpful and you want to help this show reach even greater audience sizes like you, the math moment maker community. So head on over to make math moments dot com forward slash episode.

00:16:31:10 – 00:16:34:24
Kyle Pearce
I don’t know what this is.

00:16:35:01 – 00:17:03:18
Jon Orr
It is episode 96 Kyle folks and also if you you kind of want to run your current math classroom through an audit get an opinion I like what’s going on here under the hood or maybe your district program you know like the professional development program, the action plans, the vision that you’ve created. You have a vision, right? If you also want an audit of the program, head on over to make math moments dot com forward slash report.

00:17:03:20 – 00:17:27:01
Jon Orr
And you can go through our assessment here. We’ll walk you through some questions to basically audit your program in the classroom if you’re a classroom teacher. But there’s a version for the district leader listening right now to you to kind of help them think about what they’re doing in their math program, because that audit is a great way to start uncovering where these bullet holes are and where these non bullet holes are.

00:17:27:02 – 00:17:36:15
Jon Orr
The hidden holes. Yeah, the non reclaimed holes head on over to make math moments dot com portion of report. You’ll get your report there to see where you are and what you can be start fixing.

00:17:36:21 – 00:17:40:05
Kyle Pearce
All right math moneymakers until next time I’m Kyle.

00:17:40:05 – 00:17:47:12
Jon Orr
Pierce and I’m John or high fives for us and a big high five for you. Oh.

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