A Tale of Two Teachers

Background:
I was asked to write for my district a curriculum pacing resource guide for second grade during the summer.  A few weeks ago, I saw the stack of worksheets the second grade teachers were planning to use, and I got a bit cranky.  I told them that since I had written their CPR, I should see at least some of the more rigorous activities and lessons in their lesson plans.

Teacher One has been teaching for at least 8 years.  She was not happy when the principal and I told her that the worksheets were unacceptable.   Last week, she came into my office with a baggie of laminated cards, handed them to me, and said, "I don't know what to do with these!  You are going to have to show me."

Since it has been 4 months since I wrote this, I had to ask her to tell me where they came from.  She looked up the web site: http://www.k-5mathteachingresources.com/support-files/skipcountingcards.pdf 

After having my memory refreshed, and sorting out the cards so they were in an understandable order, I was able to show her a few ways that I might use them.

Teacher Two has been teaching for 2 months and came to me after school for some help with her lesson plans.  I asked her what she had planned already, and she pulled up the same activity.  HOWEVER, she told me the ways she was going to incorporate the activity into her lessons.  The only thing that I can honestly say that I added to her lessons was using Two Ways to Count to Ten by Ruby Dee and Susan Meddaugh as an opener for teaching skip counting.

Reflection
Teacher One wants to do activities with her students, while Teacher Two is looking at the learning objectives/targets of her students.  I need to be mindful when I meet with teachers to ask them what they are trying to teach and why, rather than focusing in on the activities. I will especially have to be mindful when working with Teacher One, to help deepen her understanding of what she is teaching rather than going through a series of activities and wondering why her students aren't learning!

Solving Word Problems

The hardest part of my job is having confront teachers.  I hate any kind of conflict and do just about anything to avoid it.  Today I had to address a problem and it turned out positive!

The first teacher has been teaching for about 6 years.  I walked into his class for math, and he had several word problems showing on his SmartBoard.  As the problems were read, he had the students "flashing" their hands when they saw the key word(s) which helped them understand what operation to use.  My heart sank!  No comprehension of the problem, not strategies, just key words!

The worst problem is how do you point something out without the teacher's spirit.  So I did a few things: First, I copied out the article, Caution: Avoid Key Words! from Teaching Student-Centered Mathematics Grades K-3, by John A. Van De Walle and LouAnn H. Lovin, because he and I had already had a discussion about this last year.  I wanted him to see that it wasn't just my personal preference, but that he was going against what was considered best practices.

The next thing we discussed was  the four square problem solving method, UPS-check that we have been doing at the school before he got there.  This is basically a graphic organizer showing the four steps of problem solving by Polya - understand, plan, solve, and check.  I then showed him a video of one of his colleagues leading a lesson with it that I had taken the previous year:

https://youtu.be/CPgX3NTdMCE


His response was that it took her 15 - 20 minutes to solve one problem!  I told him that it is OK for students to work on one good problem during a class period, if the students were learning how to problem solve!  The clincher was when I told him that she had 87% pass rate in math and he had only had 75% pass rate!

I also wanted to give him  a second strategy to give the students, so I showed him the bar method (AKA Singapore Math) which our text series uses.  I even showed him the wonderful web site,  Thinking Blocks  and we went through a few problems.

At the end of the day, he came to me and said that he really had not been teaching key words (I guess blinking the hands at the key words meant something else!).  He was going to start using the UPS-check because the students had learned that last year.  However, he was not going to use the bar method because he didn't know it well enough.

I see that with him I need to encourage him to use more than one representation during his lessons.  I will also have to help him to learn more than one strategy to teach students!