More Math for More People

Episode 3.13: Where Joel and Misty think about pronouns and finish their conversation with Dr. Sarah Powell

• Misty Nikula • Season 3 • Episode 13

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Join Joel and Misty as they celebrate International Pronouns Day—highlighting the vital aspect of acknowledging and respecting an individual's chosen pronouns. Let's embark on increasing our understanding of the impact of pronouns in our day-to-day interactions.  For more information on personal pronouns please visit: https://pronouns.org/day

Then they continue their conversation with Dr. Sarah Powell from the University of Texas at Austin, who shares her research on problem solving and provides some alternatives to using keywords. https://education.utexas.edu/faculty/sarah_powell/

And then another installment of Join Them on Their Journey, with Mike, Grahame, and Maggie!

Cheers!

Send Joel and Misty a message!

The More Math for More People Podcast is produced by CPM Educational Program.
Learn more at CPM.org
X: @cpmmath
Facebook: CPMEducationalProgram
Email: cpmpodcast@cpm.org

Speaker 1:

Welcome everyone. It is October 17th 2023. This is episode 13 of season 3 of the More Math for More People podcast and special shout out it is my grandmother's 95th birthday today. Happy birthday, gima Cheers.

Speaker 2:

Hello, there, I'm. Joel.

Speaker 1:

And I'm Misty.

Speaker 2:

And you're listening to the More Math for More People podcast, an outreach of CPM educational program.

Speaker 1:

We have a lot of conversations about math and math education on this podcast. We're passionate about continually improving the way math is taught and we hope that you learn something in every episode that helps you become better at what you do.

Speaker 2:

And we hope that you have some fun and laugh as well. That always makes things a little more interesting.

Speaker 1:

Yep, we're pretty passionate about having fun Joel.

Speaker 2:

So please have a listen and we think it'll be well worth it. Boom.

Speaker 1:

So here we are and I am wondering, Joel, what national day will we be celebrating today?

Speaker 2:

Well, it is October 17th for this episode, but October 18th is International Pronouns Day, so I thought we could talk about that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, sounds great. Okay, so International Pronouns Day. Tell me what you got about International Pronouns Day.

Speaker 2:

Yeah what is it? So? It's like just that acknowledgement of the importance of recognizing pronouns. Pronouns are sometimes we say in our taglines, right, he, she, they, them, those kind of things. So it's an acknowledgement of what that really means on this day.

Speaker 1:

Cool yeah, I think that sometimes, sometimes pronouns feel like people can get bent out of shape about the idea around pronouns. We all use pronouns right, we do. I could call you Joel, and I could call you and refer to you as Joel, everywhere and all the time. And that begins to sound redundant in our language, and so sometimes I will refer to you as he or him or his Right. So then I can't just walk up to a person and look at a person and presume I know what pronouns they want to use.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

I think that awareness around, around that and awareness around the importance of pronouns for people, for everyone, and and that some people don't have a particular pronoun that they feel really drawn to you. And so you may not have that much as importance for that particular person, but there are lots of people in the world who the pronouns that are used for them are really important.

Speaker 2:

It is important and I can remember. So my daughter, samantha, went to college and I went to parent day and they had pins.

Speaker 2:

This was my first introduction to pronouns. They had these pins he, she, they and I grabbed a they because I thought this is so great to be inclusive. I don't know quite where my mindset was, but I thought it was more inclusive, like we're all a part of this community. And then I started to learn more about pronouns and I almost felt bad that I grabbed a they and then it was shared with me later. No, that was. That was actually just fine.

Speaker 1:

You can. You can choose your own.

Speaker 2:

This is not like a crazy thing, like you were just saying. Like it's how do how do we see ourselves, how do we want people to see us, how do how do we interact with the world? Totally so yeah, so.

Speaker 1:

So what are some things that people could do for International Pronouns Day? Well, you could.

Speaker 2:

There's there's some websites that you could go search on these things. You could look up the history of pronouns day. It's a pretty new holiday. It's founded in 2018. I think just getting familiar with and and learning is probably a great way to celebrate this day. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I like it as a as a way of just becoming more conscious and aware of pronouns.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

And how they're important in our world. So and there's definitely lots of resources and places that you can if you want to learn more about pronouns how to ask someone what their pronouns are, what did you? If you miss pronouns someone there's a lot of good resources for that and we'll put a couple of links in podcast description for today, so if you're interested, in that take a look.

Speaker 1:

Here is part two of our conversation with Dr Sarah Powell from the University of Texas at Austin, talking about her research on the use of keywords to help students with problem solving. If you missed part one of the conversation, it is in episode 12.

Speaker 2:

So what? What would be your like a recommendation? Then Like what? What is the strategy? Stay away from keywords Like what, what?

Speaker 1:

would your study find?

Speaker 6:

So there are two strategies that we see time and time again in the research literature that seem to be really important for word problem solving. One of them is to help students have a generalized process for working through a word problem. I usually refer to this as an attack strategy. Other people call these cognitive strategies or sometimes metacognitive strategies, but the idea is that when students see a word problem they should say, oh, I do these four things or these five things to work through a word problem, and so it's a generalized process. So it should work for word problems in grade two and it should work for word problems in grade six, and it really just is a high level way of working through a word problem.

Speaker 6:

So common attack strategies are the solve strategy, where students study the problem by reading it. They organize the information, they line up a plan, they verify the plan and then they evaluate their answer. A very common attack strategy is the cubes strategy. I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with that. The cube strategy is an OK attack strategy to use. The thing that I would do if I was using cubes in my classroom is I would turn it into R-cubes, which would be read the problem first and then use the cube steps, because the most important thing when it comes to word problem solving and I say it's really, it's the most important and it's the one that students skip the most is what?

Speaker 1:

Reading the problem yeah, and reading it more than once.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, reading it more than once. And there are some attack strategies that will ask students to slowly read the problem twice or go back and reread the problem. And the attack strategy is usually related to the steps that Polia outlined decades ago, which is understand, plan, solve and check. So you can choose which attack strategy that you use. But every time I see a word problem I should say, oh, I have to read this. Now I'm going to make a plan. Students' plans can differ wildly. They could be using gestures or acting things out, using manipulatives, using equations, graphic organizers, whatever it might be, and then I'm going to solve and then, just like a good person, I'm going to go back and check my work to make sure it is OK work that I did. So that's one strategy that has a large research base to support its use. The second is to really dig into what I'll refer to as the schemas.

Speaker 6:

Some people call these structures or problem types, but it's the conceptual underpinnings of the word problem. So across grades K through 8, we see that there are six different types of concepts that are emphasized in word problems very regularly. So, for example, we already talked about the word total. So one of those concepts is word problems where we are figuring out a total or where we're combining amounts. Now in those what I'll call total problems some people call those combined or part-part whole problems in those types of problems we have two variations. We have word problems where I have to figure out the total, and then we have word problems where I'm given the total and I have to figure out one of those parts. But the underlying concept of that problem is that I have parts that are put together for a total and we see that as a word problem in kindergarten where I might have three red blocks and two blue blocks and I'm putting those blocks together for a total. We see that problem in fifth grade where I might have two thirds of something and three fourths of something and I put those together for a total. And we even can see that in middle school as I'm maybe working with decimals or integers, and I have a part, another part and I put those together for a total.

Speaker 6:

And so when students can recognize, oh okay, this is one of those problems where there's parts put together for a total, when they recognize that and they've solved problems like that before, it helps them see that concept or concepts of it's a multi-step word problem and it makes the word problems more accessible. Now the thing about both of those things that I just talked about, joel, is they're more time consuming than having a keyword poster and saying, oh look, whenever you see the word compare, that means you're going to do this. But these are thinking things that are important for the long haul, that attack strategy. If I learn in second or third grade that I need to understand, plan, solve and check, that's going to stick with me really pretty much through the rest of my school career and probably most adults. That's how they attack word problem solving.

Speaker 6:

And the schemas are the same way. We see those word problem schemas first introduced to students, not within word problems, but really how students learn to add and subtract. So there we think about oh, I'm going to put these cubes together or am I adding on to this set of cubes, or am I going to take away from this set of cubes or am I going to compare this set of cubes? And so as students work with the earliest understandings of the operations, then that translates pretty much directly to the different types of schemas we see in word problems solving.

Speaker 2:

Cool. It's interesting too, because you were talking about the assessments and you were looking at those problems and, as you were explaining, it's better to think about more the process of the problem rather than the key words. And I know I was thinking about time because I'm thinking about oh, what would you say to a teacher who's worried about time and the assessment Key word might be a nice strategy to move to the next problem, but I like the way you said it, where let's understand the structure and then the efficiency can come from there.

Speaker 6:

That's exactly right and you're working more toward those longer term goals, longer term within the school year, but I would say also across school years there as well.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that is striking me, as you were saying that, is that a lot of this is again it's the patterns, right, it's the schema, it's these different types of things and when and how, as an adult, as the more knowledgeable other in the room, the person with more math authority in the room, right, how I introduce that to children and students and when could be really important If I introduce it as something as they're starting to notice it and I go oh yeah, I noticed this too, Look at this, as opposed to if they're just still haven't figured it out and I'm like oh here here's how you can understand it.

Speaker 1:

Then they're working to try to just understand what I understand right. Which is a different way than working to try to understand their own Well and really helping students.

Speaker 6:

I like how you talked about the noticing. So maybe one of the days you're talking with a word problem, we'll say we're comparing things. So maybe we're comparing chocolate chip cookies to peanut butter cookies. Then the next day we were comparing something with Misty's amount of money that you made and Jules's amount of money that he made. And then maybe the next day we're comparing the number of sea turtles to dolphins, right. So it's like well, what did we notice that was going on in all of these stories? We're talking about different things food and money and sea creatures and maybe we're working with different numbers. But there's something that was going on in all of these stories.

Speaker 6:

And this is where, when we do word problem instruction, we use a lot of manipulatives to help students see oh, I'm comparing this greater amount to this lesser amount.

Speaker 6:

We use graphic organizers to help students see oh, there's a greater amount and a lesser amount. And another thing that we use that I'm using right now but your listeners at home cannot see are gestures. So every time I talk about a difference problem, I have one hand that's held a little higher in the air and one hand that's a little lower in the air, and I'm talking about the difference between those two hands, and you can even do this with students themselves. They can be acting out these stories, and so there's a lot of ways like oh, so there's a commonality across these word problems. It doesn't matter if it's sea turtles, the dolphins or your money to Jules's money, but I can see that I'm comparing these different amounts and that comparisons true with whole numbers, such as five and three, or larger than that, true with fractions, decimals, integers and beyond. So it's really amazing to pay attention to these concepts, the schemas or structures of the word problem and really help students try to make some of those connections among the different types of word problems.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that is some good stuff, that's some good stuff.

Speaker 6:

I'm just really good at talking about word problems.

Speaker 1:

It's one of the things that I think any adult if you ask them what was the thing they didn't like about men.

Speaker 4:

It's going to be one of two things.

Speaker 6:

It's often word problems.

Speaker 1:

It's going to be fractions or word problems. Right yeah, fractions, decimals or word problems, it's those two things.

Speaker 6:

Well, and it's quite unfair yeah, it's something that a lot of adults have some bad memories about and it is unfair because, unless we change things drastically in the United States educational system, starting in grade three and beyond, students show their mathematics knowledge through word problem solving. So it isn't. Can you divide these two numbers? It's. Can you read this 30 word text based scenario? Think about oh, do you need to divide to solve this problem? And then do the division and then report your answer.

Speaker 6:

It's a lot and it's an overwhelming task for many students when they either haven't had a lot of word problem practice or maybe they're relying on it in effective strategies such as keywords tied to operations, or maybe students struggle with other things. We have a lot of students who struggle with reading. Can you imagine if you were doing okay in math but struggled with reading? How then you would never be able to show off your math knowledge, because you have to be able to read these text based scenarios to then show your math knowledge off to other people. So it's very complicated. And because it's complicated, I feel that a lot of teachers I've talked to don't always want to spend as much time on it. They want to spend time on those foundational skills that are essential for word problem solving. But if we aren't practicing word problem solving, I would say, on a daily basis, we are really doing students a disservice and not preparing them to show off all that mathematical knowledge that they know.

Speaker 1:

Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Speaker 6:

Oh, you're welcome.

Speaker 1:

I'm telling us about your research and what other exciting things are you researching right now?

Speaker 6:

Oh goodness, misty Well.

Speaker 1:

I wish there was a long list. Yeah, give us a couple of highlights.

Speaker 6:

Well, one of the things we're working on in word problem solving right now is we are doing a grade four study where we have two competing word problem interventions, so some students receive one of them and then some students receive the other, and we are helping, we're trying to figure out what's the best way to help students set up and solve multi step word problems, because starting in grade four and then continuing on through middle school, that is a big thing that students have to do, and so in one of the conditions students are using multiple equations to represent each step.

Speaker 6:

So maybe they do six plus five in the first step and then maybe they do, we'll say, 11 minus four in the second step. In the other condition, we are teaching students to use one equation, so it'd be, in parentheses, 6 plus 5 and then minus 4 to represent the word problem. So we're playing around with which of those approaches is the better approach. And then in another really cool project that we're working on, we're working with teachers. So in the first project we work with students, but in the second one we're working with teachers here in the Austin Texas area where I live, and we are working with them through a series of professional learning workshops and coaching throughout this upcoming school year on probably no surprise best ways to teach word problem solving to students in grades 4 and 5. So it's fun to not just work with the students but also work with the teachers, who then go back and work with their students in their classrooms.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's. Can't wait to see what happens with that.

Speaker 6:

Oh yeah, Can't wait to see. It's really fun yeah.

Speaker 1:

Well, I hope everything goes well with your research and appreciate you coming on the podcast and talking with us today and hopefully everyone who's listening will take down all their keyword posters and have some rip them up. Send. Send a picture to Missy. Tell kids why. Tell kids, why Exactly?

Speaker 6:

Can I say, can I?

Speaker 6:

say one thing before we close, of course, yeah, rip up the keyword posters when they're organized by operation. But one thing that would be really great is to have a word wall in your classroom with all of those keywords on it. Like, students need to know about what it happens when you have more and how that's different from more than, and how that's different from less or less than, and what it means when you have in all or all together, per or share all those different types of words. But just don't organize it by operation. And so have a great word wall in your classroom, have some student friendly definitions and when you're reading these word problems and talking with them with students say, oh, I see more than All, right, let's talk about if we have more than someone else, what does that tell us about this word problem? But then you want to avoid the thing where you say, oh, because we saw more than that means we do this, don't do that. But have word walls, have student created glossaries, just don't organize those terms by operation.

Speaker 1:

That's excellent.

Speaker 2:

Great advice.

Speaker 6:

Thank you so much Awesome, all right, thank you so much.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

Well, here you go. Here is your next installment of join them on their journey. Cheers.

Speaker 4:

Hello, this is Mike Hammer, straight from Northern Lower Michigan. I was asked this week to give you a lowdown of some of the things I've been trying and some of the things I've been doing and how it's been going here with this CPM program. So the first thing I'd like to state is it's been a little difficult in the last month to do a lot of CPM stuff for me, especially being my first year trying to figure that out, but it's been very, very disjointed. In the last two or three weeks I've been out for training, my kids have been absent, I have kids, groups of kids, all gone on certain days and the last last week we had homecoming and this week we have parent teacher conferences, which puts in a bunch of half days, and we're out on Friday. So just the sheer amount of kids absent, me gone, days of missing class, has been very difficult in terms of tracking progress and getting us going, because the thing I'm going to talk about is I just did a team test for chapter one and it is October 11 today and that's as far as I am, but I do have to say that the team test did go quite well. What I did for the team test was. I didn't use a normal test like thing. I actually took the graphic organizers for the end of chapter one, all on rotation, reflection and translation, and then I added another list of questions, all on symmetry, and I use that as my team test. It actually did go very, very well, allowing kids to work together. They use their notebooks, they use all of their materials and they worked through those questions and they were creating their own reflections. They were following instructions and things like that, and it really was a nice way for them to finish up chapter one. It was a really good sort of team test, so I'm very pleased with how that worked out.

Speaker 4:

I did have some issues, as I think everybody does. There's always those groups of kids where one person's working and then the other one's just copying, or the group that works separate and then just periodically checks with each other. So I am trying to work out some of the kinks and trying to get different strategies to get kids collaboratively working together on these team tests. So that's one of the things I'm looking for in the future. Another thing that I just used recently that actually worked out really well in there is there was a checkpoint where the kids have to be able to solve simple equations. And so I use that checkpoint worksheet and I put that as a hot potato and I didn't know what hot potato was. I've done something like this before but I didn't know it had a name. So the kids all each got a different colored pencil and then they would start on one paper and one person would start doing the work for a problem and then I would say switch and they would switch it over and then the next person would start doing it. What it created was this dynamic of kids talking to each other because as they switched it over, they had to talk and tell them where they were at, what they were thinking they were doing, and then the more I switched, the more that they had to keep talking to each other and you could very much create a rhythm where they're switching quite a bit and you see a lot of different colors on there and stuff like that. You also, with the colors, you could see where people made mistakes and what kids were struggling with and things like that. So it was a really nice strategy that I think worked very, very well for that type of assignment.

Speaker 4:

So this last month or so again has been a little disjointed, but I'm trying to incorporate some of the things that CPM has to offer. I am finding that there's so much stuff in there that, as a new teacher of this program, trying to figure out where I want to plug in and then in the future where I'm going to try to plug in. So, as I'm going, the big things I'm going to try to incorporate this year are just trying to get some organization down so I can get some flow for the kids. I mean, I'm also going to try to focus on utilizing some of those team strategies, because I do see that they really do work with engagement within the classroom. So that's where I'm at with CPM at this point. So this is my camera. Talk to you again sometime. Bye.

Speaker 5:

Hey CPM folks, graham checking in here. I had a busy couple of weeks here with Parent Teacher Conferences and a visit from Joel and investigating different research proposed by my principal, and CPM Parent Teacher Conferences went well. I'm trying to focus on the positive interactions with parents, and one thing I noted was that the collaboration that I've seen from my students was something I could really genuinely say was a positive thing for every student, and so generally I had a lot of good things to say about students in how they're collaborating and sharing ideas and persevering, which I think are good things to focus on, rather than difficulties students are having in math, although those are important issues to address as well. I did have one student that said they wanted to change classes. They didn't like my style and as I prodded and asked more about what they meant, they said that they didn't like collaboration. They have anxiety and really just want to work on their own. I asked them to give me a chance. They haven't been coming to school because of the anxiety, or at least to my class. They have been coming recently and have been contributing to the class and to their group. It's in small steps, but I made sure to really appreciate and thank that student for coming to class and giving us a chance. And I said I noticed that they're doing really well with the material and that seemed to go over well. So I'd say all in all it was a successful parent conference. I really appreciate that CPM offers support.

Speaker 5:

Joel came in and gave me some great ideas to increase student discourse with icebreakers. I just did that in one day and students were talking a lot more. There was one particular group where they told me they didn't know each other and it made it difficult to talk and that particular group was talking a lot more not fully about math, but I recognized that some off-task talk can be beneficial and so I let that happen and I noted to the student that they were talking a lot more. They mentioned they didn't want the group to break up and I have been postponing that more and maybe going with CPM's recommendation with each chapter to change the groups and this chapter is taking us a little bit longer and so I'm working on the pacing. But they are having some time to get to know each other and work together and I think that's been a positive thing. So I really appreciate that recommendation with the icebreakers.

Speaker 5:

And finally, the last thing that's been going on is my principal sent me some research that he or at least guided our department to some research that says direct explicit instruction is superior than other types of instruction, and it got me wondering about that research as well as the research provided by CPM. I really appreciate that CPM does have research to back up the practices that we are doing, and to me it came down to my own practice and what's working for me, and what I noticed with CPM is that the collaborative problem solving work can be difficult for students, but I believe that it has been beneficial for them, and so still navigating how best to support students, but I think it's worth it. So thanks for listening. Hope you have a good one.

Speaker 3:

It's Maggie and this is where I am on my journey. My students are just about to take the chapter one assessment. In the inspiring connections closure section, we have options for what we want to do and how we can share the information with our students. What I have always tried to do on those closure days is set the students up for them to be able to pick what they need to focus on first, and then also to meet with each student individually. Now I've learned that it is hard within a 60 minute class period to meet with each student just one on one, but I often try to now do two on one, so two students with me, and I think what that does it really sets the students up to feel confident going into their assessment. So in this case, what we just did was we had the students work with their elbow partner and altering the way that the textbook explains about completing the check for understanding questions. What we did was we printed them out on a piece of paper and put them around our amputeeater and had them work into their elbow partners, and so they would be working in their mathematician notebook looking at the question. So the question up on the wall just gave them guidance to which one to do. So they would be standing there working together with their elbow partner and then, when they're done, they would flip up the piece of paper and the solutions were there. So it's just a different take.

Speaker 3:

On the closure questions, I find that getting them out of the classroom, getting them up, just lends itself nicely to our review. But then it also allows me to work with the students in those pairs, and so when they come to Meme, I ask them really quickly we've got five minutes any questions that I can answer, and some will say like I've been wondering about this or I'm so confused about this. But otherwise I hand them a dry erase pocket with a few questions in it so they can pick one to go through. And I pick them from like the main topics from each learning goal, and it's really helpful to see where they're at. They leave my station feeling confident and then, because what we've done is we've color coded all of the questions. So there's three main sections in chapter one and each question is color coded. So all the blues relate to scatter plots, all of the reds relate to transformations, and this allows them to focus in on specifically where they need. I will report how they do, but I'm feeling pretty confident going into our first assessment.

Speaker 3:

And then the last update is just I received an email from a parent who I connected with because she's very passionate about math, had major in math and, over the remote time, took it upon herself to really teaching her daughter's math. And so what we found was that the students had some exposure and some understanding to a lot of these different concepts that even were maybe a grade above but couldn't articulate it in the way that we were wanting. So seeing that in different representations, seeing the connections, and so ultimately we had them stay in the class that they were at. So all six graders are all together, all seventh graders are together, and so the student remained in the sixth grade class and the seventh grade class. And so I think it's a reminder for myself, even with back to school day happening a couple weeks ago is that part of our responsibility as teachers is sharing with the parents the value in our curriculum and that it will be different than maybe what they went through. But what we're seeing and what we're setting them up for is that solid foundation that they can apply to whichever classes they're at. And so I'm going to read just a little bit because I think it's always a good reminder that there's value in the curriculum and that we may need to explain to the parents that value. And it says I've become a full-fledged believer and converted after seeing all the ways the curriculum has come together this year.

Speaker 3:

I am a tough critic when it comes to math education and I am so, so grateful and wanted to say thank you. I've already taught my kids to think math as problem solving and I believe the students are confident in their ability. But what I don't know is how to teach math, and what you're doing here far succeeds my expectation. You're bringing it all together in a thought-provoking, mindful, holistic, not plug-and-play fashion, and the problems are fantastic, really, really excited about the rest of this year and wanted to say thank you. And so if you ever run into, I think, a parent or an admin or another colleague of asking why the value in the way that CPM does, I think it's always a good reminder of just saying like it is their experience they hadn't experienced the same way that we aren't, and that is where the education needs to come in. Until next time, goodbye.

Speaker 1:

So that's all we have time for on this episode of the More Math for More People podcast.

Speaker 2:

For more information and to stay connected, find CPM on Twitter and Facebook. You can find our handles in the podcast description.

Speaker 1:

The music for the podcast was created by Julius H and can be found on pixabaycom. Thanks, julius. Join us in two weeks for the next episode of More Math for More People. What day will that be, joel?

Speaker 2:

It will be October 31st. Knock knock who's there? National knock knock joke day. National knock knock joke day who? That's right? Next episode is National knock knock joke day, so we hope you join us for some good knock knock jokes. Please, if you have any, send them into the podcast. We'd love to air them and hear what you all have to say. I love knock knock jokes some of the best jokes ever. Again, it's October 31st, national knock knock joke day. See you then.