More Math for More People
CPM Educational Program is a non-profit publisher of math textbooks for grades 6-12. As part of its mission, CPM provides a multitude of professional learning opportunities for math educators. The More Math for More People podcast is part of that outreach and mission. Published biweekly, the hosts, Joel Miller and Misty Nikula, discuss the CPM curriculum, trends in math education and share strategies to shift instructional practices to create a more inclusive and student-centered classroom. They also highlight upcoming CPM professional learning opportunities and have conversations with math educators about how they do what they do. We hope that you find the podcast informative, engaging and fun. Intro music credit: JuliusH from pixabay.com.
More Math for More People
Episode 3.18: Where Joel and Misty read poems at work and a reprise of a conversation with Gail Anderson about assessment
It's National Poetry at Work day! Joel creates a haiku on the spot and Misty reads everyone a poem by Langston Hughes.
How will you celebrate?
Also, they reprise a conversation with Gail Anderson, one of the writers in the Curriculum and Assessment department, about assessments. A lot of excellent reminders about how to deal with assessments, particularly in your first few years of teaching CPM.
Lastly, it's the beginning of 2024 and the approximate midpoint of the school year. How are you taking care of yourself? The PL team chimes in with some good ideas for balance and mindfulness.
Send Joel and Misty a message!
The More Math for More People Podcast is produced by CPM Educational Program.
Learn more at CPM.org
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Email: cpmpodcast@cpm.org
Hello everyone and welcome to 2024. It's January 9th and this is episode 18 of season 3 of the More Mass for More People podcast. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Hello, there, I'm. Joel and I'm Misty 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:Alright, here we are. It is another time for our national day of here again. So what is the national day today?
Speaker 2:Joel Today is National Poetry at Work Day. Poetry at Work yeah, which I think is kind of exciting, because our work may one may consider it as poetic, or are we actually creating poetry, is it? Poetry about work. It could be poetry about work. You could take a lunch break and do like a slam poetry event or something.
Speaker 1:Yes, interesting A slam poetry at lunch. I like listening to slam poetry. I'm not sure that I would be good at doing it.
Speaker 2:I don't think. Well, actually I do think I'd be pretty good at it. I don't want you to put me on the spot right now.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no. I wasn't going to like here, improv some slam poetry Go.
Speaker 2:What movie did I love that had slam poetry? I think it was how I Married an Axe Murderer. Did you ever see that movie?
Speaker 1:Oh, that has slam poetry With.
Speaker 2:Mike Myers. I think he's a slam poetry guy in that movie.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:I would model my slam poetry after Mike Myers. I think you would after how I Married an Axe Murderer.
Speaker 1:How I Married an Axe Murderer. Yes, good yeah, so it's poetry at work so it's a very poetic way of putting it. Even Poetry at work. It's not just Read some poetry at work.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, that would take you away from the work almost right, Like you want to be poetic in your work.
Speaker 1:Although the way. So I think, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:I was going to say the way. The suggestions for celebrating are that you could write a poem, read a poem by others, which I don't know. If you're doing that at work, what else you're not doing?
Speaker 1:That's what I'm going to do, but continue. Is that all the things?
Speaker 2:That's all the things. That's all that I suggested here and my source yes, I understand, so yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I think we planned on this one a little bit and you were going to do a poem.
Speaker 2:I'm going to do a poem. Yeah, would you like to go first?
Speaker 1:Do you want to go first or do you want me to go first?
Speaker 2:Well, I just asked you what.
Speaker 1:No after you. I insist no after you, okay.
Speaker 2:I'll go first, and one of my favorite activities and I do this, I wouldn't say it every day Well, two times a year, maybe four times a year, maybe I don't know monthly, I don't want to put a number on it, but I have these high cubes, and so the cubes come in two sets. There's the top of cubes and then there's the phrase cubes, and so you roll, okay, and then I'm going to make a high cube out of the cubes that come up.
Speaker 1:A high cube out of the cubes.
Speaker 2:So I'm rolling, I'm going to roll. Okay, I'm just going to take a look here. So my top of cubes they came out as a dream about our world. So the poem I'm about to create is a dream about our world.
Speaker 1:A dream about our world.
Speaker 2:I'm looking for syllables because a high cube is five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables. So as I look through that one of the cubes, actually is making me laugh. Five, seven, five, Five seven five, okay, but one of the cubes says hashtag at symbol and symbol asterisk hashtag exclamation point, which makes me laugh because I think it's supposed to be a swear word. I'm not going to use that one, but that came up. I thought that was kind of funny.
Speaker 1:How many syllables were the symbols?
Speaker 2:for swear word. It could be a whole lot Take out, that's right.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's even more confusing, all right.
Speaker 2:So I think I have mine set.
Speaker 1:All right Okay.
Speaker 2:A dream about our world. Also fortune bank, but promises shelter, spat fertile behind. Did you giggle at my poem?
Speaker 1:Well, yes because, it's spat fertile behind, and that was mildly amusing to me in some way.
Speaker 2:That's my poem. I'm doing it at work.
Speaker 1:That's excellent, so very nice.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Very nice. I'm excited that I'm going to read a poem from Langston Hughes. When we were in Washington DC area a little while ago, we went into a bookstore that was owned by black people and had all the books that were either topics relevant for people of color or written by people of color, et cetera, and so I bought this book, the Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, and I've learned a lot about Langston Hughes even just looking at this book so far, and so I'm going to read a poem that's called Star Seeker. Okay, I have been a seeker seeking a flaming star, and the flame white star has burned my hands, even from afar. Walking in a dream-dead world circled by iron bars, I saw the singing star's wild beauty. Now behold my scars. Thank you, all right, so it's Poetry at.
Speaker 3:Work Day Poetry at.
Speaker 1:Work Day. If you want to make a poem by yourself, random words with your high cubes or some other way, you probably have those online, even they probably do, or you can also please share with the podcast.
Speaker 2:Cpm Podcast.
Speaker 1:Yes, CPM Podcast at CPMorg you can tell us what?
Speaker 7:you did to celebrate.
Speaker 1:Here it is. So we have another oldie but a goodie here for you. This is a reprise of the conversation that we had with Gail Anderson in Season 1 about assessment and we thought it was still relevant for everyone today. So here you go. So we're here today with Gail Anderson. Gail, you work in the Curriculum and Assessment Department CPM. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yes, that's how we say it Yup, yup.
Speaker 1:So welcome to the podcast, gail.
Speaker 2:Welcome, Gail.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you, my pleasure to be here. One of the things that we often encounter when we're working with teachers and they're implementing is how to write assessments for CPM. I always feel like there's a little bit of a shift that teachers need to go through in how they have written assessments, maybe in the past, and how they think about assessments, to how they might write them when their kids are doing CPM. So how would you describe that or how would you think about them?
Speaker 6:Yeah, it really. You nailed it when you said it. It really is a change of adjustment in your testing strategy. I think I was a really slow learner. I think that took me probably five years in that process.
Speaker 6:I started teaching at a CPM school, so it was my first time teaching and it was CPM, I think. I looked at the sample tests and I thought these aren't good for me. So I just started writing my own tests and I thought there aren't enough questions in here. Could my kids just learn this, this and this? And it's not in the test. So I quickly just tossed the CPM test, wrote my own tests and then every year I would go back and rewrite it and change it because it didn't work last year. I'd add more of this or take some of this out and kept changing. And then I'm pretty sure it took me five years when I finally said, wait, I'm going to go back and look at the CPM ones and maybe on some whim I just said let's just use the CPM one. I mean, it went so much better.
Speaker 6:I thought, well, okay, that took me five years. And then I started over using the CPM assess the sample one and then I would tweak it just to make different problems or whatever like that. But I think I had a tendency to. I just taught these kids these things and I taught it three times in one day. So by the end of the day I felt, wow, these kids really got it. Of course, that was really free to be classed, so I felt justified in asking a lot of questions that I think they weren't really ready to hit yet. And that was the biggest shift for me is trusting the curriculum, and I remember this is what CPM my colleagues told me just trust the spiral. Trust the spiral. That's what they would always tell me when I was panicking too much. And sure enough, as a teacher, looking at those sample assessments, I figured they know more than I did about the curriculum. So I'll just go with that. So that's what I did as a teacher.
Speaker 1:So to clarify so, when you were writing your own assessments in your first couple three years, you chapter four assessment. Were you just testing all on chapter four, really not even doing the previous content and the existing new content? Well, I would put a little bit.
Speaker 6:Well, see, I had heard the technique that you should start with an easy question just to help kids get over the nervousness and that kind of thing. And I think, you see, the easy question was the old stuff. So I would grab something that they were hopefully familiar with enough by then. I put that on there and even after just the first year at CPM I think I realized, with the spiraling nature, by the time you get to the final exam, because they've been doing review and preview all year long, they didn't really have to go back. And what did we?
Speaker 7:learn in chapter one.
Speaker 6:Now it was at a point where, wow, chapter one was so easy because they've done it and engaged with it for so long.
Speaker 1:Right, right, yeah. So then you were saying that you went to using the sample assessments and that worked a lot better. How were they?
Speaker 6:better. The timing seemed better, as far as I think. My test tended to be a lot too long, but there were enough questions in there. If I remember going to a CPM training sometime, I started right before school started, so I didn't get to do training my first year, but then when I did go, I remember an exercise that she had us do which was to try to write one test question and hit as many topics as possible, just to get to think about what was going on there, and I think that opened my eyes to the fact that one question doesn't necessarily cover just one idea, like the ideas aren't that discrete, and that I can feel confident that I'm assessing my students' knowledge of a lot of information in there. So it's all rolled up in these really good, rich questions.
Speaker 2:And how does that play into your writing role? So now you're a writer, and do you think about that as you write?
Speaker 6:Yeah, so one of the first assignments I had when I took this job was to rewrite all of the assessments in the book as well, our team was working on, so there was a big push for that.
Speaker 6:That was in 2019. And it was actually. It was fun because earlier that year, when I was still teaching, I was a teacher I mentioned became a CPM teacher leader, so I was doing PD and that stuff. They invited the teacher leaders to go through to pick a course and go through the tests and give them feedback on the sample tests, and so I did that for CCG, for geometry that was the course I taught the most of so I went through and did all that feedback and so then, ironically, when I started at CPM, my first task was looking at CCG tests and so I was looking at my own feedback on the test, plus some other teachers, so there was other feedback in there too.
Speaker 6:So we spent a long time. It really just surprised me and I want teachers to know this as a teacher, you don't have time to sit and read through the whole book, cover to cover, and just immerse yourself in it to get the whole progression, the whole story that goes through there. But it's really hard to do that with everything that you juggle the teacher and as a curriculum writer, that's what we do. So we sit there. We really understand how much exposure a student has had to a certain topic and what point they're on in that progression and are they ready really for a tough question on this or are they really ready for a little bit later question to introduce there.
Speaker 6:So we spent time going through plotting out the different content things, the progressions and placing things really, really intentionally let's put this in chapter two, we'll come back to it in chapter five when they've had more practice with it or something like that. So there is just so much. I mean, this project took a bunch of us just months to go through and rewrite these tests and they really do follow the curriculum. It was very intentional where we put different questions. So when they say trust the spiral, really what you're trusting is the people who have spent hours and hours doing this so that you don't have to, so that teachers get to teach and they get to think about their students and connect with them and do those more important personal, upfront kind of things.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that the new sample assessments in so many ways we did revisions to the suggested assessment plan also along with that and so match those things together so much better than they were before. And I think when we talk about it in our learning events all the time, we try to get teachers to just use the sample assessments in the first year. You don't need to write assessments, you could use these.
Speaker 6:Do you know? I was just reminded of a funny story. As a teacher leader, I was doing classroom visits and I remember talking to one new teacher and he was so frazzled and we were sitting down debriefing his class afterwards and when I mentioned the sample assessments, he looked at me like I had just given him a gold brick, like he had no idea that they were just there waiting to be printed. He was so excited. Yes, they are there. Please know that. They are there. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's one thing to take off your plate in that first year when you're trying to figure out all the other things that are going through each lesson and in preparation and so on, and as you move forward into year two or three or so on, yes, you can adjust them. You can start to look at it and say, okay, so here's where it is and here's where I know my kids are. I can make some tweaks and some things to it. I think it's interesting that teachers are and I get this we're always worried that if I don't do my bestest work this year, my students are going to suffer. Well, guess what? You're going to be a better teacher next year anyway. So you're already not going to be your bestest teacher with these kids, right? I might look back at some of the things I did in my first years of teaching. I was just like, oh my gosh, how did those kids survive? That was ridiculous, because we learn and we get better. So I think that trusting what someone else has put up, that it's good in our work.
Speaker 2:My curiosity is again the writing and the assessments. How, when you're writing a curriculum, what part does assessment play in that? As far as that mixed-based practice, I'm wondering does that add to the mathematical storyline as you create?
Speaker 6:I don't think I'm saying it very well, but Well, yeah, kind of on a macro level, that the storyline goes through the whole book. So there's this big mathematical story with all these different pieces, like you read a novel, right, and there's all these different things going on and you have these different characters who make appearances. Maybe they disappear for a while, but you don't want to forget about them because they might be the key character at the end. Or there are all these different things going on and on a novel, like, at the end of every chapter, the author a good author will sort out, help you sort out and put the events into kind of a focus and then kick you into the next chapter and move you on. And I think the closure in a chapter does that. It serves as the end of the chapter, to wrap it up. So you might do these closure activities.
Speaker 6:I used to say closure as okay, we're going to do this closure activity, the closure problems or whatever, and it's so that I can repair my kids for the test, and really the closure activity and anything you do then is a piece of that, is the assessment. It's not like the closure problems lead to the assessment. It's that we're doing closure and part of that is the assessment and the assessment's taken, the barometer. Well, let's stop and let's look around and let's see what we remember. Let's see if there are things that we maybe need to tweak as we move on, because we forgot some of the characters and we want to bring them back in for another little act or something, so they can remember who they are when they need them again. It's a measure, right? That's the assess. We take stock of what our students know and what they don't know and then make some informed decisions as we go on.
Speaker 2:And so is that thought of, as well as what is formative here, what is summative and things like that, when you write those sample tests, when you write those test questions?
Speaker 6:Well, I mean really. So I don't think it's so easy to separate. This is formative and this is summative.
Speaker 7:It's really all formative because everybody's forming.
Speaker 6:We're all on this journey. We're not going to get there, we're just going to keep going, and so it's all forming us. I mean that's again part of that process that we made of looking through a particular. We're doing quadratics or whatever, but we're just introducing it here. We're getting to different levels and by the end of the course we're going to be at this different position and so that's the work, that we've gone and figured out where those go. So you'll see a question on chapter two in chapter five. But it's progressing. Different levels. I mean chapters. You think of a novel too? Right? Chapters are just there to chunk it for us, right? They're not like firm divisions in there, that this is ending and this is starting. They're just segues to the next piece of the journal.
Speaker 1:I think that's an interesting thing. I've had this conversation with teachers before to help them understand that the learning is a continuous thing. Right, we looked at the. Here's a lesson, here's the next idea, there's the learning, and then basically at some point we had to say, well, this is how much we think you can do in a class period, so we'll call this a lesson and this a lesson and this a lesson, and here's about 10 to 13 lessons, which we think is about a time you should do an assessment.
Speaker 1:So that's a chapter, and we tried to chunk the ideas so they came to some place where we could pull things together and do some synthesis of ideas and so on. But it is a really it's a continuous learning. It's a continuous thing we're making connections through. I also had a teacher one time when we were talking about difference between formative and summative and the idea that we always want kids to be getting feedback and getting information from what they're doing in an assessment, and so this teacher said so every test is formative until the last time, until just the last test, the last time you tested. So thank you for taking your time today, gail, and being with us. Is there anything else, any other tips that you would want to give to CPM teachers about assessment?
Speaker 6:Well, I think, and something we haven't really touched on is how does feedback fit into the assessments too? And I think about, like when I was in school especially, this was more obvious, maybe with English class and you get a paperback, this essay that you spent all this time on and stuff, and it says A minus or whatever. Okay, that's kind of unsatisfying. What did you always look for? You looked for it.
Speaker 6:I paged through my papers looking for those little phrases or sentences, or a teacher put an exclamation mark somewhere, like things that surprised him or whatever was going on there. Those are the things that I enjoyed reading and that helped make me a better writer. And I think, as math teachers, it's just as important for us to give feedback and just an X through something, or even putting a question mark instead of an X or something, to let kids know that this is what I'm thinking as I'm reading your paper. Let's have a conversation here and I know we don't. I'm sure every teacher wishes you could sit down for 15 minutes in conference with a student after every test, but I never had time for that, but we do what we can to give them more feedback than just a grade, more of those words.
Speaker 6:Continue that conversation. I think that helps the students too, if we make it a conversation that they see it's not this is the ending. We turn it, our test and we're done with that. We're not going to come back to it, it's just over. We want them to see it as part of that journey to part of that building who they're becoming as mathematicians.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Absolutely Well. Thank you so much for being with us today. We sure appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Thank you, sure. All right, so here we are.
Speaker 1:It's January 9th. Just come back from break.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:It's 2024.
Speaker 8:It's 2024.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, if you really didn't like 2023, it's over and if you did, if you really liked 2023, then you can extend it into 2024 either way. That's the magic of segmented time construction.
Speaker 2:I like that you refer to it as magic, so that would be good. Well, yeah, it is.
Speaker 1:It is the magic of our perspective of time and our need to partition it into things True, like yours. So this, yeah, so it's 2024 and it's a brand new year, and you can make it however you want. I agree with that, so do you do resolutions still.
Speaker 2:No, I don't do resolutions.
Speaker 1:So we don't have anything to talk about there. No, so, other than we don't do resolutions done, talked about that. So, however though it, is a new year. And as far as for teaching, I think that sometimes that break and coming into the new year, a lot of schools have a pretty good chunk between January, february, march where they can get a lot of things done because there's not as many holidays or as other things disrupting.
Speaker 1:I mean definitely from the beginning of November until December. I always feels like I remember. It felt like a time I was like there's not even any school in here, so yeah, so that can be a time where you can feel like you can get a lot more done with your students and learning going.
Speaker 2:It's the end of the quarter, start of a new quarter, of that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, whether it happened at December or it happens in.
Speaker 1:January. In some places it's getting right into that space and I think it's a time to that. You can think about how are things been going to here and how do I want them to go. There's still a good chunk of the school year left and you can think about how I want to dedicate my energies and what I'm doing with my students. So I think in that vein, we asked the PL team to send us some of their ideas around things that they might think about or focus on at halfway point of the year.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, is that accurate? Yeah, some ideas of how to keep yourself balanced, keep your students moving forward. I know there's assessments a lot of times around that break and things like that, and so just resetting and keeping it going.
Speaker 1:So here you go, you can enjoy their thoughts in that vein.
Speaker 2:Let's listen.
Speaker 3:Hi, my name is Bridget and I am from San Luis Obispo, california, and I think one way to maintain some balance is to take a couple of minutes at the end of the day to clear your head before you actually leave the building. Having an intentional end of the day routine will help signal to your brain that we're leaving school, stuff at school, and it can be whatever works for you. It can be a meditation, writing down one thing that went well that day, busting your favorite song as soon as you get into your car, anything that helps tell your brain it's time to go home and be present at home.
Speaker 5:Hi, I'm Jesse Teal from Port Washington, wisconsin. I'm a high school math teacher and I've been working with CPM as a professional learning specialist for a couple of years now. What helped me keep perspective as I trudged through the winter months was actually using the calendar to my advantage. I like to plan things, so I would make a big deal about experiences for later in the school year that I knew I could look forward to and that my students would look forward to. That anticipation of what's to come is really exciting, and I would share that with my students too.
Speaker 5:It didn't matter what kind of event it was things like when I was coaching, traveling with the teams to out of state competitions, or things like all school events, dances, big games coming up, even when I was attending or presenting a math conference. Any occasion that brought joy was worth the energy, and involving my students in the anticipation was what made it so much fun. We would post countdowns on the walls or the boards in the classroom, we would have brainstorming sessions about packing or spirit outfits, we would plan timelines for the day of the event together, and it was such a fun way to build community and give everyone something to look forward to and something to be part of. So I encourage you to find that thing to put on your calendar. That's gonna motivate you and then include your students in that planning and anticipation. I hope you have as much fun as I did with it. Best of luck to you. Have a great 2024.
Speaker 4:This is Nicole Gorgas from Victoria, minnesota. Something that helped me or at least I tried to do as much as I could remember is when I would send my teams to a task, I would try to remember to just pause and just observe, almost like a little teacher timeout, before starting my circulation. So I know many of you have heard of the three pass promise, but there's almost like a step zero where you just have to take a breath as a teacher. So that is maybe one small way you could try and keep some balance in your teaching life this year. And another thought I actually had a cooperating teacher that posted a sign in the back of the room just for the teacher and the students would ask about what that was all about, and maybe it says breathe or maybe it says step zero, so that you remember take a breath before you start circulating.
Speaker 7:Hey, jeremiah, here from Egan, minnesota. For mindfulness to make sense to me, I needed to reframe it to mean caring for and about others, which might seem a bit currentiary but actually results in my ultimate form of mindfulness. Pay attention to your purpose for being an educator. For me, providing learners with a community to support them in accessing the right tools or making the most informed decisions, and just being there when they can't be there for themselves, provides immeasurable well-being for me. Be aware of the needs of each one of your learners. Support your students in journaling about their understanding of both community and mathematics. Teach your learners to breathe first and share in non-gent mental ways. Be present for your learners every day and just pay attention to how it feels to be there for someone else, and it'll be much easier to show up when initially felt like staying home.
Speaker 8:Hi, my name is Tom Strickland. I'm an Algervren geometry teacher in Salem, oregon, and here are some thoughts I have for surviving as a teacher, for taking care of yourself in the cold winter months. I've noticed that as I teach my students, I see so many students with low math skills, so many students who struggle to care or seemingly even put in the energy to learn, and I get discouraged. I get discouraged because I know they can do it, but they aren't even taking the steps to be able to do it. And I notice that my focus is on the students who are struggling and that's all I can see sometimes. And my advice, even to myself and to all teachers, is to not just focus on the struggling students.
Speaker 8:Every single kid in that room deserves your time and your energy, and in every single one of my classrooms I have kids who are doing amazing.
Speaker 8:I have kids who are trying you are asking questions who are thinking, who are doing the work. And to care for myself, I need to make sure that I check in with each of them. I notice what they're doing, give them feedback and I spend time with my students who are excelling, with my students who are succeeding and with my students who are doing well, who are making those good choices. That time spent with them does two things it gives them an equitable piece of my time they deserve it but it also fills my soul. My soul is filled and strengthened while I encounter students doing well, when I experience them, when I celebrate with them, and so I encourage all teachers be a strengths finder. Find the strengths of those students who are succeeding, who are doing well, notice what they're doing, point it out, encourage them and enjoy those things. And let it fill your soul, let it encourage you and build up that energy inside when it wanes in the wintertime.
Speaker 2:Thanks, I'm sorry to eat your pie and celebrate on this day, maybe at McDonald's. But perhaps you know I used to be working for Pampered Chef. I used to do shows for them and then I would get these recipes that would be sent to me, and one of my favorites is the Pampered Chef Apple Cherry Pie. So I highly recommend it. Maybe I'll end up celebrating Sure, enjoy, enjoy.