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 4.01: Where Joel and Misty discuss chihuahuas and begin a conversation with Dr Mandy Jansen about rough draft thinking in math classrooms
It's Season 4 on the More Math for More People podcast and we have some new segments in store for you this upcoming season!
May 14 is International Chihuahua Appreciation Day - so first Joel and Misty discuss what they like about chihuahuas including Misty's rescue dog, Tabitha Chicken Bean.
Then they begin part 1 of a conversation with Dr Mandy Jansen of the University of Delaware about rough draft thinking and revising in math class. You can find copies of the slides from Mandy's keynote and session at the 2024 CPM Teacher Conference here:
Keynote Slides
Breakout Slides
Connect with Dr Jansen on X: @MandyMathEd
Then Joel and Misty enjoy and rate the first Math Joke of the Podcast sent in by Karen from Maryland.
And finally, we are nearing the end of the school year and also the final Join Them on Their Journey installment... Only one more after this one!
Please complete our quick 5-question listener survey!
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
You are listening to the More Math for More People podcast. An outreach of CPM educational programs Boom. An outreach of CPM Educational Program.
Speaker 2:Boom. Okay, just one quick show note before we get started with our first episode of Season 4. In the description for the podcast you will find a link to our listener survey. We want to just know who our listeners are, so it's a quick five-question survey. It just gives us some demographic information. If you could fill that out for us, it would be great. It helps us design content that meets your needs. Thank you, Okay. So here we are on May 14th and season four. So tell us, Joel, what is the national day today?
Speaker 1:Today is International Chihuahua Appreciation Day.
Speaker 2:International Chihuahua Appreciation.
Speaker 1:Day yes it is Woo.
Speaker 2:Do you like chihuahuas?
Speaker 1:I don't know that much about chihuahuas.
Speaker 2:I feel like people either love chihuahuas or hate chihuahuas. Well, you know.
Speaker 1:I remember the Taco Bell commercials with the chihuahua, the bobbing head and things like that. In my reading, I think I realize why it's international is because Miss British Columbia started International Chihuahua Day 2020 because she had her own chihuahua Tikas. So henceforth, may 14th is International Chihuahua Day.
Speaker 2:I see.
Speaker 1:So you know some things about chihuahuas.
Speaker 2:Well, I have a chihuahua. I never would have thought I would have had a chihuahua, because I definitely. I think, growing up was one of those people who was like what is this tiny little dog? And people, I get it. People, they treat their chihuahuas like they're tiny children and carry them around and dress them up and put them in little carriages, whatever all these little things. And and I thought that was ridiculous, because it is kind of ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Yes, I do agree, it's still ridiculous, but they also chihuahuas are like, they're definitely. They have like that, that small being syndrome, however you want to talk about it, because they're small right they are, they're tiny. Well, it's that. It's that, like they're, I'm gonna rough you up. Like they're, very they can. Chihuahuas can go from like sweet and lovable to full on Chihuahua in half a second Very, very aggressive and protective of themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, yeah, so I I never thought I would have a hat at Chihuahua, but I do have a Chihuahua now. My one of my dogs her full name is Tabitha Chicken Bean. That is her official name, but we call her Tabby. Chick is a chihuahua. She's four and a half pounds. She's 15-ish years old, blind, no teeth. I mean she has a great life of just sleeping most of the day, yeah, but when she gets startled or is hangry or grouchy or something, she gets her little chihuahua going and she's like and it's kind of funny. I mean it's kind of funny because she's so small.
Speaker 1:Of course, but you were talking about people like would carry those chihuahuas or hold them things.
Speaker 2:Do you fall into that as a chihuahua owner? Now? Yeah Well, cause whenever I mean it's, she's so blind and she can't just wander around the house, and so it's because now she has a little space that she knows and she likes it.
Speaker 2:So, whenever I take her outside she can't go up and down the stairs or anything, so I just, yeah, I carry her outside and put her down and she wanders around, does her business, and then I pick her up and bring her back in. And also I will admit that she has a little infant carrier, one of those little baby wrap things that you have for infants.
Speaker 1:It's a long wide stretchy wrap Like a sling, almost kind of thing.
Speaker 2:No, it's a wrap because it's the ones where the baby would sit and nestle up against the mom's chest and belly, and so you wrap it around and over your shoulders and things so it's nice and snuggly and I'll take her with her little blanket and wrap her up in there and stick her in and she just loves it. She's all swaddled and snuggled and she just goes right to sleep and I'll take her to the vet that way when she gets her nail trimmed.
Speaker 2:So I'm driving in the car with her all swaddled up and she'll get her little nails trimmed and then she goes back in. She's very happy in there. So yeah, I have become one of those people.
Speaker 1:Well, I will admit that I have seen the swaddle and I have seen the sleep and all that kind of thing. Let me ask you I have this list of five fascinating facts. I wonder if this is true of tabby chick.
Speaker 2:All right, we'll see so number one.
Speaker 1:Chihuahuas have a loving disposition.
Speaker 2:I would say that's somewhat true for Tabby Chick. She's, you know. Again, she's blind and deaf, so she's not a really highly interactive dog, but she's a very sweet dog.
Speaker 1:Number two a mistrust of strangers.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, For sure Okay. Oh number three chihuahuas are quick learners Again. I mean I've had her for about a year. She knows her pen, she knows her space, yeah, but she's blind and deaf so it's hard to figure out. I mean she does know when we go outside, Like she can tell, definitely, can smell the difference, I mean different things. So she's you know, she's figuring things out, she knows where her food is.
Speaker 1:I would add that maybe she's learned very quickly how to get your attention and how to make those things happen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sometimes it's hard to figure out what she's trying to say.
Speaker 1:Yes, Chihuahuas are not cold friendly. They don't like the cold weather.
Speaker 2:Oh no, they hate cold. That's the one thing she cries about the most is when she has lost all of her blankies. She has two fluffy beds in her pen and about 10 blankets little, you know, small dog blankets and she loves and she also has a heat lamp.
Speaker 2:Okay, so definitely Okay, so definitely no cold weather she loves to be in the warm and in the middle of the night. If she gets up and drinks or goes pee or something, then she lets me know that she needs her blankies put back on top of her. Excellent and the magical blankie fairy comes and puts the blankies back on top.
Speaker 1:Well, number five I don't think relates specifically to you, because this is saying that Chihuahua is commonly mispronounced.
Speaker 2:Did you know that that? That, what do people say where?
Speaker 1:well, they say chihuahua so that's saying the actual pronunciation is a little bit closer to chihuahua. Instead of chihuahua or ch I just I've been saying chihuahua but saying chihuahua. I I've been saying chihuahua but saying chihuahua?
Speaker 2:I don't know, I'm skeptical, okay.
Speaker 5:It's only one source.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, yeah, yeah, I wish that tabby chick could wear little sweaters, keep her warm. But there's two problems Like you can't put something over her head, because as soon as you start coming at her with something she's like you can't and you can't just hold her head still to stick it over her head. She'll fight you and the other so that it's loose enough to go over her head. Then it's loose on her body and one time she had one and she, I came in and she had gotten her leg through it, the arm, and I was like, oh, this is not a good idea because she'll just manage to get herself tangled up in some way and hurt herself.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so she has not been able to wear any kinds of clothing to keep herself warm. Too bad. She does like to sleep under a little lamp.
Speaker 1:Well, I might like that.
Speaker 2:She's a princess. She is a princess, but you know she's old and I figure this way she's living out her best life as a princess. I mean, who wouldn't want that? It's what I want.
Speaker 1:Well you sound. One, I bet you would want that, and two, she's pretty lucky to have you taking care of her.
Speaker 2:All right. So it's International Chihuahua Appreciation Day, and you can appreciate chihuahuas to whatever extent you choose.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:So our conversation today is with Dr Amanda Jansen. She's a professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. She was a mathematics educator and now she conducts research on students' engagement in mathematics classrooms and teachers' learning from their reflections on their own practice. She wrote the book Rough Draft Math Revising to Learn that was published in March of 2020. And she's a former junior high math teacher. So, in the spirit of rough draft thinking, at the beginning of our conversation I mess up Mandy's name, I mess up where she works, all kinds of things. I was clearly not prepared to begin the conversation in a coherent way. Some of those I've edited out because they're maybe more embarrassing than I wanted to put onto the podcast. But we did have a really lovely conversation with Mandy Jansen, and this is part one. So here you go, and this is part one. So here you go. So we're here with Dr Mandy Jansen and you're at Purdue right University of Purdue I'm at Delaware.
Speaker 2:Delaware, delaware. Oh my gosh, where am I and who have I been talking to? Sheesh, delaware. Okay, so you're at Delaware. I'm going to do like an official intro and give all your details and things. I'll record that afterwards and put that at the beginning and it will have your correct name and location, so no problem. Well, we're here to talk with Mandy Jansen today about rough draft math and rough draft math thinking, or rough draft thinking in math, right? So yeah, thanks for joining us on the podcast. We're having a really smooth start today.
Speaker 4:It's my pleasure. It's nice to see you, Misty and Joel.
Speaker 1:Nice to see you.
Speaker 2:So we just wanted to start with. We have, I think, two questions really that we want to ask and then mostly just going to go off of whatever else you tell us. And so the first one is what is rough drafting Like? How would you describe it? How would you explain it if we didn't know anything about it?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I think that a lot of us have experience with thinking about drafting and revising as a practice that we apply to writing. We can use writing as a tool for thinking, get our ideas out and then, once our ideas are out in writing, then we can revisit them and think about oh, is there another way? I would like to say this Would I like to organize my ideas differently, something like that. But we can apply this idea of drafting and revising to pretty much every area in our life. And why don't we do it in math? And so I would say, rough drafting in math is when we share our thinking, whether it's in talking or in writing, even before we're sure that we're correct. We share what's on our mind and we remain open to revising our thinking. We don't hold on to our thinking too tightly. We realize that we can learn from the perspectives of others, and that even applies to a correct solution or explanation. We can keep revising, we can make new connections, we might use different language, we might layer in a different strategy or representation. So it's sharing our thinking at any stage, assuming people's thinking makes sense, trying to understand that and then also trying to continually evolve in how we understand things.
Speaker 4:So I first thought of this as a way. Actually, I didn't think about it on my own. I first developed this idea collaboratively with secondary math teachers in Delaware and we were in a study group trying to think about ways to invite students into discussions so they felt more safe to share their thinking, and through that process we generated different ideas for how to help students feel safe. But we were also reading a book called Exploring Talk in School and we were thinking about what Douglas Barnes called exploratory talk and how to create conversations, that where everyone was not just sharing what they had figured out but continuing to learn in dialogue. And the concept of exploratory talk was contrast with performing or final draft talk, where I share my ideas that I've figured out.
Speaker 4:I'm just going to perform for you what I know.
Speaker 4:And so the teachers in the study group said well, exploratory talk might not have a lot of meaning to my students, so what if we called it rough draft talk, to contrast with final draft talk?
Speaker 4:And that seems to make a lot of sense to people. If you say rough draft thinking, rough draft talk, people automatically have some intuitive sense of what that is like sharing our drafts, and I was initially focused myself in this work about how do you welcome drafts, help people feel safe to share their drafts. But the wise teachers in the study group were like well, we can't remain in the rough draft space. We want to also create opportunities to revise, and that wasn't something that I brought in myself into the study group, but it ended up being really fascinating and generative to think about what revision looks like in math class. I think a lot of people are really deeply engaged in creating safe spaces for people in lots of contexts, including math class. But I think the unique component now into rough drafts in math class is what would it look like and in what forms are people invited explicitly to revise in math class and what does that communicate to students about what it means to learn.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:So that's kind of a long answer, yeah no, no it's a great answer. That's a brief orientation.
Speaker 1:What does it look like to revise math?
Speaker 4:And so I'm sure you all have ideas about that too. But I would say that revising happens all the time, whether or not we're naming it and labeling it. I mean, one way to think about revising is learning. I'm thinking about something differently than I thought about it before. But what does it mean? To explicitly invite revising into math class is making it really explicit for students that they have multiple tries, multiple opportunities, whether it's on a problem they're working on in their groups, whether it's on an assessment. And then there's also revising your work versus revising your thinking. So the way CPM brings ideas, spirals them throughout the curriculum. You're revising your thinking about that idea when you revisit it in the context of having learned new content and thought about mathematics in different contexts. So in some ways I think about revising just as a name for learning. But there's that contrast between revising your work and then revising your thinking about a concept, so it looks different depending on how you think about revising.
Speaker 2:Well, and I like what you're saying there about it being learning, in a sense right, and also there's a need for it to be maybe more explicit at times, right. I mean, we learn things all the time, but we don't always, we're not always conscious of it, we're not always thinking about our thinking or realizing and recognizing that, oh, I used to think this or do this and now I think and understand this. And that's one of the things I know that will happen sometimes with kids that they are doing something and connecting it hey, look what you did before. Or ask them to go back and look what they did before and come compare that they're not always aware, right, we're not always aware that oh, I got better at these things.
Speaker 2:I absolutely agree with you In that learning space.
Speaker 4:Right, there's something about when we understand something in a new way. We sort of forget or don't give ourselves credit for how far we've come.
Speaker 4:Because, how I think right now, if I own that deeply, it's hard to remember that you thought about anything differently. So really concretely with your question, Joel, it might be take out the problem that you worked on a couple weeks ago and use a different writing utensil and write on that and see what you would add. Or even during the lesson you worked on a specific rich task and the teacher had the students share out the ways that they thought about it, maybe in Desmo snapshots or document camera. And now, after you've heard some of your peers share, now write down how your thinking changed as a result of that conversation. So those are two very specific and concrete ideas, but there's lots of them.
Speaker 2:Well, and I see that what you're just saying too, really melding with the five practices for mathematical discourse, right, like it's incorporated in that last piece, the connections, but then also explicitly going back and revising as an extension.
Speaker 4:That's a connection that I really value, misty, because I like to say that revising is like the sixth practice to the five practices. I think the act of making the connections after strategically sharing out solutions that you've sequenced, is somewhat challenging for us when we're teaching math. How to help these larger connections come out Now that you've heard other solutions, reflect on how your thinking changed, is another way to reinforce some connecting that maybe you as a teacher might not even have explicitly seen. And then if you collect either typewritten reflections in a Google form or in Desmos or take it out and then you could see the connections that students made and then launch the next class with those connections that students made from revising, it does dovetail quite nicely into the five practices, for me for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so how do you see? What would you suggest are like the first steps or the ways that teachers could get started with bringing rough draft thinking into their classroom? I love how you say. It's really intuitive. I think it is right Whenever we say someone's like oh, I'm rough draft thinking, or I kind of know that they're just thinking out loud, right, and I have a different mindset about how I'm hearing what they're saying. So, but how you know, if I'm a teacher and I'm wanting to do this, what might be my first steps?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think one thing that's important about rough drafts and revising a math class is that it's an idea there's not a really specific set of practices that I would say oh, you have to do this and this is what rough drafting is.
Speaker 4:It's more of a mindset and you can do a number of different things in the spirit of that. So from that perspective I'll share a few different ways that I've seen folks get started with rough draftment. So one thing they do, especially if they're a secondary teacher which I know is folks at UCPM they assume their students have incoming knowledge right about what rough drafting and revising is, so they literally what rough drafting and revising is, so they literally.
Speaker 4:Teachers have literally started by asking students what would rough drafts and revising in math class be? Why would we do rough drafts and revising in math class anyway? And then students generate ideas. Oh, maybe it just means anything I share is fine because it's just a draft and I can fix it, or I can share anything because it's just a draft, or we're going to have opportunities to keep revising. The students can sort of generate and build ideas of why this is valuable and that provides some sort of orientation, and then, immediately after that, do an experience, maybe in a structural routine like a dot talk or something, where students are seeing math from a lot of different perspectives, where your perspective is valid and you can revise by expanding your thinking, by seeing in another way.
Speaker 4:So why I think that's important is that sometimes when people think about rough drafts and revising, the focus is on fixing mistakes Right, but I think that's only one lens into drafting and revising. You can think about learning as learning to see differently, make a new connection, get another way to see, and so when it's something like a dot talk, how did you count? How did you chunk the image? We both could see the same number of dots, but I would learn how to see differently by seeing through your eyes, and so, in that sense, revising is expanding your perspective. It's not changing something that's broken. It's broadening your point of view and trying on another way of thinking. So I would say those two things like talking with students about the role of rough drafts and revising and learning anything, thinking about how it could be relevant for math, and then doing something right away and then reflecting on okay, how is this an example of rough drafts and revising, and then think about how you might transfer that into just a day-to-day process of how you engage in doing math together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm hearing you talk a lot about culture too. It's a culture of your classroom and creating that culture and to create this safe space Any suggestions on how to start that culture? I know, I'll just say, within CPM, chapter one is often focused on creating culture, but do you have anything specific that you would add?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'll share, but just with a caveat of of.
Speaker 4:I know that you all and the listeners of this podcast have a lot of wisdom, of course, in the ways that you all create culture. I'll share a favorite approach that teachers that have been working on rough draft with me seem to really like keying into a concept called rights of the learner. That comes out of a teacher in Tucson, arizona, olga Torres. She's recently retired, but she would do this with her students. Build a set of class rights, like the right to express your thinking in whatever way makes sense to you, with whatever language, word choices, representations. That's a right that you have in this space. You have the right to be confused. You have the you have in this space. You have the right to be confused. You have the right to claim a mistake. You have the right to change your thinking at any time. Building this set of class rights and I learned about Rights of the Learner from Crystal Clinic Craig, who collaborated with Olga in Tucson and then has written about Olga's work in this way and I think the reason why a lot of people like this idea is that when you build a set of class rights, it can replace rules and instead, it creates this environment where we honor each other's thinkers we don't freeze each other in time and define their competence by what they say just in a specific moment and really honors the learning process.
Speaker 4:And then, if it becomes a set of class rights, they need to be a living document and you can keep updating it. You can reflect on if you're supporting each other with enacting their rights, if you are enacting your own rights enough, what rights are missing. And so I think with all of this, with culture building, like with drafting and revising with the rights, it has to go beyond the slogan system, and so it takes time. So if someone is to believe that they have certain rights in the room, including the right to share your draft thinking and revise, and for that thinking to be seen as valuable, the rights only become real with experience. So if I tell someone you have the right to share your rough draft thinking and I'm going to treat it as valuable, I have to do that. So I have to interact with everybody in ways where they feel that that's true and help students interact with each other in ways that they are treating each other as their draft thinking is valuable and it just takes a long time to build that trust through interactions and experiences over time.
Speaker 4:And then reflecting on. Can you reflect on a moment where you notice somebody revising their thinking, and what did that look like? What did that sound like? You notice somebody revising their thinking, and what did that look like? What did that sound like? Can you reflect on a moment when you saw someone take a risk to share their drafts when they weren't sure? What did that look like? What did that sound like? And you know so. Reflections around that, I think, are useful.
Speaker 2:I love that piece of what you're saying of really having kids think about when you saw this, when you experienced this, what did it sound like, what did it feel like, et cetera, because I think that we often just assume kids know that they're just like, oh well, that's what that was. But even as adults we don't always know it if we don't actually think about it and giving them those opportunities to really connect to those ideas and when it's happening and their part in it.
Speaker 1:Well, and assuming it's happening in other classrooms and assuming it's happening in other aspects of life.
Speaker 2:Sure yeah.
Speaker 1:Can't make that assumption. I don't think.
Speaker 4:I think another thing that is hard around the culture building is I want to foster exploratory conversations where we are engaging in each other's thinking. That's hard. So what if Joel shared something that made sense to me? What am I supposed to say about that? Oh yeah, that's cool. So how do you help somebody talk about it? And so that's hard for adults, it's hard for kids. How do you talk about something that you think already makes sense? And so using a lot of different sentence starters like that makes sense to me because or this makes me think about to help make connections, support, to talk about each other's thinking.
Speaker 4:Why do I need to say something? He said it so well. Or, misty, the way you explained that sounded great. Why do I need to comment on it? But if we comment on it and linger there a little while, we can make new connections. We have time to make sense out of it. But if we comment on it and linger there a little while, we can make new connections. We have time to make sense out of it. We can see the depth that's really there. But also I like to also invite people to say what they appreciate. Like Misty, when you phrased this this way, I really appreciated it because it helped me understand this. And that way, if you're helping everybody comment on what they appreciate about what someone said, they're also making sense of it in a new way while they're developing those interpersonal connections. Oh, I didn't know that what I said helped somebody and now I feel more connected to that person.
Speaker 2:So I want to shift us a little bit. As you had mentioned before, we started recording that you've been doing some of your research and some of your things. You've been looking at connecting some of your ideas to the CPM curriculum, and so I'm excited to hear what do you have in that realm?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I was very thankful for the opportunity.
Speaker 2:Oh, so that's all we have time for today on this episode of More Math for More People, for our conversation with Mandy Jansen. So tune in in two weeks to hear the conclusion and how she connects her work to the CPM curriculum. See you then, okay yeah so I'm very excited because we have a new recurring segment for season four.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Are you ready for this, Joel?
Speaker 1:I'm ready, let me know.
Speaker 2:We're going to have a math joke of the podcast Fantastic. So we're going to have people send in their favorite math joke. Send a recording, let us know who you are, where you live, and then your favorite math joke, send that in to us at cpmorg. That's linked in the description also. Right, and let us know your favorite math joke, and then we'll play it on the podcast here and Joel and I will give it a rating.
Speaker 1:Yes, I mean, we're the judges here.
Speaker 2:We're the judges, so yes, we get to judge the quality of the math joke, for you know cleverness, we didn't expect it coming. You know that it's mathy sort of math nerdiness, I don't know. There's a lot of different. You know very ephemeral things that we're judging this on that won't be delineated in any formal way.
Speaker 1:Absolutely not. And this first joke, if I'm not mistaken, is, this person actually suggested this segment for us. They did, they did yes.
Speaker 2:So we have thanks to Karen, who is sending in this math joke for us, and so let's listen to Karen's math joke.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 4:Hello everyone. This is Karen in Maryland, and here is my favorite math joke.
Speaker 5:Why won't Goldilocks drink a glass of water with eight pieces of ice in it Because it's too cubed. Have a good day everyone. I get it.
Speaker 1:I haven't heard that one before.
Speaker 2:I had not heard that one before either. I think it's one of those ones you had to think about just a moment to get it, which I like. That Sometimes it's, you know you're like wait what? Yeah, so it's good. So. I think we're going to give this one. It's a five point scale, right yeah? So, rate them from one to five, and each rating comes with its own special sound effect.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So we're rating this one First rating. It made me laugh. It made me laugh.
Speaker 2:It made me laugh. I laughed.
Speaker 1:It made me think.
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm going to give it a four.
Speaker 1:I'm going to give it a four.
Speaker 2:I think we're going to agree with you. We're going to give this one a four.
Speaker 4:Okay, karen, your joke gets a four. Thank you.
Speaker 2:We are almost to the end of our Join them On their Journey for this year. Join them on their journey for this year. This is our penultimate, the next to last installment from our Join them On their Journey teachers. Next time we'll have them reflect and tell you about their whole year in one capsule, but until then, here's this installment of Join them On their Journey.
Speaker 5:Hey, cpm folks, hope all is well. Graham here. With three weeks left of the year as the year's winding down, I've been thinking about what I want to focus on and carry with me for next year. Recently I've been trying to adopt and incorporate a more asset-based approach with my students. I really want to try to understand their strengths and think about ways to incorporate their strengths as students but also mathematicians in my class and with assessments. So I've been thinking that more frequent and smaller self-assessments and with assessments. So I've been thinking that more frequent and smaller self-assessments and team assessments may be helpful for communicating where students are and give them feedback about where we're going and what they need to do to get there.
Speaker 5:It's been really exciting for me to see this year the growth in my students. I felt like the end of the year testing went fairly well. Students showed a lot of growth. There's, of course, more growth that they can do, but I was especially impressed with my MLL students. Recently they took an assessment and a good majority of them were able to solve word problems, which was really cool.
Speaker 5:I think that the reading that we do in class has really paid off. When students read together, they hear the problems being read. They see it and they discuss what the problems mean and say I'm really excited for this summer I'll be joining the CPM Teacher Research Corps and I'm really excited to be a part of a team that's working to improve math education. I'm interested in increasing student engagement, student buy-in, but also supporting MLL students and students of differing abilities, so really excited to collaborate and be a part of research that will help other teachers as well. Well, I hope everyone is hanging in there and giving that last good push to make the end of the year a good one. Thanks for listening. Take care.
Speaker 3:It's Maggie and this is where I am on my journey. We are wrapping up our school year. We have about three weeks left of classes and I am excited that we are getting to the culmination of some of our big themes for this year. But I'm also seeing some students who have done well over the year but has also struggled, in a sense, of maintaining their skills from one learning goal to the next. And I think CPM does an amazing job of that mixed space practice and I think it's so important for our students to practice over time, and the lessons that we are currently in have been really great lessons in bringing a lot of the skills that we've been building upon over this year.
Speaker 3:But some of my students are really, I would say, struggling to really access that prior knowledge and those skills. When it's requiring to, for example, rearrange an equation, remember to place it into y equals mx plus b. Sometimes when you're rearranging, it goes into fractions and decimals. Even in the, you know we're using equal values method to solve systems, and so it's like touching on all of the different skills that we've really been going through since the beginning of this year and the students who have done well and grasped those concepts are flying through them. They're like this is so much fun I love this Like they're really getting into the excitement of using that knowledge. But I have some students that are really frustrated because they're not able to access that prior knowledge. So I'm I think I'm feeling that I don't want to say frustration, but I'm feeling that also what the students are feeling of like we got to take a step back. We got to go back to what have we covered this year and going back to all of that mixed space practice and that valuing of completing all of the reflection of the practice and seeing that the skills are building on each other from one time to the next. So I'm really excited that we're wrapping up the year and we're bringing all of those skill sets together.
Speaker 3:But I think, at the same time, what I'm also feeling is that my heart goes out to these students who are frustrated because they can't do necessarily step one when there's a lot of different steps involved, and so what I'm trying to really do is really break it down one step at the time so it doesn't feel overwhelming for the students, and maybe going back and highlighting actually some of the reflection and the practice that are in our packet to say, oh, remember when we did this. And they're like our packet to say, oh, remember when we did this. And they're like, oh yeah, now I remember that. So I think towards the end of the year it is great to see how all the concepts come together. But for some of these students that is also a point that's really difficult for them and I think it goes back to that value and that mixed space practice of when we're going through the reflection of the practice and making sure that we're constantly touching on those skills, because I think that the students need that practice over time to really retain it.
Speaker 3:And I would say, for the most part, all of my students are doing really well with bringing everything together. Sometimes we go back to those like couple students who are frustrated. We as teachers, we feel that and we want to make sure that all of our students, regardless of where they started and regardless of their skill sets, that they feel empowered to do the math that they're doing, and so I'm looking forward to these last couple of weeks. But I'm also feeling that pull between making sure that all of my students are feeling the excitement and that coming together of all the pieces. So I hope that all of you are feeling that excitement of the end of the year and really enjoying the culminating concepts.
Speaker 2:So that is all we have time for on this episode of the More Math for More People podcast. If you are interested in connecting with us on social media, find our links in the podcast description, and the music for the podcast was created by Julius H. It can be found on pixabaycom. So thank you very much, julius. Join us in two weeks for the next episode of More Math for More People. What day will that be, joel?
Speaker 1:It'll be May 28th, scripps Spelling Bee Day, and Scripps Spelling Bee always takes place that Tuesday to Thursday after Memorial Day weekend. So this is when it starts here and I think about spelling and I think about how I'm not a very good speller and I use phonetics a lot often gets words wrong. But I'm so grateful for things like Spell, like spell check and things like that to help me with my spelling for sure, which gives me a great appreciation for these kids who are in the spelling bee. I love to tune in and watch how they do. I love that it's on ESPN. So we'll do a little spelling bee appreciation with Misty next time on May 28th. Thank you.