Recently, after posting my small group tracker that I currently use in my classroom on Instagram, a number of followers left comments expressing a desire to get to this level of teaching.
I was happy to be able to provide insight. But I was also sad, as many teachers are crying for help in a profession that is so demanding and mentally and physically draining. We need teachers, good teachers, effective teachers, supported teachers, teachers that love their work, teachers that implement effective strategies, teachers that know how to teach.
I didn’t always know what I was doing either. But, I did research, I learned from others, and I tried new things. Eventually, my ratings improved, significantly.
So, where do we start? How do we do this thing? How to do we teach:
1. Plan with Purpose
Before you begin teaching, you must craft your lesson and in the process you should be thinking about what the end goal is. This will give you direction. Teaching with purpose requires that you know what objectives or learning targets you want your students to master. Now, getting them on the road to mastery requires many other interventions. But at least right now you know what exactly you want all of your students to accomplish first.
- Differentiate
As you plan, start to think about how your lesson will meet the needs of all your students. You know what the end goal is, but how will everyone get there? In most classes, students’ ability levels vary. As a consequence, everyone will not work at the same pace, or level and you cannot expect everyone to do the same work. Do not get this confused however with the learning target. Everyone is still trying to meet the same goal. For example, if the learning target for one lesson is, “I can determine the domain and range of a function”, after you have taught all the elements of domain and range, you may think about differentiating the content. Students who are performing above grade level may try to evaluate the domain and range of Rational Functions. Students performing at grade level may evaluate the domain and range of Quadratics and other curves. Students performing below grade level may focus on the domain and range of Linear Functions. While everyone is still evaluating domain and range of a function, the types of functions are different and require levels of critical thinking. But the point here is that everyone is still trying to meet the same goal.
2. Be Culturally Responsive
Recently, I came across an amazing article on how to teach mathematics in urban school communities in a culturally responsive way and I was unknowingly already implementing some of these techniques into my curriculum. Culturally responsive teaching is basically a way to teach that uses your student’s cultural knowledge and experiences as a pathway to bridge the teaching and learning process.
Teachers must empower urban and diverse students to construct a ‘mathematical identity’ and to deconstruct the belief that they are incapable of learning mathematics
Ukpokodu, 2011
The article stresses this idea that, “Teachers must have faith that their urban students can learn mathematics and, more importantly, convey it to them”.
It is imperative that you connect your lessons to issues related to the experiences your students are familiar with. The article gives an example of an instructor who encourages students to create algebra problems based on their favorite music hip-hop CDs, their favorite artist and the amount of money the artist earned if they sold X albums.
I personally have created Performance Tasks that get my high school Seniors to start thinking about the cost of college and if to them it is worth the investment by using their knowledge of Linear Systems, Piece wise Functions and Systems of Equations. Regardless of whether you teach in an urban community or not, as a teacher, you should always be thinking and designing lessons that will incorporate your students’ everyday life experiences.
3. Track and Target Students
You should expect that you will always have students who are not on the same page as the rest of the class. There are a plethora of reasons that could explain this but to name a few, it could easily be due to attendance related issues, gaps in prior knowledge, pure misunderstanding and confusion, and so on. Regardless of the reason, you must intervene. You should be using a tracker so that you can easily see how a student is performing across a lesson and have evidence for why you are targeting them for support.
- Implement Formative Assessments
Formative assessments are critical when it comes to tracking student mastery and maximizing student achievement. I didn’t start implementing formative assessments into my lessons until about my third year of teaching. I understood what formative assessments were in comparison to summative assessments, but now as I look back, I know that I didn’t fully understand how to implement them into my lesson to track student learning and improve student outcomes.
Formative assessments in the simplest definition refers to tracking student learning in real time. How we go about doing that is not the same for all teachers, in fact, there are so many ways to formally assess student learning. You can give students a Do Now–that you are actually going to track and not just giving it because you are getting the class started, students can engage in a multiple-choice question mid-lesson, students can do discussions like Socratic Seminars, fill out Discussion Diamonds, engage in Think-Pair-Share, and the list goes on. While there are many methods for formally assessing students, teachers are not collecting the data to drive their instruction and that’s when formative assessments are just procedures and not action plans or interventions. You must be consistent in giving formative assessments and use the data to target struggling learners immediately.
4. Schedule Small Group Conferencing
Small group conferencing is imperative for supporting struggling learners. The best way to provide intervention is to pull small groups (five students or less) as often as possible. Students whom I pull for small groups typically did not master the exit ticket from the prior lesson, did not do well on the Do Now or Warm Up, struggled on the Formative Assessment mid-lesson, and are excessively absent. Now a student may have all of these issues or just one or two, but still needs your support. I also leave one space available for a student in the room who wants to voluntarily join because they feel they need extra support. Small groups are effective because it is still is made up of peers who learn from each other, the group is intimate so members may feel more comfortable to talk among each other and with you as the instructor, and you can easily assess student misconceptions. As you assess and observe student thinking and collaboration in the group setting, make sure you are keeping record. Use a small group tracker.
Small Group Conferencing is still one of those things that even I want to improve in my classroom. I try to do small group conferencing on the second day of a lesson so that way I immediately target students who struggled on the first day, the day the lesson was introduced. Now, I’m in my fifth year of teaching and I still don’t always get this right. You should know that teaching is not perfect, so even when you think your plan for the lesson is great, it still may not manifest the way you imagined. Relax. As the year went on in my Algebra 2/Trigonometry course, I was not able to pull small groups as often as I did towards the beginning of the year because I was so concerned with ensuring my students got through the curriculum and were prepared for the content they would see the next year. If this is also your situation, it is okay. However, it is still our duty to ensure students who are struggling, are supported. So continue to provide differentiated content and move groups around as often as possible.
5. Visit Other Teachers
I don’t know what comes to you mind when you hear the words “teacher intervisitation”, but honestly, you learn so much by watching other teachers teach. Even if you walk away from an observation you took and felt you didn’t gain much, well at least you know what you don’t want your classroom to be like. If you did come across a class where you found valuable strategies, well now you get to try new things! The best part is you get to take it or leave it! I can’t even tell you how many times I walked into a classroom and loved something I saw and decided to turn it into something that would be helpful in a math classroom. As teachers, we should always be looking for ways to improve our practice. I once heard at an inquiry meeting, that, “the answer is always in the room”. You may be looking for a strategy or a way of going about something but can’t put your finger on it. Go visit other teachers! See what your colleagues are doing and ask questions! You might just find exactly what you were looking for.
6. Attend Outside Professional Development
As teachers, we are all contracted to participate in professional development once or twice a week at our schools. However, in my experience I have gained so much more in terms of support and resources from attending PD’s that were offered throughout the year after school and during school breaks outside of work. For some reason, these PD’s were so much more effective because teachers who had effective pedagogy were there and willing to share things that were working and not working in their practice. They also share physical resources for example, task sheets, problem sets, projects, and they discuss how they implemented them in their class. PD’s outside of work are great because not only are you getting resources from others, but you are also networking and getting to know other teachers. Networking always leads to great opportunities.
I hope now that you have a better understanding and a starting place for how to teach. It can be demanding, overwhelming, and sometimes even feel impossible. But, you can do this! Refer to this post as often as you need to and most importantly, share it with others!
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