Recently, I had the opportunity to speak at the NCTM Annual Meeting, which is a gathering of 7,000+ math teachers who are passionate about mathematics in some way, shape, or form. While my presentations at conferences have centered on advocating for more math-based discussions, this was an interesting twist: present about how to improve your math community. I didn't know what direction I wanted to take it, so I relied on myself as an attendee: If I were attending, what would be something useful for me to bring back to my team? And thus, the session was born. 

You can look through the slides for all the content, but I wanted to go through some of the key points made in the session. For me, it comes down to creating a space where I want to occupy. There are plenty of staff lounges that are toxic, divisive, and repellent of any good/fun/interesting ideas. This is what I'm trying to avoid. At the same time, I also want to recognize how exclusive our teaching practices have become and begin to push on that thinking. Here were the main points:

When did it become acceptable for math teachers to avoid the beauty of doing mathematics? Sure, the overwhelming majority of us love to teach kids how to do math, but how often are we getting the opportunity to engage in a rich mathematical conversation amongst colleagues? You're presented with a prompt, given a chance to think about it, and then provided a space to discuss the strategies for solving a problem. 

We're worse than the kids. We get caught up in the daily grind of making sure content gets covered that we forget the fun and interest that mathematics can provide. We need to make the time and space in our staff lounge to pose problems and hear how others may solve them.

Here's the fun part about all of this. Lisa Garcia, a teacher in my district, has a door of math problems outside her room. The new School Resource Officer came by, knocked on her door, and came in. Not to take a student out for something they had done wrong, but to talk with her about the solution to one of her problems.

Unprompted.
During class.
In the middle of the day.

People want to be challenged, they want to be curious, and they want to be right. Let's provide that on a more regular basis. Plenty of prompts are over at tabletalkmath.com/resources.

Let's face it: the field of education has been a very comfortable space for white teachers since, well, at least 2006 when I started teaching. My guess, based on plenty of historical data, is that it goes back a bit longer than that. 

Even if you have zero educators of color on your staff, there are some things that you should be doing to bring in diverse perspectives and history. One of my favorites is the work that Annie Perkins started in her Mathematicians Project. 

In this Awesome Table, Annie has listed over 100 mathematicians who are not Straight White Dudes, which is an important thing to discuss. If you think about the people we celebrate for "discovering" many of the things we use in math class, most of them are... white dudes.

Here's a challenge for you, then: pick out one of the people on the list that Annie created, print out a picture and description of that mathematician, and post it in the staff lounge. The history teachers, science teachers, and ELA teachers could all benefit from seeing prominent figures of the math community highlighted as well!

Without the online math community so awkwardly dubbed the #MTBOS (Math Twitter Blog-o-Sphere), I wouldn't be the teacher I am today. In fact, I wouldn't be a teacher at all today. It is because of you in the math community who have encouraged me to keep going, to share and learn and grow and become the person I am, so it was only right to thank you.

Not only that, but there are two other groups of people who have begun to influence my thinking in the last year or two. #EduColor and #ClearTheAir are two hashtags that cause me to reflect on my practices and push myself to be better. I encourage you to do the same, even if it doesn't mean that you engage. Just read, learn, listen, and find a way to put something into action.

It has become a central theme of what Matt and I talk about in The Classroom Chef, as well as presentations that we do, but it also needs to be something that gets put on display at work. How are we pushing ourselves to be better if we are constantly living in this comfort zone? How might we step out of it, just long enough and far enough to get better?

I am a very reserved person, believe it or not. I don't like large crowds, don't like public attention, and would much prefer the 1-1 interactions than the 300-1. With that said, there needs to be some risk that I can take to get better, to be better. 

One way of working on this is to create a different feel for the staff lounge in terms of the conversations that we have. Below are a few sentence frames that you can print out and post in the staff lounge to remind teachers that we are here for positive reasons, that our kids are what matter most, and that our jobs are meaningful in ways we cannot always see.

​What risk are you willing to take? How are you going to make sure it gets done?

Thank you to everyone who came to the session and shared their own vantage points and ideas. It was a great discussion!

Happy "Staff Lounge Under Construction" Fishing

Lesson Plan
Handout

High School: the land of opportunity, college preparation, and overstressed humans.

Kindergarten: the land of boogers, non-matching outfits, and questions. Lots and lots of questions.

Today, Mrs. Frazier gave me the opportunity to come in and work with her kindergarten class, which just-so-happened to have my beaming little Kinderkid in it. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you teach secondary and have children, take a day/period off and volunteer to teach in your kid's class.

Not only is the experience good for your child, to see you in the role of an educator, it is crucial to understand what is happening at that level and gives context to conversation that your child brings home. And, if you're as lucky as we are, your child has an amazing teacher that you can learn from while you are teaching the lesson.

I was prepped with the standard that the students would be learning about:

Directly compare two objects with a measurable attribute in common, to see which object has "more of"/"less of" the attribute, and describe the difference. For example, directly compare the heights of two children and describe one child as taller/shorter.

Immediately, I thought about BreakOutEDU, the concept of having students solve a number of clues, then using those clues to unlock a box within a given amount of time. However, knowing that this is kindergarten and those kinds of humans in large groups scares me, I needed to make some modifications. Here is what we ended up doing:

After going through an Estimation180 task to get students thinking about measurement and what might be reasonable, I passed out the handout and the measuring tapes. Yes, they were fun colors and no, I don't regret getting different colors, even though I knew it would cause a stir because everyone wants the purple measuring tape and there's only 1.

We went over how we can use a ruler, starting at the end and measuring out, making sure to stop when we get to the end of the object, and looking to see what number is there. I have to say, it isn't a whole lot different than how I show the middle/high school kids. True story. The kindergarteners actually listened better than the humans who are 10 years older...

Once that was done, each group had an envelope of "clues" with strips of paper they needed to measure and put into the boxes of the handout. They worked in groups, sharing the strips of paper and measuring each with their own measuring tape.

Something I learned: give kids more space to write the word "loves" and the teacher's name. Whoaaaa doggie, they needed more space.

Something else I learned: given the right amount of guidance, kids can do some pretty incredible things. The groups were sharing, working together, and working really hard to figure out the clues in order to get the lock and box open.

My son's group had the first crack at it, much to my dismay. Nobody wants to play "daddy ball" in the demo lesson, so I was really hoping his group had to struggle through it a bit more...

Kids were up and moving, squirming in their chairs, unraveling all 60 inches of the tape when they only needed 10, but it was all beautiful to watch. A group of kids were actively engaged in the content, which was brand new to them. This was Day 1 of learning how to measure and they were CRUSHING it!

With the time winding down for the AM class to get picked up, I reminded the class that the words they were measuring needed to form a sentence that made sense, and that's all it took as little-mister-rosy-cheeks made his way back to the lock box with a s-eatin' grin on his face. He said in a confident-yet-sheepish voice, "Hey Daddy, I figuhhed it out."

Trust me when I say that I really didn't want him to be the first to figure it out, but I couldn't block him from the box and his group had worked through the clues. Kinderkid opened it up and the entire class swarmed around to see the treasure (of pens I picked up at conferences, as well as extra markers, pencils, and erasers).

Now that the lock had been solved, I thought that the kids would lose hope, lose focus, and go off the rails, but they didn't. The kids kept working, even so long that Mrs. Frazier had to stop me so the AM kids could get picked up, as they continued to figure out the lengths of the papers and the sentence that was formed from them.

With the remaining time, the PM class meandered around the room, measuring other objects on the walls, at the desks, and more. I even had a couple kids measure my height (only a 60" ruler makes that tough), shoe length, hands, belly (at that point I shooed them away). Watching their minds wander as they measured was something I will cherish for a long ​time.

Thank you to Mrs. Frazier, the teacher who shows constant passion and love for what she does, and Mrs. Dorst, the student teacher who dove right in to embrace the lesson alongside the kids.

And thank you to all the teachers out there who do the same with their students, making their room a space where kids want to go, are invited to be curious, and leave a better person than when they entered.

Happy "Hey Daddy, I Figuhhed It Out" Fishing