A Great Read For Any Math Teacher

Recently, I have been doing some reflecting on the kind of year that my students and I have been having. This is my fourth year teaching and I think that it's vital that things continue to improve as I go along this journey. I am very pleased to report that things continue to move in the right direction. As a matter of fact, I feel as though this has been a period of tremendous growth for both the kids and myself.

For the last couple of years, I have been sporadically checking the dy/dan blog that is put out by the very talented and insightful Dan Meyer.  I hope one day to find enough time left over at the end of the day to crawl out of the Lurker role and insert myself into the active community of learners that this man has perpetuated with his Socratic ponderings of "What if".

Last spring, instead of a invitation to inquiry, I found a recommendation for a required reading. Malcolm Swan has written an outstanding resource for math teachers called Improving learning in mathematics: challenges and strategies. Of course spring time is not a good time for me to start reading anything, so I bookmarked it and held on to it for summer reading. And thank goodness I did wait. There were so many amazing ideas and strategies in this short piece that I did not know where to begin.

In the end I decided to dedicate myself to one strategic change and incorporate it into the daily routine this year. The new practice that I chose to incorporate into our daily routine is the regular use of student whiteboards to develop our mental math skills. At least that is how it started out. I had some games and gimmicks that I had developed a Notebook document around and the kids loved it. I soon realized that I could be having the students show me their current level of understanding at any point in the lesson with these whiteboards. The largest boon to our learning came when I realized that this was the perfect vehicle to throw in random review questions through out the course of the year. This one simple, elegant, powerful idea has been a real game changer for our learning community. I can't wait to read through the resource again to see what strategy we can claim for our own next year! Commit, implement and adapt! Growth will be your reward.

The Economy of Values

I have been doing some reading at my turtle's pace. I have been doing some thinking as well (at a similar pace it would seem). I've been reading Thomas L. Friedman's most recently updated book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. So far I'm really diggin it. In one part he cited a guy by the name of Dov Seidman who is the CEO of LRN. Dov explains that there are two types of business relationships: situational and sustainable. The difference between the two all come down to values. In a situational relationship you are only concerned with what you can get out of the right here and the right now. In the sustainable relationships you are worried more about your the long term success of your company and your customer and your environments (economic and natural).

Now as I had alluded to before it is all about your values. The reason that I say this is because, as Thomas points out, we could have had all the regulations that the brightest legislators could of ever conceived but it would not have delayed our Great Recession because regulations tell people what they can and can not do. Values tell us what we should do. With out buying into the values of sustainability, all of the people who made decisions that lead us to the current state of affairs would not have asked themselves what they should do but rather a how they could do what they wanted to do with out getting caught overtly transgressing the imposed regulations.

I could not help but draw some parallels between this messy situation and my own little slice of heaven. The demographic of my school is about 90% Low German Mexican Mennonite immigrants with a sprinkling of more "traditional" western Canadian kids. In our school we have tried modeling our values. We have tried enticing the our students. Some of us have even tried legislating crowd sourced regulations (aka classroom rules). Our kids do not share our values (granted, this is a blanket statement that has too many holes to keep me warm at night but I still believe that it holds enough water to be useful diagnostically). I believe that this may be the missing link. We can make all of the rules and regulations that we want but until they buy into our value system they will only have a situational relationship with us and try their best not to get caught overtly transgressing the imposed regulations.

Where does this leave us? Well, I'm lost. But I believe that this is an opportunity for us to find and define ourselves. The first thing that I think that we need to do as a community is to define for ourselves what our core values are. And I'm talking like our top four or five most relevant, significant, overarching values that encompass all of the seemingly silly things that we ask our little angels to do. From there we can move away from our class room regulations and move toward exemplars of how we uphold our shared community values. We can have a Star Value for each month with activities and more incentives and contests. We can make it a regular part of our classroom discourse. We need to overtly identify, advertise and promote these values so that our kids can finally see where we are coming from and why we expect the things of them that we do. My greatest hope is that this will help the next time that they are faced with a choice to ask themselves what they should do instead of what they can get out of the situation in the right here and right now.

Sorry for yet another rant but I was inspired and I had to share it with you. You've probably already considered this stuff. Let me know what you think our values should be.