Rounding Up

By: MLC - Mike Wallus
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  • Summary

  • Welcome to Rounding Up, the professional learning podcast brought to you by The Math Learning Center. Two things have always been true in education: Ongoing professional learning is essential, and teachers are extremely busy people. Rounding Up is a podcast designed to provide meaningful, bite-sized professional learning for busy educators and instructional leaders. I'm Mike Wallus, vice president for educator support at The Math Learning Center and host of the show. In each episode, we'll explore topics important to teachers, instructional leaders, and anyone interested in elementary mathematics education. Topics such as posing purposeful questions, effectively recording student thinking, cultivating students' math identity, and designing asset-based instruction from multilingual learners. Don't miss out! Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. Each episode will also be published on the Bridges Educator Site. We hope you'll give Rounding Up a try, and that the ideas we discuss have a positive impact on your teaching and your students' learning.
    2022 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org
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Episodes
  • Season 3 | Episode 02 - Principles for Responsive Curriculum Use - Guest: Dr. Corey Drake

    Season 3 | Episode 02 - Principles for Responsive Curriculum Use - Guest: Dr. Corey Drake
    Sep 19 2024
    Rounding Up Season 3 | Episode 2 – Responsive Curriculum Guest: Dr. Corey Drake Mike Wallus: When it comes to curriculum, educators are often told to implement with “fidelity.” But what does fidelity mean? And where does that leave educators who want to be responsive to students in their classrooms? Today we're talking with Dr. Corey Drake about principles for responsive curriculum use that invite educators to respond to the students in their classrooms while still implementing curriculum with integrity. Mike: One of the age-old questions that educators grapple with is how to implement a curriculum in ways that are responsive to the students in their classroom. It's a question I thought a lot about during my years as a classroom teacher, and it's one that I continue to discuss with my colleague at MLC, Dr. Corey Drake. As a former classroom teacher and a former teacher educator who only recently began working for an organization that publishes curriculum, Corey and I have been trying to carve out a set of recommendations that we hope will help teachers navigate this question. Today on the podcast, we'll talk about this question of responsive curriculum use and offer some recommendations to support teachers in the field. Mike: Welcome back to the podcast, Corey. I'm excited to have you with us again. Corey Drake: It's great to be with you again. Mike: So, I've been excited about this conversation for a while because this question of, “What does it mean to be responsive to students and use a curriculum?” is something that teachers have been grappling with for so long, and you and I often hear phrases like “implementation with fidelity” used when folks are trying to describe their expectations when a curriculum's adopted. Corey: Yeah, I mean, I think this is a question teachers grapple with. It's a question I've been grappling with for my whole career, from different points of view from when I was a classroom teacher and a teacher educator and now working at The Math Learning Center. But I think this is the fundamental tension: “How do you use a set of published curriculum materials while also being responsive to your students?” And I think ideas like implementation with fidelity didn't really account for the responsive-to-your-students piece. Fidelity has often been taken up as meaning following curriculum materials, page by page, word for word, task for task. We know that's not actually possible. You have to make decisions, you have to make adaptations as you move from a written page to an enacted curriculum. But still the idea of fidelity was to be as close as possible to the written page. Whereas ideas like implementation with integrity or responsive curriculum use are starting with what's written on the page, staying consistent with the key ideas of what's on the page, but doing it in a way that's responsive to the students who are sitting in front of you. And that's really kind of the art and science of curriculum use. Mike: Yeah, I think one of the things that I used to think was that it was really a binary choice between something like fidelity, where you were following things in what I would've described as a lockstep fashion. Or the alternative, which would be, “I'm going to make everything up.” And you've helped me think, first of all, about what might be some baseline expectations from a large-scale curriculum. What are we actually expecting from curriculum around design, around the audience that it's written for? I wonder if you could share with the audience some of the things that we've talked about when it comes to the assets and also the limitations of a large-scale curriculum. Corey: Yeah, absolutely. And I will say, when you and I were first teachers probably, and definitely when we were students, the conversation was very different. We had different curriculum materials available. There was a very common idea that good teachers were teachers who made up their own curriculum materials, who developed all of their own materials. But there weren't the kinds of materials out there that we have now. And now we have materials that do provide a lot of assets, can be rich tools for teachers, particularly if we release this expectation of fidelity and instead think about integrity. So, some of the assets that a high-quality curriculum can bring are the progression of ideas, the sequence of ideas and tasks that underlies almost any set of curriculum materials; that really looks at, “How does student thinking develop across the course of a school year?” And what kinds of tasks, in what order, can support that development of that thinking. Corey: That's a really important thing that individual teachers or even teams of teachers working on their own, that would be very hard for them to put together in that kind of coherent, sequential way. So, that's really important. A lot of curriculum materials also bring in many ideas that we've learned over the last decades about how ...
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    30 mins
  • Season 3 | Episode 01 - Grouping Practices That Promote Efficacy and Knowledge Transfer - Guest: Dr. Peter Liljedahl

    Season 3 | Episode 01 - Grouping Practices That Promote Efficacy and Knowledge Transfer - Guest: Dr. Peter Liljedahl
    Sep 5 2024
    Rounding Up Season 3 | Episode 1 – Grouping Practices That Promote Efficacy and Knowledge Transfer Guest: Dr. Peter Liljedahl Mike Wallus: We know from research that student collaboration can have a powerful impact on learning. That said, how we group students for collaboration matters—a lot. Today we're talking with Dr. Peter Liljedahl, author of “Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics,” about how educators can form productive, collaborative groups in their classrooms. Mike: Hello, Peter. Welcome to the podcast. Peter Liljedahl: Thanks for having me. Mike: So, to offer our listeners some background, you've written a book, called “Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics,” and I think it's fair to say that it's had a pretty profound impact on many educators. In the book, you address 14 different practices. And I'm wondering if you could weigh in on how you weigh the importance of the different practices that you addressed? Peter: Well, OK, so, first of all, 14 is a big number that publishers don't necessarily like. When we first started talking with Corwin about this, they were very open. But I know if you think about books, if there's going to be a number in the title, the number is usually three, five or seven. It's sometimes eight—but 14 is a ridiculous number. They can't all be that valuable. What's important about the fact that it's 14, is that 14 is the number of core practices that every teacher does. That's not to say that there aren't more or less for some teachers, but these are core routines that we all do. We all use tasks. We all create groups for collaboration. We all have the students work somewhere. We all answer questions. We do homework, we assign notes, we do formative, summative assessment. We do all of these things. We consolidate lessons. We launch lessons. Peter: These are sort of the building blocks of what makes our teaching. And through a lot of time in classrooms, I deduced this list of 14. Robert Kaplinsky, in one of his blog posts, actually said that he thinks that that list of 14 probably accounts for 95 percent of what happens in classrooms. And my research was specifically about, “How do we enact each of those 14 so that we can maximize student thinking? So, what kind of tasks get students to think, how can we create groups so that more thinking happens? How can we consolidate a lesson so we get more thinking? How can we do formative and summative assessments so the students are thinking more?” So, the book is about responding to those 14 core routines and the research around how to enact each of those to maximize thinking. Your question around which one is, “How do we put weight on each of these?” Peter: They're all important. But, of course, they're not all equally impactful. Building thinking classrooms is most often recognized visually as the thing where students are standing at whiteboards working. And, of course, that had a huge impact on student engagement and thinking in the classroom, getting them from sitting and working at desks to getting them working at whiteboards. But in my opinion, it's not the most impactful. It is hugely impactful, but the one that actually makes all of thinking classroom function is how we form collaborative groups, which is chapter two. And it seems like that is such an inconsequential thing. “We've been doing groups for forever, and we got this figured out. We know how to do this. But … do we really? Do we really have it figured out?” Because my research really showed that if we want to get students thinking, then the ways we've been doing it aren't working. Mike: I think that's a great segue. And I want to take a step back, Peter. Before we talk about grouping, I want to ask what might be an obvious question. But I wonder if we can talk about the “why” behind collaboration. How would you describe the value or the potential impact of collaboration on students' learning experiences? Peter: That's a great question. We've been doing collaborative work for decades. And by and large, we see that it is effective. We have data that shows that it's effective. And when I say “we,” I don't mean me or the people I work with. I mean “we, in education,” know that collaboration is important. But why? What is it about collaboration that makes it effective? There are a lot of different things. It could be as simple as it breaks the monotony of having to sit and listen. But let's get into some really powerful things that collaboration does. Number one, about 25 years ago, we all were talking about metacognition. We know that metacognition is so powerful and so effective, and if we get students thinking about their thinking, then their thinking actually improves. And metacognition has been shown time and time again to be impactful in learning. Some of the listeners might be old enough to remember the days where we were actually trying to teach students to be metacognitive, and the frustration that that ...
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    44 mins
  • Season 2 | Episode 18 - The Promise of Counting Collections - Guest: Danielle Robinson and Dr. Melissa Hedges

    Season 2 | Episode 18 - The Promise of Counting Collections - Guest: Danielle Robinson and Dr. Melissa Hedges
    May 23 2024
    Rounding Up Season 2 | Episode 18 – Counting Collections Guest: Danielle Robinson and Melissa Hedges Mike Wallus: Earlier this season, we released an episode focused on the complex and interconnected set of concepts that students engage with as they learn to count. In this follow-up episode, we're going to examine a powerful routine called “counting collections.” We'll be talking with Danielle Robinson and Dr. Melissa Hedges from the Milwaukee Public Schools about counting collections and the impact that this routine can have on student thinking. Mike: Well, welcome to the podcast, Danielle and Melissa. I can't tell you how excited I am to talk with y'all about the practice of counting collections. Danielle Robinson and Melissa Hedges: Thanks for having us. Yes, we're so excited to be here. Mike: I want to start this conversation by acknowledging that the two of you are actually part of a larger team of educators who really took this work on counting collections. You introduced it in the Milwaukee Public Schools. And, Melissa, I think I'll start with you. Can you take a moment to recognize the collaborators who have been a part of this work? Melissa: Absolutely. In addition to Danielle and myself, we are fortunate to work with three other colleagues: Lakesha King, Krista Beal, and Claire Madden. All three are early childhood coaches that actively support this work as well. Mike: So, Danielle, I wonder for some folks if we can help them see this practice more clearly. Can you spend time unpacking, what does counting collections look like in a classroom? If I walked in, what are some of the things that I might see? Danielle: Yeah, I think what's really amazing about counting collections is there might be some different ways that you might see counting collections happening in the classroom. When you walk into a classroom, you might see some students all over. Maybe they're sitting at tables, maybe they're on the carpet. And what they're doing is they're actually counting a baggie of objects. And really their job is to answer this question, this very simple but complicated question of, “How many?” And they get to decide how they want to count. Not only do they get to pick what they want to count, but they also get to pick their strategy of how they actually want to count that collection. They can use different tools. They might be using bowls or plates. They might be using 10-frames. They might be using number paths. You might see kiddos who are counting by ones. Danielle: You might see kids who are making different groupings. At times, you might also see kiddos [who] are in stations, and you might see a small group where a teacher is doing counting collections with a few kiddos. You might see them working with partners. And I think the beautiful piece of this and the unique part of counting collections within Milwaukee Public Schools is that we've been able to actually pair the counting trajectory from Doug Clements and Julie Sarama with counting collections where teachers are able to do an interview with their students, really see where they're at in their counting so that the kids are counting a just right collection for them—something that's not too easy, something that's not too hard, but something that is available for them to really push them in their understanding of counting. So, you're going to see kids counting different sizes. And we always tell the teachers it's a really beautiful moment when you're looking across the classroom and as a teacher, you can actually step back and know that every one of your kids are getting what they need in that moment. Because I think oftentimes, we really don't ever get to feel like that, where we feel like, “Wow, all my kids are getting what they need right now, and I know that I am providing the scaffolds that they need.” Mike: So, I want to ask you a few follow-ups, if I might, Danielle. Danielle: Yeah, of course. Mike: There's a bit of language that you used initially where I'm paraphrasing. And tell me where I get this wrong. You use the language “simple yet complicated,” I think. Am I hearing that right? Danielle: I did. I did, yeah. Mike: Tell me about that. Danielle: I think it's so interesting because a lot of times when we introduce this idea of counting collections with our teachers, they're like, “Wait a minute, so I'm supposed to give this baggie of a bunch of things to my students, and they just get to go decide how they want to count it?” And we're like, “Yeah, that is absolutely what we're asking you to do.” And they feel nervous because this idea of the kids, they're answering how many, but then there's all these beautiful pieces a part of it. Maybe kids are counting by ones, maybe they're deciding that they want to make groups, maybe they're working with a partner, maybe they're using tools. It's kind of opened up this really big, amazing idea of the simple question of how many. But there's just so many ...
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    28 mins
Mathematics Science
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