A Love Letter to Great Math Teachers

My new book just came out. It’s called Motivated: Designing Math Classrooms Where Students Want to Join In. The book addresses the question: what can teachers do to design motivating environments for their students’ mathematical learning?

This is not the usual way that motivation is discussed. Typically, motivation is seen as characteristic of students themselves, with some kids being “more motivated” and others being less so. Drawing on social psychology, I turn this logic around by looking at motivation as a design issue. In other words, instead of seeing kids as more or less motivated, I offer a framework for teachers to design classrooms that are more motivating.

I knew I wanted to share the practice of math teachers I admire. I have had the great fortune to work with and learn from a number of amazing teachers over the years, usually in the context of research. Because of confidentiality agreements that are a part of those projects, I have had to mask teachers’ identities when I write about them, which sometimes makes me sad, because I want to give them due credit for their thoughtful work.

For this book, I crafted a process where I could ask amazing math teachers to share their practice as a way of illustrating the motivational framework –– and publicly give them credit. It involved lots of vetting, checking with them to make sure I told their stories accurately. This represented a tremendous commitment on their part, for which I am extremely grateful. The upside, for readers, is that you can find people whose thinking “clicks” with you, follow them on social media, find them at conferences, and continue learning.

The book is, in the end, a love letter to great math teachers. I have always been moved by great teaching, the way that some people might be moved by great art. When I am in a classroom watching an engaging lesson unfold, it is a profound experience for me. To me, lessons are engaging when students’ humanity is not put underground but is a part of instruction. Students can be a delight, and when learning is connecting with them, it is a joy to watch.

I wanted to challenge myself to illustrate a variety of ways talented teachers design motivating classrooms. In the book, I feature six teachers who work in very different secondary math settings. They are: Peg Cagle, Rafranz Davis, Sadie Estrella, Chris Luzniak, Fawn Nguyen, and Elizabeth Statmore. Additional examples of motivating design draw on the work of Anna Blinstein, Tina Cardone, Andrew Gael, Heather Kohn, Justin Lanier, Dan Meyer, Paul Salomon, Megan Schmidt, Anne Schwartz, Sara van der Werf, and Anna Weltman.

I encourage you to follow all of them, check out their blogs, and continue the conversation! Keep the love of good math teaching alive. Our hashtag is #MotivatedMath!

Update: Canadians, you can order it here.

2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 29,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

More than Reflection: How Teachers Learn from Each Other

I have had a really interesting twitter conversation this morning with Luann Lee, a science teacher who is thinking hard about instructional coaching. Luann wrote a post suggesting that, instead of instructional coaching, it might make more sense to use resources to buy an assistant teacher for her and her colleagues to free them up to do more visits to each other’s classrooms.

While I agree that this may be a great idea for Luann and her colleagues, I do not think it would work in every circumstance. Recently, my graduate student Britnie Kane and I did an analysis of teachers’ collaborative conversations. They were all math teachers working in urban schools and involved in a professional development project. The key difference among the three groups of teachers was their level of accomplishment in what we call “ambitious teaching” — the kind of instruction that involves all students in high levels of content.

So we spent a year (I am not kidding) analyzing and coding 17 hours of video to make sense of the differences in how they talked about problems of teaching.

Using quantitative and qualitative analyses, here is what we found:

1. Time spent on problems of practice increased with sophistication in ambitious teaching.
   While the average length of conversations about any one problem in the Sophisticated and Emergent Groups were relatively similar (11 min 26 s versus 9 min and 4 s, respectively), the average time spent in both of these groups was more than twice that of the Beginning Group (4 min 15 s). The differences between the Beginning Group and the other groups were significant (Sophisticated Group, p=0.0055; Emergent, p=0.0003).
2. The Sophisticated Group consistently considered broad ideas of teaching in light of particular instances of practice.
   Their talk was neither overly vague (e.g., “we need to do more spiraling”) or overly specific (e.g., only telling stories). If they introduced a teaching idea like “spiraling”, it was always linked to examples from the past (what happened that makes them think that) and plans for the future (what will more spiraling look like in their classroom). The linking of general ideas to particulars was a hallmark of their talk, as was the constant pivoting between past and future classroom events.
3. The Sophisticated Group typically linked discussions of students to issues of instructional decisions and content-specific learning. 

   The other groups might have a good debrief about why a lesson did not go as planned, but then the analysis would not be taken up in subsequent conversation. The Sophisticated group consistently linked any discussion of student learning to instructional decisions and content issues, while the other groups might reflect on these issues but not connect them back up.

In the end, we saw that all reflection is not created equal. The analogy we drew was to the differences between learning from a text when you are a strong versus a weak reader. Good readers can make inferences and extend their understanding, while weaker readers struggle to decode text and can’t see the larger implications. In other words, there is more to gain from reflective discussion once you have already learned quite a bit about teaching, making it an unequally valuable resource for different teachers.

When we looked at conversations with a strong facilitator, a lot of these differences disappeared. For this reason, we think that good facilitators and coaches can make for better conversations. (We know that they don’t always — but that is another post for another day.)

We also think our analysis sheds light on what it means to understand a concept in teaching. You can’t just have an abstract idea of student learning, scaffolding, cognitively demanding tasks, or status, and then know how to use it in your classroom. You need to see multiple examples, in different situations over time. By understanding the connections across these examples, you can really dig into what these things mean.

I guess this is why good teaching is so hard.