The Minimalist Educator Podcast
A podcast about paring down to focus on the purpose and priorities in our roles.
The Minimalist Educator Podcast
Episode 058: Revisiting Empowering Math Instruction with Naomi Church
Naomi Church, a passionate advocate for minimalist teaching strategies in math, joins us to unravel the complexities of modern math instruction. What if less really is more when it comes to teaching math? Discover how simplifying your approach can not only alleviate the overwhelming burden of an extensive curriculum but also transform the learning environment into one where engagement and strategic thinking flourish. From the Universal Design for Learning framework to fostering a classroom culture ripe for productive struggle, Naomi's insights encourage educators to rethink how math is taught.
Empowering students is at the heart of our discussion, focusing on how autonomy can revolutionize their learning experience. We explore the potential of giving students choices—from the problems they tackle to how they collaborate and demonstrate mastery. This isn't just about letting go; it's about strategically passing the baton to our learners in ways that build their confidence and efficacy. We draw inspiration from "Building Thinking Classrooms," offering strategies that shift the onus of learning from educators to students, fostering independent thinkers ready to navigate complex problems.
Finally, we dissect the math block, offering a fresh perspective on balancing instruction, reteaching, and remediation. By dividing the lesson into targeted segments, we ensure every second contributes to meaningful learning. Say goodbye to traditional drills and engage students with recommended resources like "Math Fact Fluency" by Jenny Bay Williams and Gina Kling, which integrate fun fluency games into lessons. Join us in celebrating a minimalist approach that doesn't sacrifice depth or understanding, but instead, maximizes every moment in the math classroom.
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Welcome to the Minimalist Educator Podcast, a podcast about paring down to refocus on the purpose and priorities in our roles with co-hosts and co-authors of the Minimalist Teacher Book, Tammy Musialski-Bornemann and Christine Arnold.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to this very special episode of the Minimalist Educator Podcast. Welcome, Tammy. How are you today?
Speaker 3:I'm doing great this morning, and how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm good. Are you excited to hear what is our most popular episode of the podcast?
Speaker 3:I really am. Yes, I do know it's one of our very first ones from season one.
Speaker 2:It is. It is definitely one of our earliest ones and it's also from a repeat guest. This person has actually been with us twice already. It is none other than Naomi Church back in episode seven. Minimalism in Math Instruction. There you go. That is our most popular episode instruction.
Speaker 3:There you go. That is our most popular episode. That is so fun because, um, so I'm wondering why? Well, that's not a good way to say it, because obviously Naomi is brilliant with her math expertise and connection to universal design for learning.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, but I know what you mean, though I think, yeah, wondering why people have been drawn to that particular episode. But I think it's because when you're thinking about math I know a lot of teachers that we talk to find math, this big math, this big massive area, it feels for a lot of people like a really heavy subject area to deal with, because not only do you have all of these so many different strands, but also the way that we think and talk and teach math has been evolving right. So I think for a lot of the people that we talk to, this is like anecdotal evidence here. It does seem like an area in which people often feel a bit overwhelmed, or it's a lot to deal with, it's a lot to take on. So it makes sense to me that people have been particularly interested in that topic.
Speaker 3:I think so and I think too, like minimals and math kind of you know, don't seem like they would go together.
Speaker 3:But I think one of the most important things that we talked about was how teachers can reframe their thinking about how they're teaching it, and that really is who's doing the thinking in the math classroom.
Speaker 3:The students should be like, yes, you know you should know how to teach what you're going to teach, but you don't have to know, you don't have to be an expert in all of it unless you're doing higher level math, right.
Speaker 3:So the the cool thing is is that when you open up the opportunities for students and give them problems to solve and listen to them thinking, you can really get some good information just from posing a simple problem, under whatever strand you're teaching, and just focus on student thinking. So if that's the focus of your math sessions, it feels a little bit less burdensome by the pacing guide, I should say right, because the pacing guide can freak people out and because it's so packed, and if you're using a pre-packaged curriculum, which is a great resource, but there's so much in it, yeah, and it's hard to kind of dig out the best pieces specifically for your students. So if you think of okay, I'm going to look at my curriculum stuff with the lens of who's doing the thinking here. How much am I going to have to teach something you know? And you're balancing out the time. It's a great way to think about it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely for sure, and I think you know from my own personal experience, especially since COVID sometimes you know you'll have one particular standard that you're supposed to be working on with your kiddos, but they might be like multiple years below anywhere near that standard. And so then you feel like not only do I have to teach all of those standards, but I have to go back and make sure that we filled the gaps and got the learning that's leading up to that standard as well. So then it feels like this even more packed curriculum. But again, as Naomi is telling us, if you're thinking about the thinking, if you're moving those decisions over to the kids, it can really strategize, minimize what we're doing in our math lessons universal design for learning is really helpful because you can.
Speaker 3:There's so many ways that you can approach teaching all of your learners then without having to differentiate for every single student, which is like you. Sometimes you'd still have to do that, but if we're designing more open learning opportunities, we're being more strategic with our planning time.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and it's really good to re-listen to what she was saying about the best use of that math block. I think that's always a good reminder to listen in and hear that again. How do I structure that 60-minute, 90-minute block to make the most of the math instructional time?
Speaker 3:Yeah, because time is very precious and it feels like it doesn't seem like an hour for math is long enough if you want to do all of these things, but at the same time you want to do the right things. So really being strategic with the planning of time is really helpful. It is. It's a good thinking exercise, for sure, but it's so valuable and you'll end up seeing probably some good gains in your classroom if you're very strategic, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So with that, we hope you enjoyed re-listening to our most popular episode with Naomi Church. All about minimalism in math instruction.
Speaker 3:Hello Naomi, Welcome to the show. Thanks for being on with us today.
Speaker 4:Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to chat today.
Speaker 3:We know that math is your specialty, obviously, and I've gotten to know you over the last few years in a few capacities, but I always love watching you teach educators about math instruction and creating access for learners, and so we're going to talk about that today, but we're also going to talk about math in the classroom, because we know that math is really complex as a subject and math instruction is also complex, and we're talking about minimizing things which can be pretty tough in a math classroom. So what are some of the things that teachers need to think about just generally when they are addressing math instruction in their classrooms?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So in a general math classroom there are so many things going on, right? Our teachers have to consider what are the standards, right? What's the set of standards for the state country that they're in? What's the scope and sequence? When is standardized testing? How much of this has to get done, possibly before standardized testing?
Speaker 4:Differentiation and reteaching for students who don't seem to be mastering the content If they have an adopted instructional material, how to be using that textbook or those materials, which activities and resources to pull? So there's a lot of things that really they need to think about and integrate all the time. But I would like to put it out there that while, yes, all that stuff is on the table yes, all that stuff is on the table it might be better to instead be thinking about who's doing the thinking and who's working the hardest, right? So if we reposition it away from this laundry list of all of the considerations in math and change it over into within the math classroom, who's doing the thinking and who's working the hardest, it changes the way that we approach the math instruction.
Speaker 3:That's really valuable because I know that I've been one of those teachers where I'm just thinking way too hard. I'm thinking more than my students, I'm doing more than my students and I think listeners can really relate to that, because we are always thinking about but I need to do this and I need to create the support and I need to do all these things for my students. But stepping back a little bit to allow some of those pieces to be in the hands of our learners is really valuable and it takes away some of the things that teachers have to do, whether it's decisions that are made or even just talking less right and letting the kids talk more. So can you talk a little bit about how parents I'm sorry, not parents how educators can, or what frameworks even that educators can think about or use or implement when they're trying to step back and just reduce a little bit of that whether it's front loading or too much thinking for their students?
Speaker 4:For sure. Yeah, the math instruction can certainly seem overwhelming. The math instruction can certainly seem overwhelming when you're trying to pull in a million things at once, and I think that, as we're talking about minimalism in math, we need to think about universal design for learning. So this is a framework that I am super passionate about and, at its core, it's really about creating expert learners that, instead of teaching content to students to anybody really we're teaching them how to learn, and these are skills that are going to benefit them in every context for their whole lives. Right, we offer a buffet of learning options and then we teach our students to play off of their own strengths, to leverage what it is that they're good at to help make decisions. So, if we want to stop doing all of the thinking and put it in the hands of our students, part of how we do that is by universally designing the instruction, that perhaps, instead of telling them how to show what they know, we give them options for showing what they know in a way that makes them excited or that builds their confidence or that leverages their strengths.
Speaker 4:At the same time, we look at productive struggle in math. So, with the best of intentions, in a math class we typically give students all the answers. If we're solving a multi-step word problem, we're going to break it down and tell them what every step is going to be and where it goes and why. And when we do that, we're pulling the thinking out of the math and it just becomes rote memorization and following procedures. And so if we want to put the thinking back in the hands of students, we need to embrace this idea of productive struggle, and that word productive is key, right?
Speaker 4:We've all been in classrooms where there's unproductive struggle, where students are frustrated and maybe we're seeing behavior problems and there's evidence of it in other ways.
Speaker 4:So productive struggle is very intentional in choosing the right examples or problems that are maybe just outside of the current ability level or, you know, just outside of what we've already learned, to stretch it enough to allow students to make connections for themselves. So between UDL and then productive struggle, we're looking at taking some of this out of the hands of the teacher, so it's not the teacher having to make a million different decisions and we're putting these things in the hands of the students. And then there's a great book that a lot of folks have been talking about called Building Thinking Classrooms. And this book is neat because it goes into a lot of the research behind how to get students to think. And when we really dig into that research, none of it has to do with the teacher standing up there making all the decisions and doing the talking. It is getting problems in the hands of students, getting them in groups, getting them to show their thinking and make it visible.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's awesome, Naomi. I'm making so many connections as you're talking there, thinking about the, you know who's doing the thinking, who's doing the work, who's doing the talking, and you know all of that. You know the learning pit with the productive struggle, like so many connections going at the moment. So you know, tammy and I talk a lot about. You know thinking about your priorities and making priorities. You know a big part of what you're doing. So how do we use our priorities and make decisions with all of these different things that we need to tackle?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I like that. So, as teachers, in any subject at any level, we make thousands of decisions every day, and I taught elementary, and as an elementary teacher who was responsible for all of the subjects, it felt like even more, and so we can think about shifting some of that decision making from the teachers on to the students. Not every choice has to come from the teacher so we can think about. Can students choose the problem that they're working on instead of the teacher choosing for them? Can the students choose who they work with, instead of the teacher spending all of this time coming up with these groups? Can the students choose the manipulative that they work with? Sometimes there's value in choosing the wrong manipulative and finding a really inefficient way to work on something that leads them to the right manipulative, and we strip that from our students by just handing them the one that we know will work.
Speaker 4:Can students choose what color they write with? Does it matter? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Maybe they want to color code it in a different way. Maybe they want to show their thought process through the use of different colors. Right? Can students choose how they show mastery? Some students are really good with visuals and graphics. Some students are really good with talking. Some students are really good with writing. Can they choose how they show mastery and leverage their strengths? Can they choose the numbers in the problem? 11 is my favorite number, so if I see an 11 in a problem, I usually want to choose that problem or find a way to put it in right. They all have favorite numbers. Maybe it's their favorite basketball player's number, or their birthday, or the number they use in sports, and so, yeah, letting students choose even the numbers that they use right? There's so many of these decisions that teachers are making every day that maybe they don't have to.
Speaker 3:I've got an observation or thought or question about that in particular, just the ideas around what can kids choose, right? So it's reducing some of that decision making for teachers in the math classroom. How do we get past some of the ingrained mindset of teachers that they have to do all of this for their students? Because that for me, when I'm working with teachers, it's often a struggle, and so I don't know if you have like a tip or something or if it's just like ongoing discussion about where can we let go of decisions. But that's what I'm noticing. It's really hard. So they'll say, yeah, they're making choices, they're doing these things in the classroom, but then I see the opposite of that. Or when I talk to students, they aren't making those decisions. So you know, I guess it's a question and a statement, I'm not sure which.
Speaker 4:I guess it's a question and a statement, I'm not sure which. I think that it has to be gradual. A lot of us who went into teaching especially a lot of us who went into elementary teaching, I think are type A personalities and we really like things organized. We like to have control over things, and I know personally in the classroom it was really difficult for me to give some of these things up, because then there's a whole lot more uncertainty. Look, when you leave things in the hands of 25, six-year-olds, you never know what's going to happen, right? So, yeah, it's not easy and there's not going to be a quick answer that's like oh yeah, just turn it all over. I think that it has to be gradual and you have to start with decisions that you're willing to give up or that you're more willing to give up. Maybe it starts by you narrowing down the field to three problems or five problems, and then they can pick which problem they want to do from there. Maybe it's not a free for all right, maybe it's not an option of, I don't know.
Speaker 4:How do you think you can show me what you know in the best possible way? Maybe it's you can write an essay, you can make a video explaining it, or you can make a PowerPoint and the slides explain it. Maybe there's just three choices instead of unlimited choices, right? Maybe you can't handle kids writing in marker and then making mistakes and crossing them out, so maybe it's a choice of a pencil or an erasable pen, so that there's still a way for them to erase. So there's some choice, but it's not wide open.
Speaker 4:I think that you have to sort of wade into this pool of choice and then, as you become more comfortable giving up control, you can offer more and more. And I think that this really goes along with efficacy, where when we see students making choices and being more confident and being better able to show what they know and maybe having to reteach less because the students were able to show you know what they knew, then we're more likely to give them more leeway and and give them more space here, because we're seeing that it's working. It's hard to just give it all up at once yeah it, it's definitely a journey, isn't it?
Speaker 2:But hopefully people can you know, no matter who they are or where they're working, they can find one way in to giving the kids a little bit more of that, say, in the classroom. So math books are usually 30 to 60 minutes in the elementary classroom, even the secondary classroom as well. So, knowing that teachers are very time poor, what would you suggest would be the best ways that we could use that short math block time?
Speaker 4:So I love it when it's possible for a math block to be 90 minutes long. That is amazing, especially if we can make the reading block and the math block the same amount of time, so that we're really showing that math is an equal priority and it's not secondary to reading instruction. So I want to put that out there. But yes, of course we always have limited time and within the math block we're looking at teaching new things right. That is just a part of how this works. We have to teach the standards. We probably have a scope and sequence to follow, so we have to teach new things. We also likely have to reteach when students are not showing mastery or when they're just not getting something right. We need to have the ability to reteach and the bottom line is that in most classrooms we have some students who are below grade level, who maybe are missing foundational skills that they really need to help them to make connections, and so that is remediation, where we're looking at closing skill gaps, and ideally it's nice when there is a separate time and space for remediation or intervention, but knowing that that is not always the case, I recommend splitting the math block into three components and pretty much equal in time, if you can work it. I mean, you know it depends on if we have a 40 minute block. Maybe we have to, you know, move things around a little bit, but if we can break these up evenly. I like to start with a guided and focused instruction segment, and this is traditional whole group instruction, where we're introducing something new or we're doing some kind of a quick introduction and then allowing the students to work in groups. And then the second segment would be where we are able to reteach to the kids who are not understanding what we were just talking about in whole group. They seem to be missing a few of the pieces and while the teacher reteaches, maybe the rest of the students are at centers or stations, depending on what we want to call them. And then in the third segment we have a spot designated for the teacher to do remediation or intervention for students who have significant skill gaps, and so that way we built it right into the math block where the teacher can fill those gaps. And then other students are at centers and look.
Speaker 4:It's possible that sometimes we have the same students in reteaching and remediation and that happens, and you know what the benefit there is that that student is getting a lot of small group time with the teacher.
Speaker 4:They're getting a lot more individualized instruction that is meeting their needs. And so if we look at splitting this up and maybe we do this four days a week, maybe this is not the math block all five days a week, maybe we just do this four days a week and then we do something different on the last day but this helps to ensure that we're able to get all of these key components in and it also helps to make sure that we don't just use the entire time for whole group instruction of the teacher talking at the students, because most likely let's say I split this into 15-minute segments If the kids didn't get it in the first 15 minutes, they're probably not going to get it. If you spent another 30 minutes talking at them, your best bet is probably to just stop it and then reteach in small group in a different way, using a video, a song, a different manipulative or whatever. It is right, but we know that typically just doing the same thing longer, slower, louder, that doesn't really reach kids.
Speaker 3:Thank you for mentioning that, because that was exactly what was in my head, right? How long do you sit there and think that you're teaching effectively? We can't spend longer than 10, 15 minutes with a whole group and think that it's going to stick. And then those reteaching groups. You can't just repeat what you just said, right? Because that's exhaustion for teachers, like when you have to continue to just say the same thing over and over. And we know we have to do that sometimes. But that's just a layer of mental fatigue that we just all encounter and we're like why aren't they getting it? Because we haven't changed what we're doing, and maybe that would be a little bit of a refresh rather than just saying the same words again to a smaller group of people.
Speaker 2:So thank you for saying that. Definitely not going to be learning anything if they've tuned you out at that point as well. Okay, so you know we like to think about paring back as well as we're talking about minimalism. So if you could remove something altogether from math programs around the world, what would you get rid of, naomi?
Speaker 4:So a lot of math programs still include drilled fact fluency and timed testing and we can definitely pull those out. There's been more research in the past decade or so that shows that that is not effective, that all of these components where we're essentially forcing memorization should be pulled out of math programs. Because we know that when students memorize it's getting stored into their working memory, and as soon as students experience stress and anxiety especially if we think about testing anxiety that working memory shuts down and so they can't recall any of that stuff that they worked so hard to memorize. And so if we allow our students to do more of the thinking and to be more actively engaged, they're going to store things in different parts of the brain and they will actually do better on these standardized tests and chapter tests than just forcing them to memorize it. And so when I talked about the math block, breaking it into these components, when the teacher is reteaching or remediating, the rest of the students could be at math centers, and that is a great time to incorporate fluency, that it doesn't necessarily have to be a separate thing that we do, and actually sometimes when we make it a separate thing, students don't generalize that information and pull it over into the math block. Especially students with disabilities can have a hard time generalizing that. So if we better incorporate it into the math block by making centers about fluency, then the centers are fun, engaging. They're working on a critical skill that you know everybody needs and, yeah, they're more likely to remember it when they need it.
Speaker 4:So there's a great book by Jenny Bay Williams and Gina Kling called Math Fact Fluency, and it is full of games. There's even a companion website where you can download some of these games for free and so, depending on the grade level and where you're at in the year, what your students need to work on with fluency, there's different games that address different aspects of it. We can also get rid of the quote unquote homework book. I've used math programs that had a separate workbook that was like just meant to be sent home and where, like, the students were supposed to do multiple pages or like the page that went with the day's lesson for homework, and I think that we can toss that out as well.
Speaker 4:There's been a lot of frustration around that I'm sure a lot of teachers have experienced that where you send that home and the parents don't know how to teach that concept the way that it was taught at school, and so they almost derail the teaching by showing it in the way that they learned it growing up and not the way that the teacher showed it.
Speaker 4:And it can cause some frustration, not just with the parents but with the students. But my teacher said this right and they don't like this discord. So instead we can look at minimalizing homework. Instead of two pages of problems, maybe there's just one good problem and they can solve it in different ways or really show their thinking behind it. Or maybe we can flip the classroom and it can be a video of the teacher lecture. Since we maybe don't want to do that we don't want to use our whole group time for that we could send that video home for older students. Let them watch that at home, maybe take their notes at home and then do the problem solving in class, where they can get that just-in-time support that they need.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. I love that. Before we let you go, naomi, we do want to do a pare-down pointer with you, if possible. So what we would like is to hear a tip from you, a strategy maybe, about how we can pare down or be really effective or minimalist. You know we've been talking about math today, but it doesn't have to be in the realm of math, it could just be generally in life generally in life.
Speaker 4:So if I think about math programs, I know myself as a teacher. A lot of teachers that I work with now are very overwhelmed by everything in the math curriculum, and so my pointer would be that you don't have to use everything that a publisher put out there. Everything that a publisher put out there, even if your district or your school tells you that you have to use an adopted material, that's fine. You don't have to do every activity that's in there. You don't have to do every worksheet that's in there you don't want to use, because choosing a single great resource or problem or page is going to be better than making students do it all.
Speaker 2:Awesome, that's a perfect pare down point. Thank you, naomi. We hope you've enjoyed listening to this countdown of our three most popular podcast episodes so far, ending with this fantastic discussion with Naomi Church. This episode was brought to you by Growing Minds Consulting, empowering educators to reach and teach all learners using the universal design for learning framework. Find out more at growingmindsconsultingcom.
Speaker 1:Find out more at growingmindsconsultingcom. The music for the podcast has been written and performed by Gaia Moretti.
