What happens AFTER students feel welcomed in math class?

Notes from a math education conference.

I attended the California Math Council’s conference in Palm Springs, CA, this last week and I’m bringing back some notes!

Basically, every presenter in every session I attended was very concerned that only certain ways of thinking mathematically are welcomed in math classrooms—specifically the formal, correct, and precise kinds, leaving out students who have lots of other kinds of valuable mathematical thinking to offer.

For example, Annie Fetter likened math to art in her opening keynote, by way of this Tim Madigan quote, and argued that, similar to art education, we need to offer experiences before explanations.

Art is something natural to all human beings, which should not be overly explained or theorized about before being experienced.

Some of the experiences Fetter recommended were Numberless Word Problems, Contemplate Then Calculate and Which One Doesn’t Belong routines.

Howie Hua argued that “math needs a better marketing team” and shared his methods for marketing math more effectively, including transforming word problems to “would you rather”-style problems which he argued would welcome more students into the math.

My Math Teacher Lounge co-host Bethany Lockhart Johnson helped her participants identify “Opportunities for Joyful Sense-Making Within Assigned Curriculum.” With one particular strategy, Bethany would remove structures embedded in a curriculum (instructions for solving a math problem using a particular tool like a number bond or number line, for example) letting students reveal their own tools and adding the original tools back into the problem as needed.

Megan Franke recommended we welcome what she called “partial ideas.” Franke argued that the point of offering a student a problem to think about isn’t just to engage and welcome them but also to help the student “understand what they already know,” a/k/a those partial ideas.

I share these concerns. Too many students feel like math class isn’t for them, like math class only has room for certain kinds of ideas.

And I also wonder, as a field, are we over-theorizing the welcome into math class and under-theorizing what we do with students after they feel welcome?

Let’s assume kids are through the door. Let’s assume they feel like they are in a place that welcomes them and their ideas. How do we make sure that once they leave the room we have helped them make more of their ideas than they could have on their own?

Jessica Balli and Jeremy Thiesen’s session fascinated me, then, because they’re developing digital assessments and scoring processes that are asset-based, that assign value to the ideas students already have, even if those ideas stop somewhere short of precise and formal correctness.

But they also proposed some interesting routines for helping students develop those partial ideas. (Check out their slides.) For example, they’d take some common answers from the class to a particular question and ask students to ask a question that would have each number as its answer.

I see lots of value in students sharing the ideas they brought to class and have little doubt that those students are learning more mathematics (and also learning more than mathematics) in those conversations. But how that happens seems, frankly, a bit mysterious to me sometimes. Like I should place ingredients next to one another on a counter, leave the room, return, and find that they have assembled themselves into a meal.

I think a key challenge for teacher supporters is to demystify the mysterious. So I‘m excited to spend more time thinking about, reading about, and perhaps even developing routines of the sort described by Balli and Thiesen—routines that ask “how can we systematically help students make more out of their own partial ideas?” in addition to “how can we help students feel welcome to offer their partial ideas?”

If you have any favorite strategies, or anything to add to a syllabus, please leave it in the comments. 👇

Presentation Tips

As a presenter, it’s impossible not to learn about the craft of presentation when you’re watching other presenters. Here are a few moves I wanted to write down and remember.

• Howie Hua had tons of humility, expressing gratitude that we were there and giving us explicit permission to bail if the session didn’t feel like it was meeting our needs. Nobody bailed and many probably felt like Howie was watching out for them.

• Annie Fetter used Google Slides because they’ll automatically generate closed captions for deaf participants.

• Megan Franke started her session by asking us to stand up, meet someone new, and share what we’d learned at the conference so far. "The whole point of this conference is to meet people,” she said.