Book Excerpt:

Designing Math Adventures
by David and Kathryn Coffey

Excerpt from Chapter 6:
improving teaching and learning through reflection

One of the teachers we met with that summer was Bess, a developmental kindergarten teacher in a suburban school district. She chose to reflect on a measurement lesson she taught after the pandemic hit. It was essentially the same lesson she’d taught before, but online constraints required some adjustments. In the past, she modeled using a nonstandard unit (like a pencil) to measure the length of some object (maybe her desk), and then students spent 20 minutes using a unit of their choosing to measure objects in the classroom. Because the lesson needed to be online and asynchronous, she had decided to make a video of herself using sticky notes to measure the length of her car and her dog. The children responded using videos showing how they measured something with a nonstandard unit.

As we used the Compass to reflect on the lesson, Bess immediately saw that families needed to be added to the People section at the center of the Compass. Families weren’t a direct part of the in-class measurement lesson, but the young children had required help in creating and sharing their videos in the asynchronous version. While family involvement was a plus, Bess knew that it could also be a burden on some parents during a pandemic. It was something to keep in mind for future lessons. For the next 30 minutes, Bess filled in the rest of the Compass (see Figure 6.3). In the Observations section, she recalled that a lot more children copied her model than in the past. This concerned her because it seemed that they were just going through the motions and weren’t truly engaged. She used these observations to help identify what matters most (Principle) for all of her lessons—students developing a love of learning. While it was good that they showed they could measure using nonstandard units, it didn’t seem like they were excited about their exploration. Using “love of learning” as our North Star, we considered ways to improve students’ engagement in the activity. The people impacted by our ideas were never far from our thinking, which resulted in a lot of ideas that encompassed family involvement, student voice, and student choice.

Bess decided to concentrate on “seeing each other’s work” as her experiment. It seemed like a practical and powerful idea. It included opportunities to personalize the activity and add some friendly creative competition. The experiment would also allow for both online and in-person versions. Most importantly, she saw this idea as something she could extend to a variety of lessons. She was excited to share the experiment with the people involved during the upcoming year.

Figure 6.3

…

After using the Compass to reflect on her online measurement unit, Bess explained why it’s important to take time after a lesson to consider what really matters most.

I think it would be wonderful if you could do this for every lesson.... Things like this are so valuable, and getting to sit and talk through it with other people, and not just do it on your own. Sometimes you feel a pressure to just get the information out there. We don’t always take the time to go through steps like this. It really makes you sit back and put the students in the middle and say, “What do they need to get from this that matters?”

Bess had decided that “love of learning” ought to be the guiding principle of this and every lesson, and that this needed to be shared with her students.