Teacher to principal: This prepackaged curriculum doesn’t know my students as well as I do.
I know of many districts who have responded to the increased pressures of high-stakes standardized testing by standardizing the curriculum, in some places, right down to the page number a teacher should be on for any given day. Almost all of the teachers I know realize that this kind of approach goes against what they know about how children learn, but few have responded as dramatically as Ms. S.
Ms. S teaches fifth grade in a small district just outside of a large college town, not unlike Austin, Texas. A couple of years ago, her district adopted Everyday Mathematics, a program developed by the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project and lauded by many. Now, Ms. S has been teaching for many years. Her tried and true approach — whether it’s first grade or fifth grade — is to pose problems that students can solve using a variety of strategies, then help her students to express the concepts behind the strategies they use. She doesn’t show kids how to solve problems; she writes problems in such a way that her students can use what they know to construct their own strategies. In fact, she insists when her students come to her using procedures they don’t understand that they not use those procedures, for the time being. Her highest priority as a teacher is to understand her students’ thinking and to build on it.
As it happened, the year her district adopted Everyday Math, her principal decided to place a large number of students in Ms. S’s class who were considered struggling.
When her district delivered the boxes and boxes of Everyday Mathematics materials to her room, Ms. S took a look at the curriculum. She realized that she could write problems that were better tailored to her students’ needs and understanding and also met district curriculum objectives. So she pushed the boxes aside, closed her door, and began teaching.
Every once in a while, her principal would inquire about what page she was on. Ms. S would tell him, truthfully, “We’re learning a lot.”
All the students in Ms. S’s district take a standardized test at the beginning and end of the year. Students are expected to gain 7-9 points on this test. 10 points is considered quite a respectable gain. At the end of the year, about a week after Ms. S’s students had taken the test, she was surprised to find the principal knocking loudly on her classroom door. When she answered, he told her, with a great deal of excitement, that out of all the fifth-grade classes in the district (about 15 sections), hers was the ONLY class where every single student had met the passing standard for the test. Moreover, he continued, many of these students had gained an astounding 30 or so points between the beginning and the end of the year tests. He asked her, almost rhetorically, “You don’t even use Everyday Math, do you?” “Nope,” she answered. And then she took the opportunity to suggest that perhaps all the money that had gone into the Everyday Math materials may have been better used to support teachers to take the time to learn about their children’s mathematical thinking. Richard Elmore, writing in Harvard Magazine, agrees: “You can’t improve a school’s perfomance, or that of any teacher or student in it, without increasing the investment in teachers’ knowledge, pedagogical skills, and understanding of students” (p. 37).
This year, for the first time, Ms. S has a preponderance of students from the high end of the achievement spectrum. They are challenging in a different way, she says, because they know how to execute procedures such as subtraction with regrouping and long division very well, but often have little understanding of why the procedures work, and almost no flexibility in their choice of strategies. Even with this group, she says, she has to begin the year by posing many types of problems with smaller numbers than one would normally expect at fifth grade in order to help her students develop some flexibility and variety in the strategies they use. It’s worth it; they surpass expectations in the end and their understanding is much, much deeper.
Thank you, Ms. S, for reminding us what teaching is all about.
REFERENCE: Elmore, Richard. (2002). Testing Trap. Harvard Magazine. October, 35-37+.
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So, REALLY, how did you figure that out?
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