Sometimes a book just excites you. I’ll grant you, I’m a total pedagogy nerd, so a lot of books excite me, but this book has me thinking a lot about the types of tasks I do in Pre-Calculus, and I highly recommend it.
I heard about this book through an interview on Think Thank Thunk, in the context of how these ideas tie into the Thinking Classrooms model. I’ve been a fan of the Thinking Classrooms model for a while, and this book synergizes very well with that model, but this book is not just for BTC teachers. The focus is different, less prescriptive, and more about giving you the tools and asking the right questions to decide how to build your classroom. The book has three big ideas that intertwine:
- Academic Safety: How to shift student perception of the math field and their place in it so that anyone and everyone can succeed and feel successful
- Quality Tasks: How to build activities that:
- Spark curiosity
- Encourage creativity
- Are accessible to all learners
- Tie into content
- Connects different mathematical ideas together
- Effective Facilitation: How to run an actual class using your best-laid plans to keep kids engaged and learning
I have either had or overheard a variation of this conversation with a lot of math teacher colleagues over the years:
“All these new ideas, why can’t we just learn the way we were taught? Clearly it worked for us!”
They’re right, it worked for them. Did it work for everyone? Not really. Tons of people, including my non-math colleagues, talk about how they aren’t math people and are incapable of understanding what I teach. Parents tell us they were terrible at math, so it’s not surprising that their child has a C- in Pre-Calc. Kids who might otherwise be highly creative and successful at higher levels are drummed out of the academic streams by math anxiety before they even hit high school . Sometimes I think we secondary math teachers forget that we are secondary teachers and our job isn’t to replicate every bad practice that happens at university to “prepare” kids. This book talks about how to build a space for everyone to feel successful and for everyone to see math as more than a torture device with no utility, while still giving the rigour and high standards that students deserve.
The sections on quality tasks really caught my eye, because this is something that I have been wrangling with recently. I feel like sometimes I fall back on the safety of more traditional, procedural problems, rather than trying to use more interesting, contextual problem solving to teach various concepts. Sometimes, students wind up with stronger procedural skills, but end up falling apart when you throw context at them or are unable to tell that they’ve made an error because they aren’t thinking about reasonableness. I wonder if well-designed rich tasks can strike that balance between procedural fluency and conceptual understanding. I’m excited to try some of the strategies outlined in this book for building and revising quality tasks.
I’m also really interested in the chapter on assessment, which talks about shifting your assessment practices to align more with what you actually care about. How can we make tests more equitable and more useful for teachers, students, and families? How can we put curricular competencies, and not just procedural fluency, at the forefront of our assessments? How can we make systemic changes within our classrooms? A lot of this chapter just rings true for me. When he talks about making shorter tests and allowing retakes for full credit, I’m like, “I was already doing that!”. When he talks about having a collaborative portion, I suddenly remember that I had MULTIPLE professors in my Computer Engineering undergrad who had us write tests twice – once alone and once in a small group, and each section was equally weighted. When he talks about a teacher who only puts 2-3 rich tasks on tests, no classic procedural items, I’m like, “if I value problem solving as much as I claim to, why am I not doing that already?”. I’ve never done porfolios in my classroom and I’ve always been a little bit terrible at doing student reflection as often as I probably should, but I am eager to increase student agency in how they are assessed and I am eager to try out math portfolios for the first time in my pre-calc 11 class in September.
This book is my new Math Bible. I feel the empathy and care dripping in every page of this book and the teachers who serve as examples here are who I want to be as a teacher. I am excited to be better.