Tools for Practice: 'Tiny, daily goals' for math mastery
PLUS: The first Bell Ringer book club!
Happy Friday, Bell Ringers! Today’s newsletter reveals the book for our first-ever book club, and features a new Tools for Practice from an elementary teacher who’s found an effective way to work on math fluency with her students.
Here in the southern U.S., we are only a few weeks away from the end of the school year, so I feel like it’s a good time to announce The Bell Ringer Summer School, coming in June and July. I’m envisioning a slightly looser, more interactive version of the regular newsletter, with video, how-tos, and some serious book-reading (admittedly, my favorite part). And you can join even if it’s not going to be summer where you are!
We’re kicking off Summer School with our very first book club—a special feature for paying subscribers where we’re going to get together, talk about the book, and readers will get to ask questions of one of the authors. Read on for details:
What we’re reading in June: Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival
by Tim Surma, Claudio Vanhees, Michiel Wils, Jasper Nijlunsing, Nuno Crato, John Hattie, Daniel Muijs, Elizabeth Rata, Dylan Wiliam, and Paul A. Kirschner
There are a lot of authors on this short, free, open-access book—but they’re all experts in the field of evidence-based teaching and learning. Starting June 1, Book Club members are going to read this book together, which summarizes the evidence on why knowledge is so important to developing young minds, but also how knowledge shows up in curriculum and what the best knowledge-rich curricula actually do for students.
If you want to think deeply about the role knowledge plays in learning, and talk about it with a group, AND get a chance to ask co-author Paul Kirschner some questions, then download the free PDF of the book and join us beginning the first week of June!
Raising the Bar in Math: Parts 3 and 4 coming soon
If you haven’t already, check out the first two stories in my four-part reported series on what it might take to raise math achievement. They take a hard look at how necessary teacher training is to student improvement.
In Part 1, I look at whether there is going to be deep, comprehensive, how-the-brain-learns training for math teachers like states have recently done for reading. Experts say there isn’t much appetite for it, but one state is taking the lead: Kansas. Read about how they created and developed their own evidence-based training for teachers in grades k-12, and how they’ve made it free for anyone to access—“How Kansas built their own LETRS-style training for math.”
Part 2 looks at a new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality on how math teachers get trained before they enter classrooms. NCTQ ran a survey of 1,100 teacher training programs and found that few were giving future teachers adequate coursework, especially in math content like “numbers and operations,” the kind of foundational math that can make or break students’ future achievement. Read “Special report: Future teachers don't learn enough foundational math, new survey finds,” for more.
More math stories:
* Expert Amanda VanDerHeyden on why so many students can’t master math
* Teacher and coach Bill Davidson on math fluency and how to teach it
* New Zealand is reforming math—what could that mean for the U.S.?
* Foundational math needs more scrutiny and attention
Tools for Practice: ‘Tiny, daily goals’ to get to math mastery
Laura Stam, a second grade teacher in 3,000-resident Thermopolis, Wyoming, spent the first three years in her Title I school studying everything to get literacy right for her students. She became a LETRS Local Certified Facilitator, a Goyen Literacy Fellow and helped launch a Wyoming chapter of The Reading League.
But then this school year, Stam turned her sights toward math. She wondered if similar evidence-based, structured and explicit instruction she’d been using for literacy could help her students succeed with numbers as well.