In this episode, we explore the math workshop model with Jennifer Lempp and Skip Tyler, authors of the brand new book Math Workshop, 6-12: Five Steps to Implementing a Student-Centered Learning Environment. Join us as we discuss how this model fosters peer collaboration, critical thinking and mathematical discourse.
Transcript
Skip Tyler:
I really look at it as it is a student-centered instructional model that focuses on differentiated and active student learning. I think we're trying to create opportunities for students to do the thinking and generate ideas about the mathematics where there's a lot of peer collaboration, critical thinking is happening, mathematical discourse, and we're just trying to create a community where everyone feels that they're a math person.
Jennifer Lempp:
Yeah. And I'll just add on that when I think about Math Workshop, it is both a philosophy as well as kind of a system for how we use our instructional minutes. So it's both of those married together, the bones and the heart kind of have to all be aligned there. We use our instructional minutes in the right way so that we're not spending so much time on the teacher, the teacher doing more math than the student or the teacher taking over that class.
Instead, in a Math Workshop classroom students are doing most of the thinking just like Skip had said, students are doing then more math and more of the talking, the person doing the math, the person talking about the math is the person learning the math. And so some real tenants of Math Workshop help to guide us in how we use our minutes. And then that Math Workshop model helps to align the time with students so that we can give them those opportunities.
Edie:
Yes, that must look and feel very different from, I think what I experienced in school.
Skip:
And myself, yeah.
Edie:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer:
Very different, also from how I even first started teaching in my first several years of teaching. I taught in that traditional way that many of us grew up with and I know all of our teachers were doing the very best that they could and I was doing the very best that I could.
Edie:
Right.
Jennifer:
I just started to feel really frustrated. I think I was frustrated because I had too many surprises. I would give a test or a quiz and then I would find out some students that I thought were doing okay, were not. And I realized then I wasn't giving them the opportunity to show me what they know and what they don't know yet.
Skip:
And I think similarly, Jennifer, for me it was that traditional model that I grew up with as a student and I started teaching as a teacher because what I was told to do. And it got results, but I was teaching to the middle. I wasn't teaching to all students. And I think that to me is really how Math Workshop spoke to me when I first learned about it, is I was spending a lot of time working with students on the Fringes Extra instead of doing it the first time with solid tier one instruction.
Edie:
I'd love to hear you describe how Math Workshop is designed for being really intentional about the instructional minutes around differentiation. Teachers are strapped for time, so if it's all happening in the classroom, that feels really important.
Jennifer:
I feel like the first step of differentiation is to know your students. And where I see Math Workshop differs at the core from a traditional model is that because students are doing more of the math and more of the talking, the teacher knows what the students know, what they don't know yet, and the teacher is aware of what misconception there might be.
But in a workshop model, there's a blend of whole group and small group time where then I'm able to use those instructional minutes within the math class to help students with what they need. And I didn't have that when I was teaching in a traditional way.
I was always trying to find these extra minutes like, "Hey, come see me during your lunchtime or come see me during advisory," whatever it might be. If you're waiting and hoping that the time outside of class is going to make a difference, those are not nearly as many minutes as the ones that we have with students right there in the class time. So that was huge for me.
Skip:
Yeah. And I think, Jennifer, you summed it up as well for me. And my structure was I had to deliver the content, so I would deliver all of it and then we would practice and they may have missed something from the first step that I should have remediated and jumped in five minutes into the lesson. The structures gave me some breathing room to see what the students actually knew in the moment.
Jennifer:
I never have met a teacher who has said, "I'm not willing to adjust my instruction for a kid." Everybody wants to adjust their instruction for kids, but what I was doing before is I was adjusting based on a few facial reactions or a couple of hands that were going up and it wasn't real deep knowledge of all of my students.
Edie:
So as you're both talking, I'm imagining the classroom where there's this great student to student discourse happening in small groups and the teacher, you have time to check in with students individually, and but I would like to talk more about academic discourse amongst students and really as you've both said, creating that mathematics community. So what are some of the ways you get students ready for this? I can imagine there's some hurdles there. Where do you see the discomfort and how do you move through that and build that mathematics community?
Skip:
And the struggle is real. A lot of our students, they're used to playing school and coming in and sitting in their seat and listening to what the teacher says. Many of our students don't really know how to speak in a mathematics classroom.
They may be really shy, they might be afraid of being wrong around their peers, but again, in many cases, they're not used to having to explain their thinking, which I think as educators in our system, we've trained kids to tell us what the answer is or tell us how to do a problem and not really asking the why and the justification.
And when we do ask students why, they think they're wrong. It's like, "Oh, you only asked me that when I had the wrong answer. You're trying to be soft and caring and tell me I'm wrong in a polite way." I think that's where it starts is putting kids in a situation where we're in here. Just the thinking is what's important, not the answer.
Jennifer:
Yeah. And there's so many things that we can do that can be simple, simple moves that a teacher can make to help with that. I think establishing some safe partnerships right from the beginning with students, having them work together, but showing them what does that look like and sound like and feel like when you work with a partner, modeling that, acting that out.
It doesn't matter if they're in elementary school, middle school or high school, really showing them what that looks like. You can provide a task that has multiple answers. When we do that, we allow for more discussion. We want kids to talk? Well, we've got to give them something to talk about. If there is only one answer and only one strategy to get there, there's not a whole lot of discussion.
But if there's a lot of different ways that we can go about thinking about a problem, then we've given them an authentic opportunity for discussion. I think that builds community too, when you get to listen to a peer and hear something that maybe you weren't thinking about. And now I see that I can learn from and with the people in my classroom, not just a teacher. I think that we can help them even with some of their conversations with each other when we're not there to use sentence frames and sentence starters that can be posted on anchor charts around the room.
For many of us, math was a quiet, isolated content area where sharing answers was seen as cheating, and we need to be very explicit that sharing answers in this room, sharing strategies is not cheating. That's how we learn, that's how we grow. And to support your conversation, take a look at this anchor chart and these sentence frames, and starters can support that. Using talk moves as a teacher.
And talk moves might be a, "Who agrees? Who would like to respectfully disagree? Would anyone like to add on to what so-and-so said?" Using types of phrases to support the conversation is important for students to understand what does conversation sound like in math class? And it is amazing, if you keep at it, pretty soon the students are using those same talk moves with each other. They're raising their hand and saying, "I'd like to add on to what Skip just said."
Edie:
So in sort of thinking about that, and I'm thinking about an educator who's like, "Oh, wow, this sounds amazing. I don't know about Math Workshop yet, but I want to try something right away." I was wondering if we could talk about what a reasoning routine is and how you use it in Math Workshop.
Jennifer:
A reasoning routine really replaces that traditional old warm up that many of us used in those first five to 10 minutes. It was the thing that the students grabbed or started on and they were quiet and they worked by themselves. What I didn't realize in doing that traditional, old, boring, warm up, I was giving that first impression that math is quiet.
Math is by yourself. And so first impressions matter. They matter a lot. And I wanted to change what those first five to 10 minutes would look like. And so in our Math Workshop, we talk about how the first five to 10 minutes should be done as a reasoning routine, something that is going to be much more engaging, much more accessible, really require that discourse.
Skip:
And a lot of people refer to it as number talks, and I think especially in the upper grade levels, everything doesn't have to be about the number. It's about the critical thinking and the problem solving, which is why we sort of just reframed it as reasoning routines.
Edie:
I'd love to hear a couple examples of some reasoning routines that you've used.
Jennifer:
Yeah. Well, we are so fortunate right now that there are a lot of different resources out there for solid reasoning routines and ones that are really, a lot of them are already done for you or are really easy to get. Then you can focus on the facilitation of it. Two that I love to get started with, especially at the secondary level, are which one doesn't belong and a today's number.
Two of the reasons I like these is that one, there are so many different answers that when we're thinking about strategy, sometimes if students don't feel like they have a strategy, they might hold back, but when there are multiple answers, it's going to encourage discourse.
We talked earlier, we want to give them something to talk about, well, which one doesn't belong in a today's number? There are so many different answers out there that the conversation could go on and on and on. I think that with that, then it allows accessibility. So there isn't a child in that classroom, a student in that classroom that won't have access to those reasoning routines in some way.
Skip:
And those are also favorites of mine too, but I'm going to throw in some other ones because I think the power of these routines is that you mix them up. I'm like, "Which one doesn't belong Wednesday?" And the kids come into class like, "Oh, it's Wednesday. We get to do that routine today." Yeah. One of my favorite ones is also now the slow reveal graph where it's you give them a picture of data or something where I'm slowly going to introduce more ideas to this.
And so you try to come up with ideas about what you think the graph might represent. You make a hypothesis about that, and then I give you another clue of, "Here's another piece of data. How does that revise your thinking throughout the process?" And so we're narrowing in our ideas and we're... In math, often when students got a question wrong, I would show them how to do it and I'd give them a separate problem. Well, this is now we're in the same problem.
We're just reflecting on our own thinking. The other routine that I also like is a would rather. There, "Would you rather be a polar bear or penguin?" Getting kids used to debating and defending answers and being confident about, "I think this is why." All right. Well, justify it. Just explain it. If your justification makes sense, great. It's not about being right or wrong, it's about you being able to explain and defend.
Jennifer:
And as students really start to understand that the teacher isn't after a specific answer. We're not throwing these reasoning routines out there with a hidden agenda like, "Truly guess my way or guess what's in my head." I think that's really important that the teacher, when we're doing these reasoning routines, stays neutral. I'm in their reaction and does not share their ideas with students, that this is about the student conversation.
Then you can do other types of reasoning routines. You can do other things like those number talks, because then students realize when you say, "Solve it any way you want," they really do believe you. "Solve it in as many ways as possible," they believe you. So starting off with some of these that are a little bit even more open-ended, so many different answers, then you can move into when there is one answer, but so many different ways to look at how to get there.
Edie:
Thanks for tuning in today. To learn more about Jennifer and Skip's new book and read a full transcript, visit blog.heinemann.com, and for a 30% discount on all Heinemann professional books, use code PROFBKS30P.
About the Author
Dr. Jennifer Lempp is co-author of Math Workshop: Five Steps to Implementing a Student-Centered Learning Environment (6-12) and the author of Math Workshop: Five Steps to Implementing Guided Math, Learning Stations, Reflection, and More. This book is a practical resource meant to support teachers with strategies and structures to help create a learning environment where students are engaged in purposeful mathematics experiences.
Jennifer consults with schools and districts around the country, providing professional development on mathematics content and instructional practices. Additionally, she supports school leaders on the development of mathematics professional learning and school improvement plans.
Jennifer’s goal is to ensure all students have positive mathematics experiences and that teachers have the tools to support all students in the area of mathematics. You can follow Jennifer Lempp on Twitter @Lempp5 or Instagram @jennifer_lempp and learn more about her and her work on her website: mathworkshop.net.
Skip Tyler is the co-author of Math Workshop: Five Steps to Implementing a Student-Centered Learning Environment (6-12). A former secondary teacher and High School Mathematics Educational Specialist, Skip is the Co-Founder and Lead Consultant of the Collaborative Teaching and Learning Group Consulting. In this role, he supports teachers, administrators, schools and districts throughout the country by providing professional learning addressing instructional best practices. Skip is actively involved in leadership positions in his state of Virginia, and recently received a Lifetime Service Award from Virginia Council of Mathematics Supervisors. Learn more at CTLGconsulting.com.
