Achieve Math Success: S2 E13

Good morning. Hey everybody, Cheri Dotterer here. I am here for Tier One Interventions this time. My other podcast is The Writing Glitch. Maybe you didn't know that, but if you want to hop over to The Writing Glitch, you can hear interviews with people who are improving the connections between reading, writing, mostly reading and writing, but We always get that math and writing in there as well.

I am here today with Jonily Zupancic , and we are going to talk today about a problem that is happening with counting with our students. why do we have these difficulties with Math, and how do we help them as an occupational therapist? And I think that this particular problem is going to be the one that goes AHA to the occupational therapist because it focuses on counting and visuals. It's using visuals for counting.

As we get into this episode, I want you to think about what are the visuals that you're using in your therapy practice that will connect to counting. Counting and visuals are essential for overcoming the math challenge.

Previous knowledge of counting and skip counting, and you may not even know what I mean by skip counting. Skip counting is when you do something like 2, or 20. It's when you're skipping numbers in between so that you can come up with the answer. I hope that you listen in for the rest of this podcast and the rest of, and some episodes coming up, because Jonily is going to delve into counting, skip counting, and how visuals connect.

, Look for information coming up in January for the subscription box. Even the box keeps giving and giving, even though you have one box, it still keeps giving to others. I think it was wonderful. Thank you. Jonily, tell us how do we get kids to focus?. We were making good progress, and now we're just going back to where we were.

Tier 1 interventions should be a complete system for how to strengthen the core Tier 1 regular general classroom with academic, mathematical, and non academic interventions. Think about this. Are you looking for ways as a general classroom teacher to increase the engagement and focus of your students? Are you also desperately finding techniques to be able to individualize

for each need of students in the regular classroom without more work, without more prep, and without more stress? Today's session is going to be very different than the other Tier 1 intervention sessions. We've been on a good roll. You come to Tier 1 interventions, we expose a task, and we talk about what it looks like. Interaction 1, Interaction 2, Interaction 3, Interaction 4, Interaction 5. The structure today is going to be different.

The structure is going to be four parts, and we are going to create techniques and strategies for each of those four areas that I've just mentioned. The areas of deficit that are increasingly Making Tier 1 Core General Classroom inaccessible to students. One task can do that. We call these tasks reference tasks because we reference them throughout the year when we're teaching our typical, regular instruction with our textbook resources that we would always do anyway.

The questions that we're going to answer today are, How do we individualize? It's through prompts and questions. There are two types of prompts and questions. There are stop thinking questions and prompts, and there are keep thinking questions and prompts. We want to facilitate with keep thinking questions and prompts, with stop thinking questions and prompts sprinkled in. An example of a stop thinking question and prompt is, How much money will Kay have on day five?

There's one answer to I might ask a stop thinking question, How much money will Kay have on day 5? To help kids make sense. And then students might say, Oh 28. No, 35. And then what's my role? Don't confirm or deny. Oh, okay. We have 28 and we have 35. See, don't confirm or deny. Don't confirm. So I can ask a stop thinking question, and by not confirming or

denying, I make it a keep thinking question, even though it's a solve. A stop thinking question is basically your typical solve and answer getting question, and we can't eliminate those. We need those. We need a lot of them. But if that's all the prompts we ever give students. We are not individualizing. We're not going to deep thinking. We're not doing depth of knowledge. We're not getting to critiquing curiosity, creativity, reasoning, sensemaking. We're not getting to that level of thinking.

We're not getting to that heightened cognition, which is what mathematics is. I tell kids all the time, I don't teach mathematics, I teach thinking. I don't teach mathematics, I teach thinking, and this is exactly how I do it. When I don't confirm or deny that, kids keep thinking about it. It doesn't matter to me right now whether they think it's 28 or 35. Okay, that doesn't matter right now. What matters is, I don't confirm or deny, I acknowledge both of them, I leave it up there.

And kids keep thinking, because what will happen is, I'll say, okay, let's talk about when I say how much money each starts with, what day is that? So see, I move on to another topic, and then all of a sudden a student will go, Oh no. It's not 28. I get it. It's 35. I thought it was 28, but it's 35. Do you see how they're continuing to process? They're confirming and denying it for themselves. The best way. Oh, y'all don't miss this today. The best way.

For a child to learn something, truly learn it, truly create a core memory, truly get A learning deeply ingrained like riding a bike so that you never forget is for them to figure it out themselves. The more I tell as a teacher, the more they hear, but the more they tell me as a student, the more they learn. See, this is where we have a warped version of expectation. We think because we've told them 16 times. that Kay is going to have 35 on day five.

We think that since we've told them that many times, that

they're going to learn it. But that is not how children learn. What did Cheri say about the stove? And math isn't even a hot stove. It's not a hot stove and it's not a busy street. So we can open up this huge opportunity for risk taking and for kids to learn on their own and to figure it out themselves through the techniques that I'm teaching you. We can open up this huge opportunity without them getting hurt. Math is not a hot stove or a busy street. They're going to be okay.

And success in learning only comes through struggle. You must experience struggle. Good, positive, healthy struggle to enjoy success. And what I'm modeling for you today is the way to facilitate Some of y'all are creating unhealthy struggle for your students. I've moved on and I've said, remember, I'm individualizing. How do we individualize and differentiate with one task? Now I'm moving on and I'm like, look, we keep start, we keep talking about the starting amount. The starting amount, okay?

What day is the starting amount? This is the ultimate concept of rate and function at the secondary level. This is the ultimate concept of rate and function at the secondary level. Is what number is associated with the starting point, mathematically. Kids want the number one to be the starting number, and there are so many implications to that misunderstanding. The starting day, the starting amount is always zero. Day zero.

For those of you that teach at the secondary level, the y intercept is the starting amount. It's the constant and the starting amount is on the y axis because that's always the value where x is zero. And if x is my day number, the starting amount is at day zero. And that is the conceptual understanding for y intercept or my constant term. Day one is tomorrow. Day one is tomorrow. Now I'm going to go back. Remember, I haven't confirmed or denied K with day five.

Now I'm going to go back to K and I'm going to say, okay how much money does Kay have on day zero? Day zero. Day and dollar. Day zero. Watch what I'm doing deliberately and intentionally. I'm skipping some space here.

Day zero, Kay has seven dollars. No, I'm sorry. Look at me. See, I totally messed that up. That was not intentional. Let me tell you this because this is what happens in my brain all the time. When I'm teaching kids. And when you're teaching kids, this type of facilitation is very difficult when you're not used to it.

But as Krista said way early on today, look, I'm in such a habit of this model of instruction now that I'm asking keep thinking questions all the time to facilitate and I'm individualizing and like it's just so natural for me now that it's an easier way to teach mathematics. But if you're not at that point this is going to be very difficult because what's going to happen is you're going to be thinking of your next facilitation question as you're trying to facilitate the current reality.

Which is just what happened to me because I started thinking about where we were moving to part three, which is the accessibility, which is where we're going to get to the sensory and the all of the stuff that Cheri is going to give us some great insight into the visual and all of that. Because right now this hasn't been sensory. It's been accessible. As far as sensemaking, but I haven't added that visual level yet. So I was thinking about that and I said, Oh, on day zero, K is going to have 7.

So it happens to the best of us. Day zero, K has 0. What about tomorrow? Day 1, 7. Oh, 2 days from now, 14. Now, I can continue this table, and as I start doing this, then all the kids are like, It's 35, it's not 28, it's 35 on day 5. But see, that happens way later. I don't confirm and deny right away. I continue facilitating other things so kids can try to figure it out on their own.

That is the way learning sticks. We're actually decreasing the memories that kids are making by confirming or denying too soon. We're not giving them enough think time, enough process time. And we're not giving them enough time to make sense. And reason. I hear teachers say this all the time. My kids just can't think on their own. They can't reason. You know why? You don't let them. You want them to do it, but you won't let them. This is hardcore today, guys. And I don't apologize for it.

Then we do the same thing for Jesse. How much does Jesse have on day zero? Fifty. This is a little glitchy. How much does Jesse have tomorrow? Some kids want to add the 50 and the 5. We just work through that. Tomorrow, Jesse has 55. Two days from now, Jesse has 60. Now, let's say I'm like, okay, how much money did Jesse have yesterday. So what I might do, see, look at all of the questions that I've asked that I can increase or decrease the level of understanding for my kids.

But here's a question. Here's a salty question. You can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink. I can lead kids to learning, but I can't make it stick. I can't make them learn. I can make a horse thirsty, though. Guess what? I give it a salt lick. So what we need to be asking ourselves when we facilitate

mathematics instruction is. Not, how do I make my kids learn? How do I make them thirsty? If you go back and listen to part one of Jesse and Kay, I've modeled exactly with one task how to make them thirsty. How to increase that focus and engagement, gain their perspective, tell me about, don't confirm or deny. How do we then individualize? We ask stop thinking and keep thinking questions randomly at different levels. Thanks.

But with a stop thinking question, we don't confirm or deny immediately, so I'm giving you the exact step by step. And we can do this with lots of other tasks, just using Jessie and Kay today as an example. But the process is the same, no matter what task. This is probably the hardest part to individualize and differentiate as an instructor, because we don't know what questions to ask. And that's why I am always giving you sample questions.

And when you're enrolled in the Tier 1 Interventions course, you will have slide decks and documents that have all of these sample questions. You also have Hear Me Teach, where I'm actually teaching and facilitating to kids, not adults, so you can actually pick up on all the questions and prompts that I give. How do you learn all of them for Jesse and Kay?

There's not a complete comprehensive list, but I give you a bunch of examples, and you just need to pick out three or four of them, and every year, you adapt more and more of them. For you as a teacher to learn this model and to truly transform and transcend your instructional practices, that is going to make a difference. Tier 1 core general classroom accessible to everyone and fully successfully inclusion.

The only way to do that is for you as a teacher to grow over time and I always say that individual teachers, it takes about 8 to 10 years to unbreak all of those old habits. We're teaching the way we were taught and that did not work for the majority of people. I got to say that's very true about occupational therapists as well. I was doing a lot of reflection this week on where I, as an

OT, was doing interventions. And after delving into this product with you, how my interventions have shifted. And, for example, when I would go in to a kid's, I went to kids homes because I did cyber before cyber was known. I would go in, we'd do a gross motor activity, a warm up activity, then we would do some kind of lesson with some handwriting involved, and depending on how they performed, we would do a reward at the very end.

Of the session, Don Teresa, does that sound like a typical thing that we've been trained to do? And I slowly started implementing things like Okay, what do you see? What do you notice? Tell me about, before I started doing the instruction, and they're looking at me like, what do you mean, what do I see? And I'm on a one to one basis, not a whole classroom, and the kids are looking at me like, what do you want from me? Because we don't usually do this and they are there.

They were very slow and picking up the change, but yet it was empowering them because it was, I was facilitating what they understood versus what I understood. I understood. I thought they understood. So I would take a vertical line and a circle, put them out there. What do you see? What do you notice? What if we put them together here? Oh, it's a B. What about here? Oh, it's a P! Oh, what if we flipped it and put it on this side and started to work at it from that angle?

We flipped the script a little bit with the literacy. Now, if you were with us on Wednesday night, we talked about numbers and some of the things that happen and change with children's understanding of number. This is Cedric, your AI Assistnat for Tier 1 Interventions Workshops. Jonily and Sheri thank you for listenting. You have been listening to Part two of the Reference Task Jesse and Kay. Parts 3 and 4 are included in our Mastery Math Method course.

Now available online at https://disabilitylabs.com/courses/tier-1-interventions-workshops. We hope to see you there. We want to wish you a very Merry Christmas, Happy hanukkah, and Happy New Year. We will not be publishing a podcast episode for Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve to give our staff a much needed vacation. We look forward to seeing you in the new year.