Rounding Up

Auteur(s): MLC - Mike Wallus
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  • Résumé

  • Welcome to Rounding Up, the professional learning podcast brought to you by The Math Learning Center. Two things have always been true in education: Ongoing professional learning is essential, and teachers are extremely busy people. Rounding Up is a podcast designed to provide meaningful, bite-sized professional learning for busy educators and instructional leaders. I'm Mike Wallus, vice president for educator support at The Math Learning Center and host of the show. In each episode, we'll explore topics important to teachers, instructional leaders, and anyone interested in elementary mathematics education. Topics such as posing purposeful questions, effectively recording student thinking, cultivating students' math identity, and designing asset-based instruction from multilingual learners. Don't miss out! Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. Each episode will also be published on the Bridges Educator Site. We hope you'll give Rounding Up a try, and that the ideas we discuss have a positive impact on your teaching and your students' learning.
    2022 The Math Learning Center | www.mathlearningcenter.org
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Mathématique Science
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Épisodes
  • Season 3 | Episode 10 – Building Productive Partnerships - Guests: Sue Kim and Myuriel von Aspen

    Season 3 | Episode 10 – Building Productive Partnerships - Guests: Sue Kim and Myuriel von Aspen
    Jan 23 2025
    Sue Kim and Myuriel Von Aspen, Building Productive Partnerships ROUNDING UP: SEASON 3 | EPISODE 10 In this episode, we examine the practice of building productive student partnerships. We’ll talk about ways educators can cultivate joyful and productive partnerships and the role the educator plays once students are engaged with their partner. BIOGRAPHIES Sue Kim is an advocate for children’s thinking and providing them a voice in learning mathematics. She received her teaching credential and master of education from Biola University in Southern California. She has been an educator for 15 years and has taught and coached across TK–5th grade classrooms including Los Angeles Unified School District and El Segundo Unified School District as well as several other Orange County, California, school districts. Myuriel von Aspen believes in fostering collaborative partnerships with teachers with the goal of advancing equitable, high-quality learning opportunities for all children. Myuriel earned a master of arts in teaching and a master of business administration from the University of California, Irvine and a bachelor of science in computer science from Florida International University. She currently serves as a math coordinator of the Teaching, Learning, and Instructional Leadership Collaborative. ​ RESOURCES Catalyzing Change in Early Childhood and Elementary Mathematics by National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Purposeful Play by Kristine Mraz, Alison Porcelli, and Cheryl Tyler Hands Down, Speak Out: Listening and Talking Across Literacy and Math K–5 by Kassia Omohundro Wedekind and Christy Hermann Thompson TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: What are the keys to establishing productive student partnerships in an elementary classroom? And how can educators leverage the learning that happens in partnerships for the benefit of the entire class? We'll explore these and other questions with Sue Kim and Myuriel von Aspen from the Orange County Office of Education on this episode of Rounding Up. Well, hi, Sue and Myuriel. Welcome to the podcast. Myuriel von Aspen: Hi, Mike. Sue Kim: Thanks for having us. Mike: Thrilled to have you both. So, I first heard you two talk about the power of student partnerships in a context that involved counting collections. And during that presentation, you all said a few things that I have been thinking about ever since. The first thing that you said was that neuroscience shows that you can't really separate emotions from the way that we learn. And I wonder what do you mean when you say that and why do you think it's important when we're thinking about student partnerships? Myuriel: Yes, absolutely. So, this idea comes directly from neuroscience research, the idea that we cannot build memories without emotions. I'm going to read to you a short quote from the NCTM [National Council of Teachers of Mathematics] publication Catalyzing Change in Early Childhood and Elementary Mathematics that says, “Emerging evidence from neuroscience strongly shows that one cannot separate the learning of mathematics content from children's views and feelings toward mathematics.” So, to me, what that says is that how children feel has a huge influence on their ability to learn math and also on how they feel about themselves as learners of math. So, depending on how they feel, they might be willing to engage in the content or not. And so, as they're engaging in counting collections and they're enjoying counting and they feel joyful and they're doing this with friends, they will learn better because they enjoy it, and they care about what they're doing and what they're learning. Mike: You know, this is a nice segue to the other thing that has been on my mind since I heard you all talk about this because I remember you said that students don't think about a task like counting collections as work, that they see it as play. And I wonder what you think the ramifications of that are for how we approach student partnership? Sue: Yeah, you know, I've been in so many classrooms across TK through fifth [grade], and when I watch kids count collections, we see joy, we see engagement in these ways. But I've also been thinking about this idea of how play is even defined, in a way, since you asked that question that they think of it as play. Kristine Mraz, teacher, author, and a consultant, has [coauthored] a book called Purposeful Play. And I remember this was the first time I hear about this reference about Vivian Paley, an American early childhood educator and researcher, stress through her career, the importance of play for children when she discovered in her work that play’s actually a very complex activity and that it is indeed hard work. It's the work of kids. It's the work of what children do. That's their life, in a sense. And so, something I've been thinking about is how kids perceive play is different than how adults perceive play. And so, they take it with seriousness. There...
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    34 min
  • Season 3 | Episode 9 – Breaking the Cycle of Math Trauma - Guest: Dr. Kasi Allen

    Season 3 | Episode 9 – Breaking the Cycle of Math Trauma - Guest: Dr. Kasi Allen
    Jan 9 2025
    Dr. Kasi Allen, Breaking the Cycle of Math Trauma ROUNDING UP: SEASON 3 | EPISODE 9 If you are an educator, you’ve likely heard people say things like “I’m a math person.” While this may make you cringe, if you dig a bit deeper, many people can identify specific experiences that convinced them that this was true. In fact, some of you might secretly wonder if you are a math person as well. Today we’re talking with Dr. Kasi Allen about math trauma: what it is and how educators can take steps to address it. BIOGRAPHY Kasi Allen serves as the vice president of learning and impact at The Ford Family Foundation. She holds a PhD degree in educational policy and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and its history, both from Stanford University. RESOURCES “Jo Boaler Wants Everyone to Love Math” — Stanford Magazine R-RIGHTS Learning to Love Math by Judy Willis TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: If you're an educator, I'm almost certain you've heard people say things like, “I am not a math person.” While this may make you cringe, if you dig a bit deeper, many of those folks can identify specific experiences that convinced them that this was true. In fact, some of you might secretly wonder if you're actually a math person. Today we're talking with Dr. Kasi Allen about math trauma: what it is and how educators can take steps to address it. Well, hello, Kasi. Welcome to the podcast. Kasi Allen: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Mike: I wonder if we could start by talking about what drew you to the topic of math trauma in the first place? Kasi: Really good question. You know, I've been curious about this topic for almost as long as I can remember, especially about how people's different relationships with math seem to affect their lives and how that starts at a very early age. I think it was around fourth grade for me probably, that I became aware of how much I liked math and how much my best friend and my sister had an absolutely opposite relationship with it—even though we were attending the same school, same teachers, and so on. And I really wanted to understand why that was happening. And honestly, I think that's what made me want to become a high school math teacher. I was convinced I could do it in a way that maybe wouldn't hurt people as much. Or it might even make them like it and feel like they could do anything that they wanted to do. But it wasn't until many years later, as a professor of education, when I was teaching teachers how to teach math, that this topic really resurfaced for me [in] a whole new way among my family, among my friends. And if you're somebody who's taught math, you're the math emergency person. And so, I had collected over the years stories of people's not-so-awesome experiences with math. But it was when I was asked to teach an algebra for elementary teachers course, that was actually the students’ idea. And the idea of this course was that we'd help preservice elementary teachers get a better window into how the math they were teaching was planting the seeds for how people might access algebra later. On the very first day, the first year I taught this class, there were three sections. I passed out the syllabus; in all three sections, the same thing happened. Somebody either started crying in a way that needed consoling by another peer, or they got up and left, or both. And I was just pretty dismayed. I hadn't spoken a word. The syllabi were just sitting on the table. And it really made me want to go after this in a new way. I mean, something—it just made me feel like something different was happening here. This was not the math anxiety that everybody talked about when I was younger. This was definitely different, and it became my passion project: trying to figure how we disrupt that cycle. Mike: Well, I think that's a good segue because I've heard you say that the term “math anxiety” centers this as a problem that's within the person. And that in fact, this isn't about the person. Instead, it's about the experience, something that's happened to people that's causing this type of reaction. Do I have that right, Kasi? Kasi: One hundred percent. And I think this is really important. When I grew up and when I became a teacher, I think that was an era when there was a lot of focus on math anxiety, the prevalence of math anxiety. Sheila Tobias wrote the famous book Overcoming Math Anxiety. This was especially a problem among women. There were dozens of books. And there were a number of problems with that work at the time, and that most of the research people were citing was taking place outside of math education. The work was all really before the field of neuroscience was actually a thing. Lots of deficit thinking that something is wrong with the person who is suffering this anxiety. And most of these books were very self-helpy. And so, not only is there something wrong with you, but you need to fix it yourself. So, it really centers all ...
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    27 min
  • Season 3 | Episode 8 – Helping Our Students Build a Meaningful Understanding of Geometry - Guest: Dr. Rebecca Ambrose

    Season 3 | Episode 8 – Helping Our Students Build a Meaningful Understanding of Geometry - Guest: Dr. Rebecca Ambrose
    Dec 19 2024
    Dr. Rebecca Ambrose, Helping Our Students Build a Meaningful Understanding of Geometry ROUNDING UP: SEASON 3 | EPISODE 8 As a field, mathematics education has come a long way over the past few years in describing the ways students come to understand number, quantity, place value, and even fractions. But when it comes to geometry, particularly concepts involving shape, it’s often less clear how student thinking develops. Today, we’re talking with Dr. Rebecca Ambrose about ways we can help our students build a meaningful understanding of geometry. BIOGRAPHIES Rebecca Ambrose researches how children solve mathematics problems and works with teachers to apply what she has learned about the informal strategies children employ to differentiate and improve instruction in math. She is currently a professor at the University of California, Davis in the School of Education. RESOURCES Geometry Resources Curated by Dr. Ambrose Seeing What Others Cannot See Opening the Mind's Eye TRANSCRIPT Mike Wallus: As a field, mathematics education has come a long way over the past few years in describing the ways that students come to understand number, place value, and even fractions. But when it comes to geometry, especially concepts involving shape, it's often less clear how student thinking develops. Today, we're talking with Dr. Rebecca Ambrose about ways we can help our students build a meaningful understanding of geometry. Well, welcome to the podcast, Rebecca. Thank you so much for joining us today. Rebecca Ambrose: It's nice to be here. I appreciate the invitation. Mike: So, I'd like to start by asking: What led you to focus your work on the ways that students build a meaningful understanding of geometry, particularly shape? Rebecca: So, I taught middle school math for 10 years. And the first seven years were in coed classrooms. And I was always struck by especially the girls who were actually very successful in math, but they would tell me, “I like you, Ms. Ambrose, but I don't like math. I'm not going to continue to pursue it.” And I found that troubling, and I also found it troubling that they were not as involved in class discussion. And I went for three years and taught at an all-girls school so I could see what difference it made. And we did have more student voice in those classrooms, but I still had some very successful students who told me the same thing. So, I was really concerned that we were doing something wrong and that led me to graduate school with a focus on gender issues in math education. And I had the blessing of studying with Elizabeth Fennema, who was really the pioneer in studying gender issues in math education. And as I started studying with her, I learned that the one area that females tended to underperform males on aptitude tests—not achievement tests, but aptitude tests—was in the area of spatial reasoning. And you'll remember those are the tests, or items that you may have had where you have one view of a shape and then you have a choice of four other views, and you have to choose the one that is the same shape from a different view. And those particular tasks we see consistent gender differences on. I became convinced it was because we didn't give kids enough opportunity to engage in that kind of activity at school. You either had some strengths there or not, and because of the play activity of boys, that may be why some of them are more successful at that than others. And then the other thing that informed that was when I was teaching middle school, and I did do a few spatial activities, kids would emerge with talents that I was unaware of. So, I remember in particular this [student,] Stacy, who was an eighth-grader who was kind of a good worker and was able to learn along with the rest of the class, but she didn't stand out as particularly interested or gifted in mathematics. And yet, when we started doing these spatial tasks, and I pulled out my spatial puzzles, she was all over it. And she was doing things much more quickly than I could. And I said, “Stacy, wow.” She said, “Oh, I love this stuff, and I do it at home.” And she wasn't the kind of kid to ever draw attention to herself, but when I saw, “Oh, this is a side of Stacy that I didn't know about, and it is very pertinent to mathematics. And she needs to know what doorways could be open to her that would employ these skills that she has and also to help her shine in front of her classmates.” So, that made me really curious about what we could do to provide kids with more opportunities like that little piece that I gave her and her classmates back in the day. So, that's what led me to look at geometry thinking. And the more that I have had my opportunities to dabble with teachers and kids, people have a real appetite for it. There are always a couple of people who go, “Ooh.” But many more who are just so eager to do something in addition to number that we can call mathematics. Mike: You ...
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    36 min

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