Math Beyond Computation

I was a terrible math student throughout my educational career. I partially chose my undergrad major (journalism) based on how few math classes I needed to take.

But as an elementary school teacher, I’ve taken my fear of math and turned it into excellent math teaching. I know where my understanding broke down when I was a student, so I’ve been able to turn that into making math visual and teaching my students multiple ways to attack a problem. I’ve been commended on my math instruction by my admin, as well as higher ups from the district who’ve observed my teaching.

However, that hasn’t always translated to great math scores. And as much as we all know that standardized test scores aren’t the be all/end all of student learning, they are a big focus in education. I want my students to learn, to build solid conceptual understanding, to understand the world around them, AND I want them to do well on those tests. I want my school to be one that people look at and wonder “What are they doing and how can we replicate it?” I want my students to score high and show that they are just as smart and qualified as kids in higher income areas.

This year my grade level team has worked with a math consultant a few times and he’s helped us to develop practices around metacognition. Basically, we’re teaching kids how to look at math questions that are not basic computation and understand the thinking that’s required. For example, one type of this strategic math thinking is visual analysis. Students have to look at problem that includes something like a graph or a picture of objects and determine if the picture is needed to answer the problem. If the problem can be answered without the visual, then it is not a visual analysis question, and they can focus their thinking elsewhere. If the problem cannot be answered without the visual, then they know the problem is visual analysis, so they need to carefully read, or analyze, the given image.

That sounds so basic, but you’d be surprised how many kids see a visual and don’t know how to use it to answer the problem. They often will just skip over the visual and guess at an answer, or they’ll look at the visual but don’t understand the connection to the problem. Teaching the metacognition behind visual analysis has helped our students to understand how to analyze charts, graphs, images, etc and then use them to solve the math problem.

And isn’t that a “real world” skill? We need people who can read and interpret graphs and charts, data sets, pictures, and more. We need critical thinkers and analyzers.

I’ll be writing more about strategic math thinking and metacognition in future posts, as well as how to incorporate it into your teaching.