Progress Toward a Standard: How I'm Making Math Meaningful

My first professor from SPU's School of Education once told me, "Your class's behavior will only be as good as your curriculum is engaging." At the end of the day, if what and how we teach isn't cutting it, the students will tell us in the tune-out method du jour--pulling at their desktags, poking their neighbors, chatting instead of listening...Not great if we really want our students to deepen their understanding. This is why Program Standard 4.3: Designing Coherent Instruction in Learning Activities matters so much. 

When I redesigned a straightforward math task (image below) into something richer for first grade students, I looked for ways to open up the activity and make it more meaningful. Marian Small is a pioneer of math education that is relevant to children, engaging in ways that inspire creativity and problem solving over rote memorization--this task is inspired by her work. The standard requires that "learning activities are suitable to students or to the instructional outcomes, and most represent significant cognitive challenge, with some differentiation for different groups of students."

In this activity, students were invited to use colorful manipulatives (buttons) to learn in a playful way, rather than working through a classic set of addition equations on a worksheet. The tactile element makes the task multisensory, and the description requires critical thinking both to understand the task and then develop original ideas in the form of new equations. Because the activity invites students to use a number line and buttons, opportunity for scaffolding is convenient and natural. 

Although I haven't taught this lesson yet, I can picture it being more engaging to my students because of the playfulness of its design and its simplicity. My experience has shown me that sometimes that cleanest, most streamlined activities make for the most popular moments in a day. The hope is that by engaging in more tasks that require creative engagement during math, students will strengthen conceptual understanding and increase flexibility in their relationship to numbers. If I were to tweak this lesson, I might add more specifics in terms of challenge opportunities for learners who need enrichment. 

I'm looking forward to a chance to test this out in real life--my aim was to breathe life and joy into what might otherwise be a ho-hum part of first grade. 

References

Ernst, K., Ryan, S. (2014). Success from the start: Your first years teaching elementary mathematics. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Inc: Reston, VA.

Small, M. (2010). Beyond one right answer. Educational Leadership, 68(1), p. 28-32.

ISTE Standard #4: Developing Critical Thinking and Problem Solving Skills Through Technology

ISTE Standard #4 requires learners to use critical thinking skills to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve problems, and make informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources.

My question: What age-appropriate digital tools might help young learners cultivate critical thinking and problem solving skills in the classroom?

The Global Digital Citizen Foundation is a rich resource I dove into more deeply in my search to answer this week's question, and I found this article by the GDC Team extremely helpful: 

26 Critical Thinking Tools Aligned With Bloom’s Taxonomy (Links to an external site.)

The piece is organized according to which digital critical thinking tools help learners in different areas: remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. 

My biggest takeaway from this week's research is actually more about my own understanding of what critical thinking is for a digital generation. The Global Digital Citizen Foundation helped me make important parallels between the learning I did as a child and the ways kids in 2016 still develop critical thinking and problem solving skills, but through the lens of a digital native. 

Digital natives, a term I understood and identified with instantly, but had not heard before, are members of the generation having grown up in this incredible technological boom. My family got AOL junk mail beginning in fourth grade, when I first logged onto the Beanie Baby website, clogging our family's phone line for hours as the photos of stuffed elephants loaded onto each page. I'm the same age as Mark Zuckerberg--I remember sitting in my college residence hall and submitting my request (invite only, back then!) to join this new online community for college students only: Facebook. It was a glorified phone book at the time, but the rest is history. My students, however, will never know a time when the phone book actually came to my doorstep, and most will have their own smartphones long before they can drive. They are true digital natives. 

So their learning will look a lot different.

Check out this massive list of digital and online actions that correspond to Bloom's Taxonomy. I had never thought of commenting on a blog post as a form of analyzing (critical thinking), but of course it is! Animating is creating, mind mapping is analyzing, and tweeting is understanding (not a statement I could call gospel truth, but it is possible.)

The truth is, and I'm a little embarrassed to admit it when I know the world wants and need digital education, but I'm starting to see much more value in educational technology now that I'm connecting these dots.

Bates's writing on the difference between technology and media also helped clarify some of these same questions for me. He says, "In judging the value of a technology, we need to look more closely at the ways in which it is being or could be used. In essence this means focusing more on media--which represents the more holistic use of technologies--than on individual tools or technologies themselves, while still recognising that technology is an important component of all media" (Bates, n.d.). Basically, a cool app means nothing on its own. Put it in the context of enriching educational media, and it could be magic.

I still don't believe the youngest students need more than a few minutes of screen time exposure every day--there's just too much literature (Reddy, 2015) warning us of the damage of such high doses--but I can now see all the ways my digital teaching strategies will expand their skills sets. It feels like a real breakthrough for me, and it feels good!

References

Bates, A.W. Understanding technology in education. In Teaching in a digital age (6). Retrieved from: https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapter/8-8-understanding-the-foundations-of-educational-media/

Global Digital Citizen Team. (2016, January 11). 26 Critical thinking skills aligned with Bloom's Taxonomy. Retrieved from: https://globaldigitalcitizen.org/fostering-critical-thinking-skills-with-online-tools

Reddy, Sumathi. (2015, October 15). Pediatricians rethink screen time policy for children. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from: http://www.wsj.com/articles/pediatricians-rethink-screen-time-policy-for-children-1444671636