Jackie Flowers is the secondary instructional specialist for Madison City Schools, former Instructional Partner at Discovery Middle School and a veteran high school math teacher. She’s allowed us to share this recent letter prepared for parents in her system, in support of higher mathematics standards.
by Jackie Flowers
I taught mathematics at the high school level for 12 years and I taught remedial math classes at a junior college for six years. When I worked with struggling math students, one important goal for me was to help them “know what they didn’t know” about mathematics. If that sounds odd, think of it this way: if we can learn the big concepts about how math works, then our success with math is not so dependent on our ability to memorize formulas and procedures and then figure out when to apply them. We understand the big picture, so we have confidence that we can solve the particular math problem in front of us.
The new Alabama College and Career Ready Math Standards (ACCRS) that we are now implementing emphasize the big concepts and the big picture of mathematics. I now see students learning in new and rigorous ways (or “vigorous ways,” as one of our instructional partners likes to say). Teachers are now asking students to defend their answers, discover formulas, problem solve with their peers, complete math-related projects, work on tasks that demand our highest levels of thinking, and more. Teachers are not just “covering the curriculum” – drilling students on discrete facts and formulas – they are really probing and tapping into student thinking.
The ACCRS includes 8 Standards for Mathematical Practice that help our teachers push students’ thinking deeper, engage them in discovering how we can use math every day in real life, and help them take ownership of their own learning process.
The 8 Standards for Mathematical Practice are:
- Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
- Reason abstractly and quantitatively
- Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
- Model with mathematics
- Use appropriate tools strategically
- Attend to precision
- Look for and make sense of structure
- Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning
These are good practices that I think we can all agree are beneficial for our students and children. We need to graduate college and career ready students who can approach math and other kinds of problem solving in this manner and stick with the work until it’s accomplished.
As reported in a recent article on AL.com, “Alabama children handling common core better than grownups, Hoover teacher tells national audience”, Alabama’s 2012 Teacher of the Year, math educator Suzanne Culbreth, told a national audience: “To be honest, the children of our state are handling it much better than the grownups, so we are working toward helping inform our grownups.”
Many parents learned mathematics in a procedural manner. I did too. We weren’t asked to spend time digging into the big concepts behind the math problems we were taught to solve by rote. If you were “naturally” good at math then you understood how to apply it. If not then you just memorized the steps and moved on. As a result, many adults never made as much use of math in our lives as they might have, if they’d really understood the why and what for. Our children can do better.
In another article in the Dothan Eagle, “Conquering Common Core: Students, parents, teachers wrestle with new standards,” parent Jennifer Robinson explained that “My child is actually getting it, it’s just hard for me to work with him and try to help him do math because the way they’re teaching it is not how I learned to do it.” Mrs. Robinson isn’t the only parent to struggle with the new standards and how they’re being taught. Everyone is having to adjust.
The story goes on: “Anthony Stewart, Houston County Schools director of elementary curriculum, said his office and school systems across the state have been getting calls from concerned parents about dips in student grades and difficulty in helping their children with school work. Stewart and other education officials say some user shock is to be expected as students and teachers alike adapt to the new standards, which are intended to be more rigorous than previous standards.”
You might ask why we needed new mathematical standards and new ways of teaching and learning math. Hasn’t our math education in the past been good enough? A recent article in The Washington Post reported on the math and science progress of eighth-graders in the United States and pointed out that the lowest scoring state on tests in the recent past was Alabama. Why? Prior to the ACCRS, our standards for mastery of mathematical concepts were too low and our teaching was too focused on procedures, not concepts. That needs to change.
We cannot keep doing what we have always done and expect different results. We must partner with all states in our union to ensure that all students are being prepared for their futures by being offered a guaranteed, rigorous, and viable curriculum no matter where you are from. As Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the Department of Education, told the Washington Post, even our highest performing states are being outperformed by other countries in math and science.
We must partner as a country to do what is right for our students in the United States. Remember that motto from our earliest days as a nation: “United we stand, divided we fall.”
