Education Week - February 8, 2017 - 8

Photos by Sarah D. Sparks/Education Week

FROM LEFT: First graders Jade Cruz, center,
and Ylin Gamino use tokens to balance
addition equations during a lesson-study
session at Boulder Ridge Elementary in
Menifee, Calif.
Math notebooks are used as part of the
program to help pupils reflect on their
learning.

Young English-Learners Tackle a Third Language: Math
Program also enlists
lesson-study tactics
By Sarah D. Sparks
Menifee, Calif.

For young English-language
learners, language skills can be a
barrier not just to reading but math
as well. Educators and researchers
working in two school districts here
hope that helping students "talk
through" number problems will assist them in meeting the state's new
math standards.
It's part of Teaching EnglishLearners Early Mathematics, or
TEEM, a pilot partnership between
researchers at California State University, San Bernardino, and the
Nuview Union and Romoland school
districts, in California's Inland Empire region. In 2014, the project
won a development grant from the
federal Investing in Innovation
program to use a combination of
Japanese "lesson study" cycles and
detailed student math notebooks to
help teachers and students write
and reflect on their math learning.
"For so many years, math was
about getting the right answer,
and if you got the answer, that was
it. Now, it's about justifying your
thinking, and it's amazing the number of times kids will get the correct
answer, but really don't know what
they are thinking," said Shirley
Roath, an education administrator and former middle school math
teacher for Riverside County, which
includes the two districts and is
partnering in the TEEM pilot. The
"number talk" discussions, she said,
instead focus on "looking at the kids
and their thinking, not the teacher
and her teaching."
TEEM focuses on early grades,
from preschool through 5th grade,
and targets high-poverty and English-learner populations; Boulder
Ridge Elementary, for example,

has 75 percent low-income and 18 percent English-learner students. The
project is still collecting baseline
data and has not yet evaluated its
impact, but Madeline Jetter, the
lead researcher for the project at
CSUSB, noted that after the first
year, teachers' instructional styles
are changing; classes are having
more complex discussions of underlying math concepts, and teachers are asking students to come up
with more diverse ways to solve
problems. That, in turn, may help
students be better prepared to
tackle complex word problems and
prealgebra later on.

Lessons Up Close
During one lesson last month,
Deana Whyde's 1st grade class at
Boulder Ridge Elementary here
crowded on the carpet around a
whiteboard marked with two groups
of black dots. "We're going to really
test our math brains today," Whyde
said. "Who can tell me if these two
groups have the same value?"
She led the class through the
dots, which were aligned differently in each group, to decide that
the groups were equal, then talked
about the use of the equal sign to
show the same value. Within a few
minutes, the students-more than
a third of whom are English-learners-had moved from grouping dots
to pondering the "number sentence"
6+5=10+_.
One by one, students talked
through what the sentence was trying to say-which numbers should
be counted in a group, which groups
should be compared with each
other-and then talked each other
through the steps to find the answer. After going through two problems together, the children paired
off with sets of tokens and counting
frames to work through a series of
equations together.
Afterwards, Whyde sat down with
a handful of other 1st grade teach-

8 | EDUCATION WEEK | February 8, 2017 | www.edweek.org

ers and math instructional aides
from her own and others' schools,
who had watched her with the class,
to talk through what happened.
Vicky Kukuruda, a co-director of
the TEEM project for the Riverside
County office of education, saw that
one student consistently added the
larger of two numbers to the smaller
one rather than the reverse; for example, for 3+7, he marked three to-

their particular students to learn."
Later, one group member teaches
the lesson to a class while the rest
observe, and the group later discusses what worked and didn't. In
the final part, another participant
teaches the revised lesson for a
different class in the same grade.
Afterward, the whole group again
discusses differences between the
classes in what worked.

We don't often get to ... talk about instruction.
Teachers don't go in at break and say, 'Help me
figure out what went wrong in this lesson.'"
VICKY KUKURUDA
Co-director, TEEM Project

kens and then counted up, getting
the correct answer of 10 but taking
about twice as long as his peers.
Whyde planned to contrast the two
methods of counting during the next
class to help the boy understand
how to speed up.

Cycles of Teaching
The activity was the culmination of one round of TEEM's lesson study-a Japanese model of
teacher professional development
involving cycles of lesson planning
and teaching.
Jetter assigned 69 general and
special education teachers, instructional coaches, and aides into small
teams by grade level. Each group
first discussed research around a
particular topic in the state's new
math standards, such as understanding the equal sign or base-10
counting, and planned a lesson on it.
"Teachers need to set the goals
together," Jetter said. "They look at
the standards they know are challenging to teach or challenging for

The cycles of lesson planning give
teachers the opportunity to compare
different approaches for different
types of students.
"We don't often get to stop in this
profession and talk about instruction," Kukuruda said. "Teachers
don't go in at break and say, 'Help
me figure out what went wrong in
this lesson.' "
Yet Whyde also noted that the
discussions often reveal differences
in how students have been taught
to approach math by parents or
schools in other countries. (Most of
the school's English-learners come
from Mexican immigrant families.)
"It's a valid way, so you honor the
way," Whyde said.
Watching different classes respond to the same lesson also
shows teachers how common ELL
instructional approaches can backfire in math. "How many pencils
altogether? Some teachers will say
whenever you see 'all together' it
means add up all the numbers," Jetter said. "But there are many examples where it may not be that" which

could confuse English-learners. "We
want students to really understand
the problem."

Math Journals
TEEM also adapts science-labstyle journals to give students more
practice writing about and reflecting
on their math learning.
"When principals walk through the
classrooms and want to know what
the class is doing, the quickest way
to do that is to ask a child to see his
notebook," Kukuruda said, "because
that should have a record of the
teacher's teaching and the student's
learning."
The notebooks also help teachers
provide additional support for young
children and those with limited English skills. One kindergarten teacher
takes photos of her pupils' work
with blocks or other manipulatives
to paste into their notebooks to help
them remember what they can't yet
write down. As students progress
from grade to grade, they practice
writing down and "showing their
work" for word problems and writing
their reflections on what they learn,
what confused them, and what questions they have each day.
"Teaching students how to journal, so that all their thoughts are
in one place, makes it easier as the
year goes on," said Debbie Baadilla,
a 1st grade teacher at neighboring
Harvest Valley Elementary and a
member of Whyde's TEEM group.
She has found students often go back
through their notebooks to remind
themselves of how to solve particular problems. "It's their time management, their document management.
It's not just about math; it's about
putting everything together."
Coverage of early-math education
is supported in part by a grant
from the CME Group Foundation,
at www.cmegroupfoundation.org.
Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.

http://www.cmegroupfoundation.org http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - February 8, 2017

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