This past week I had the privilege to attend the Standards Institute in Orlando. I went in not knowing what to expect, but it ended up being one of the best conferences I have ever attended. It was five days spent immersed with other educators who have a desire to see equity in education, recognizing our biases, and learning how to make equity a reality in our own classrooms and schools.
It was a lot. It was five 8 hour days, mostly spent with our little cohort of subject area teachers. My group of educators helped push me, encourage me, and challenge me throughout the week. Our facilitators were knowledgeable, lovingly challenging, and extremely helpful. Working with them this week has been a great reminder of how I want my students to feel in my classroom!
It was a lot. It was five 8 hour days, mostly spent with our little cohort of subject area teachers. My group of educators helped push me, encourage me, and challenge me throughout the week. Our facilitators were knowledgeable, lovingly challenging, and extremely helpful. Working with them this week has been a great reminder of how I want my students to feel in my classroom!
The Standards Institute is put on by UnboundEd. Our main focus for the week was equity. We had several amazing keynote speakers speak on this, and during the day, we talked about how to make our schools equitable.
These five charges served as a basis for our week together:
- Adopt aligned curriculum.
- Attend to the language of the standards.
- Talk about race systematically.
- Examine bias and its role in our work and learning.
- Commit to adaptive change within the shifts.
Throughout the week, we discussed the need for a standards-aligned, rigorous curriculum. Without those things, we couldn't really talk about having equitable instruction. On the other hand, we could have a standards aligned and rigorous curriculum all we wanted, but if we weren't willing to stop and recognize our biases and confront systemic racism, it wouldn't really matter.
As my coworker said when we were talking later, we need to ask ourselves, "Would we teach this same way and these same things if we were teaching at a different school?" And I can tell you that if I was being honest, there are a lot of times when my answer to that would have been no. The CEO, Lacey Robinson, talked in her keynote on the first day of our tendency to "love our kids dumb". We love them so much that we think we need to make things easier for them and do things for them. But that is exactly the kind of practice that leads to more inequity in our schools.
I have to start by recognizing that I am a white female who grew up with college educated parents, never had to worry about money, and always had a safety net to fall back on. When people see me, they make very different assumptions than when they see my Latinx students. But I have to recognize that despite our very different backgrounds, both I and my students have brilliance inside us. We both deserve to be see as people who can and will contribute to society. And we both deserve the absolute best opportunities.
I imagine it will take me a while to process all of the feelings and things I learned this week. But I want to share one thing that will be impacting by teaching practice immediately. I want to talk about rigor. You've heard the word. You've probably heard it a lot, actually. It's a popular educational buzzword. But for the first time, I feel like I can accurately identify rigorous tasks and help other people identify and create them as well. This week we define rigor as having 3 parts, all equally important. You can see in the picture below that we used a stool to represent this:
As you can see on the poster, we spent a lot of time looking at the big focus standards for each course, the coherence of the curriculum, and the rigor of the tasks. We spent a LOT of time working on rigor. We identified rigor as a balance of:
- Conceptual understanding
- Procedural skills and fluency
- Application
We learned how to analyze the standards to pick out which ones were meant to be more conceptual, procedural, and application problems. We did tasks from EngageNY, and identified the types of rigor in the tasks. We talked about the importance of this balance for our students. I was reminded that procedural work is OKAY and even GOOD sometimes for our students, but it can't be the majority. We were also constantly reminded that rigorous does not mean harder. Good rigorous tasks are often low floor, high ceiling tasks. And beyond that, rigorous means that the task must be on grade level. Our students deserve grade level instruction. Giving students something below their grade level doesn't help them to grow, but giving them something way ahead of their grade level doesn't help either. And obviously, we need to be providing scaffolding along the way to help students make connections. We understand that a lot of our students have unfinished learning from previous math courses, and we need to remedy that along the way. But there are equitable ways to do that, and using grade-level, rigorous tasks is a great way to start. (And if you're looking for some rigorous tasks to start with, EngageNY and Illustrative Math both have some great tasks to check out.)
In the future, I'll write a blog post about how to better serve our students with unfinished learning and how that looks when it's built into our curriculum. But for now, my focus is rigor. And we have to remember the reason we're doing this: EQUITY. As a colleague in my session pointed out, if we teach these things without the background of equity, it is just seen as a "best practice", and will be forgotten and pushed aside. But if we come from a background of equity, we see that these things are needed in our schools and in our classrooms.
I'd love to hear your experience with rigorous tasks in your classroom, and the difference that it has made for your students.
Here are some AMAZING resources I learned about this week. Check them out if you haven't already!
- Remediation guide to help students with unfinished learning (Kindgerarten through Algebra 2!): https://www.louisianabelieves.com/resources/library/k-12-math-year-long-planning
- Coherence map, super helpful when trying to find coherence across the curriculum, plus they have tasks for each standard!: https://achievethecore.org/coherence-map/
- Math Language Routines (a must see resource, especially if you have ELL students): https://achievethecore.org/aligned/developing-math-language-routines/
- The organization that put on the Standards Institute (they have two sessions this summer!): https://www.unbounded.org/
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