Each month I address a hot topic inside the free Build Math Minds Facebook group.  For those of you not in the group, or maybe you missed it, I thought I’d share it here as well.  In the training, I discussed Allowing Student Thinking in Math by Changing the Way We Grade.

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Build Math Minds Facebook group

Math Content Standards 

Math Practice Standards

One of the biggest changes in math education is moving from the type of teaching that is “listen to my directions and follow those steps on every problem after” to a type of teaching math that is more about letting kids use their own thinking processes to come up with the answers to problems.

But it is a hard change.

One of the ways that can be the most challenging to change is in our grading.

My dad loves to tell the story about his junior high math teacher who graded an entire page of math problems as incorrect because he didn’t solve it the way the teacher wanted.  He had every answer correct but his work was not done in the way the teacher had shown in class.

We like to think that we aren’t that teacher but unfortunately the textbooks aren’t helping us out.  With this shift in helping kids have different strategies and ways to solve problems, textbooks will do things like “solve this using a number bond.”  That really is just like my dad’s teacher saying it had to be done the way they showed in class.

I get that we want to expose kids to different models and strategies.  I’m fine with that.  But if a kid wants to solve it another way, that should be allowed and even encouraged to do that.

Inside the Build Math Minds Facebook group we’ve had a few recent posts that show how some teachers are following what a textbook says instead of allowing student thinking in the work.

Now I know these posts don’t mean that every teacher is doing this kind of stuff, but these posts bring up an opportunity for us all to reflect upon how much we are allowing the textbook to dictate our students’ strategies and how much we are allowing our students to dictate their own strategies.

Post #1:

For a young kid, this problem is 10 – ____ = 6, it is not 10-6=_____.  The textbook wants the kids to pull out the information they know, the 10 and 6, and then subtract those…but that’s not what the problem is.  

So my advice from this post is let’s remember that it isn’t about what the textbook wants, it’s about helping our students become flexible problem solvers.  If they get to the answer but in a different way than the textbook, it’s okay….especially when the kids’ solution strategy is based upon understanding, not just plucking out numbers and operating.

Post #2:

Even though the textbook had a different answer, you can see the great thinking and process this kid went through.  Most of the comments on this post were about how it doesn’t say that they have to make 2-digit numbers and that the question is poorly written.

Teri made a good point in the comments saying that’s why she loves it when students share their work and thinking because it’s an opportunity to reveal any blind spots to different interpretations.

So by allowing student thinking in mathematics, not only do you get to see how kids might approach solving a problem differently, it helps us reveal how problems can be interpreted by different people.

As a parting thought, I want to remind you that we have our Math Content Standards that tell us the types of math content kids need to learn at each grade level, but here in the United States we also have the Math Practice Standards.  The practice standards tell us how kids should engage with the mathematics.

The students whose work was shared in those Facebook posts were engaging in those practice standards.  

They were making sense of problems and persevering in solving them.  

They were reasoning abstractly and quantitatively.  

They were looking for and making use of structure.

Yes, kids need to get correct answers but we also want them to engage in these math practice standards while they work on problems.  It isn’t about following what the textbook says needs to be done.  Building Math Minds is about allowing students to think through and solve problems in a way that makes sense to them….even if it isn’t the way we would do it or the way that the textbook wants them to do it.

I hope this has helped you build your math mind so you can build the math minds of your students!

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