As you know, I call myself the Recovering Traditionalist, but I’ve never really explained what that is.

I’m Christina Tondevold, the Recovering Traditionalist, and I hope you’ll stick around as we take a look at the journey to becoming a Recovering Traditionalist in our quest to build our math minds so we can build the math minds of our students.

Watch the video below or read the transcript:

Now where this term started was back when I was getting my master’s degree at Boise State University. My supervising professor called the group of us there Recovering Traditionalists, because he was trying to help us see mathematics and the teaching of mathematics through a nontraditional way, and we would always talk about how we’re struggling because we were taught so traditionally. We had that mindset of, this is just so hard. And he would say no, you’re just Recovering Traditionalists.

We are recovering from our traditional ways, but we can change and we can grow. Now, I can sit back, it’s been 16 years since I graduated with my master’s degree, and I’ve wanted to reflect upon the things that I learned that helped me along my journey to becoming a Recovering Traditionalist, and I’m going to share that with you today so that you can see what the path is like, because many of you are on this same path, you just don’t call yourself a Recovering Traditionalist, and I want to give you the okay to call yourself a Recovering Traditionalist.

Now, I have to say though, I did meet someone here recently that, she said, I don’t call myself a Recovering Traditionalist because I never was a traditionalist to begin with. So her learning of mathematics even when she was a child was very nontraditional. So she didn’t have to combat that when she went into teaching. Now for the rest of us, most of us learned mathematics in a very traditional way.

Now we learned it in our own way, the way that worked for us, right? Now we are in charge of helping a whole classroom of students every single year, and every single year that classroom is different, and we have to find a way to help them make sense of mathematics in a way that wasn’t traditionally taught. This is a tough road to go down. So, here’s my seven areas.

#1 Equity & Access for ALL Students

Now the first area is honestly not the first area I started with. It’s Equity and Access for ALL of our students. Now, this is something that we should be taking a look at no matter what, but unfortunately it’s only been the last few years that this has become something in the forefront that people are talking about and saying it needs to be one of the big things that we are looking at. And I’ll be honest in my teaching, it wasn’t, right? Number one, I am from Idaho, and our populations are not that different. We definitely had differences in socioeconomic status, we have differences in cognitive ability. All of those other areas, but providing equity and access for all of your students is all different areas. It’s because of race, it’s because of home lives. It is because of socioeconomic status.

All the different areas where our students are different, oftentimes mathematics seems like it’s splitting our kids and making them not feel included. So the biggest area that no matter where you’re at along your journey to becoming a Recovering Traditionalist, the thing that I want to encourage you to do is always be reflecting upon your practice as to whether or not this is including my students or excluding groups of students. That is the number-one thing to be looking at. And sometimes, some of the practices that we’re trying to implement may seem new to us and they may seem like we’re doing something that’s going to be great for our students, but is it great for all of our students? That’s something we need to have in the forefront of our mind, not something that we are thinking about afterwards.

As we’re reflecting, that should be one of the first things that we are looking at. So number one is again providing equity and access for all of our students, and all the different ways that our students are different within the same grade level that we teach.

#2 Procedural Understanding

Number two is helping to build your own Procedural Understanding. If you have struggled with mathematics your whole life, being a teacher, that just comes out even more. So we have to face it and look at our own procedural understanding.

I’m not just talking about the traditional procedures, I’m talking about new procedures, new strategies that we’re being asked to help our students be able to understand. If we don’t understand those strategies and procedures, we can’t help our students understand them. So our second one again is procedural understanding.

#3 Conceptual Understanding

The third one is once we have those procedures down, we need to build our Conceptual Understanding of that. And that’s the difference. What we’re doing is the procedures, conceptual is why, why does that work.

If I’m doing this strategy, why does that work and when should I ever use it? Yes, I can add by rounding, I can make the numbers friendly, but when should I, right? When it’s 299 + 387, that might make sense to round 299 to 300. But if I’m doing 256 + 387, does that make sense to round? I don’t know, maybe it does to you, but maybe it doesn’t to somebody else.

So the conceptual understanding is building that understanding of why these things work and when we should use the procedures and strategies that we are teaching our students.

#4 Theory of Math Education

Okay, so number four is Theory of Math Education.  Once we can do the math, we understand the math, we also need to understand the theories of how kids learn that stuff.

So we have to dig into some research that shows. How do we develop these things for our students and then use that research to make decisions about our instructional practice?  Which leads into number five, which is implementing the ideas.

#5 Implementing the Ideas

I’m a researcher at heart, I love reading books, you can see all these books behind me. I love to read, I love to learn, but if you’re not actually implementing and changing your teaching, what are we doing all this research for?

And understanding the theory, it doesn’t matter if you don’t actually go back to your classroom and make that change. So many of us know the research, we know what the right thing to do is, but we don’t go do it in the classroom. So again, number five is to actually take those ideas and start implementing, implementing is never perfect, you’re not going to have this wonderful lesson that just goes awesome and you’re like, oh, it worked exactly as the book had said.

So we often get discouraged because when we go to implement, it doesn’t work that great. So implementation is definitely a big process filled with ups and downs, but don’t let those downs keep you stuck, just keep moving forward. Try a little bit at a time.

#6 Building Math Connections

Now number six is about making Math Connections. Because what we typically will do is we will start doing all the first five for our grade level. So if you teach third grade, you’ll do all the first five that I mentioned for third grade content, which is awesome, because that’s what you need at the time. But we also know that in education, we never tend to stay in that one grade level. And we don’t have kids even at third grade who are all at third grade level. So even if you’re teaching third grade, you still need to understand what comes before and what comes after.

So building math connections is a little bit about that vertical connection about what we’re doing in our grade level and how it connects to above you and below you. But it’s also about building the connections within your grade level. So oftentimes in mathematics, we learn things in isolation. But in each grade level, there is math content that is interwoven, and unfortunately oftentimes it is taught in isolation, but if you can build those connections for yourself about how the content at your grade level is connected, then you can help your students build those connections as well.

#7 Leading The Change

Alright, our last one is Leading The Change. Once you get this knowledge, don’t keep it to yourself. Start sharing it, be vocal about the changes you’re making and how it’s impacted not only your teaching, but your students’ learning.

Oftentimes, as you progress through these stages of becoming a Recovering Traditionalist, you get asked to be a math coach. But even if you don’t, be a math mentor. Start sharing with your grade level and the other grade levels at your school.

You’re doing a disservice to keep it to yourself.

Oftentimes, we have what’s known as the imposter syndrome. Who am I to share this information?

Seriously, me sharing this information with you, totally would never have expected this from me. But, and then when I first started it, I had this, “who am I to share this? Who wants to learn from me? Who wants to listen to me.”  

But you have to know that you are, even if you’re just one step ahead of somebody else, you can be a mentor to bring that person to the next stage, right? If you have gone through all of the stages I’ve talked about before, you can help the people who are one, two, three, four, five stages below you.

Don’t feel like you don’t know anything. You know stuff and you’re continually learning, that’s for sure, but don’t be stingy about sharing your knowledge. This was what prompted me to do what I’m doing now, is that for a few years when I was getting my master’s degree, I was part of a project that was doing professional development out in schools. Well when I finished my master’s, I went back into my own classroom and I was loving it. I got to take everything that I had learned and was doing it in my classroom. But I had a conversation with a teacher who was part of the professional development stuff that we had been doing during my master’s, and she said something to me that really struck me and changed my path. She said “Christina, I know you love having your classroom and making a change for your students there, but when you do professional development for teachers, you’re not making a change for 30 students, you’re making a change for 30 or 40 teachers who then are making that change in their classroom for their group of 30 students, and the next year of 30 students, and the next year.”

Once you get this knowledge, when you share it, the impact becomes so much greater. And it’s not just about your own internal learning or helping your own students, it becomes being able to make the change more widespread so that again, everybody has that equity and access to this knowledge. When you keep it to yourself, you’re not providing that access to everybody else that’s out there who could use this information.

So, from that moment, I knew that I needed to help teachers learn the stuff that I had learned, and I hope that this video will help you along your path and then when you get to that end of the path, which really there never is, because you can always learn more. But whenever you’re at, at that stage, and you see someone who might need some of the knowledge you have, be free to share it, and say, “I don’t know it all, I’m learning along the way just with you, but here’s something that I’ve learned along the way that might be able to help you.”

And I hope that through this blog, well it’s now a vlog, it’s turned into a video series, The Recovering Traditionalist, that I’m able to help you on your journey to becoming a Recovering Traditionalist. So thank you so much, I hope that this video has helped you build your math mind, so you can go build the math minds of your students, have a great day.

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