Making Math Irresistible: 4 Expert Strategies for Student Engagement in Elementary Math

Transcript

Making Math Irresistible: 4 Expert Strategies for Student Engagement in Elementary Math

If you’ve ever struggled with student engagement in math class – and let’s be honest, who hasn’t? – this episode is for you. We’re going to look at four different perspectives on engagement: the psychology behind it, practical strategies for implementation, digital tools, and ways to leverage the technology students are already using.  These perspectives come from 4 of our Virtual Math Summit presenters. If you are listening to this episode, I’d actually highly recommend going over to YouTube (YouTube.com/BuildMathMinds) to watch it because many of the presentations I’m sharing show visuals that you are missing out on if you just listen.  Plus, one of the presenters I’m sharing today I actually got an email about from another presenter asking me how I got Ryan Gosling to present at a math conference…so come on over and see if you think one of our presenters is Ryan’s doppelganger.

Also, don’t forget to go to VirtualMathSummit.com to get 10 days to watch all of these sessions.  If you’ve already registered, but you are thinking you’d like more than 10 days to watch, go to VirtualMathSummit.com/upgrade to see your options for extended access.

Let’s get started with something that might shock you – or maybe not, depending on your experience with students and mathematics. Here’s Dr. Raj Shah:

“You may not know this, this is a fact that surprised me and also motivates me. And that is that 56% of kids would rather eat broccoli than do math. And what does that say? Well A) that says that math is losing to broccoli and if we are losing broccoli we got problems.”

That statistic is both humorous and heartbreaking. But Dr. Shah doesn’t just present the problem – he offers a lot of fascinating solutions based on video game design principles. He explains that game designers have mastered the art of engagement, and we can learn from them.  It’s not about the technology they use, it’s about the psychology they use.  Let’s listen into a few ideas he shares based on the psychology of the game Tetris.

“That is agonizingly slow! Why would a video game designer choose to do this? So that every single person who picks up this game has a chance to make sense of it, right? Level 1 of Tetris is what I call this. Ridiculously easy. Then pieces will come down a little bit faster, a little bit faster, a little bit faster, till they’re coming down exactly right speed for me and that is when the game gets so fun! Because now I know I can play this game. And I’m on the edge of my seat and I’m literally getting dopamine hits to my brain. And dopamine is the chemical that makes you want to play the game over and over and over again. How does it work? It works because it starts off really, really, easy and then builds up slowly. And that means that I start to feel like I’m capable. And when I have, when the game seems fair, and I have hope of success I will keep playing. That is the key, okay? If the first time I play this game it was on Level 16, the pieces came down like this, what would I do? I would quit. And that is the correct human thing to do. No amount of growth mindset should convince you you should keep going. This is not a fair game. You should quit, okay? So when we see our students not engaging at math they might actually be telling us not ‘I’m lazy’ but ‘I feel like I’m on level 16.’ Just doesn’t even make sense to try at this point. So when we start an experience, we’ve got to start at Level 1 Tetris so everyone feels like they can make their first step into the puzzle, the game, the math, right? And keep in mind that Level 1 for one person is not Level 1 for another person. So it’s got to be Level 1 for everybody in the room. Cool. So now we’re playing this game, we feel like we can be successful, we’re getting dopamine hits. But then how does every game of Tetris end? It ends with the pieces stacked up to the top and you lost. So this is one of the most addictive games ever made and yet people don’t consider themselves losers even though they lose every time they play. Because you can just play the game again. And when the game seems fair, you’ll play again and again and again. And so we want math to feel like that. Like I can keep playing. I can keep going. Yes, I made a mistake. Yes this isn’t right yet. But I can just keep going. And if we’re working collaboratively then WE can keep going. Because replays are free. So creating more time & space for kids to keep going, to be okay with making mistakes, and to play again.”

This idea of starting with accessible entry points is crucial. Think about your own students – how many times have they shut down before even starting because the task seemed too overwhelming?  I love what he said about no amount of Growth Mindset will get us to engage in something that seems un-win-able.

But making math accessible doesn’t mean it has to be easy. It’s about creating opportunities for all students to engage and increase to their level. This brings us to our next presenter, Kristin Acosta, who is enthusiastic about using pictures as a way to get everyone into the mathematics at Dr. Shah’s Level 1 Tetris and to engage students in mathematical thinking.

“I love using great visuals especially in my classroom. I think it engages the kids. It, you know, starts a conversation. they become excited, they become curious, and overall I mean we’re just grabbing their attention.”

What I love about the ideas Kristin shares in her session is how it naturally differentiates instruction and you will see students at Level 4 or 5 in Tetris (to steal Dr. Shah’s terminology again) while others might be at Level 1. Listen to this example where she expected kids to be at Level 1 but got something different:

“All right, so quick anecdote of another reason why I love to show pictures. Pictures can really bring out some background. I am known for a routine called Clothesline Math and I put this particular image on a one of my Clothesline cards. And I showed a child who was in kindergarten, yah 5 years old, this picture and I said ‘What do you think this picture represents?’  Now I fully expected to hear ‘oh it’s a four-leaf clover because there are four leaves.’ This child told me that this picture represents eight. She saw it because there were eight halves! Holy smokes, I love that answer! I absolutely love that answer. What’s great about you know showing this, especially to kindergarten, is I’ve got a little bit of a background knowledge of you know what she knows or that she can at least identity what a half is. So this is the main reason why I take pictures and you know I continue to take pictures. Because of this one story, because you never know what kind of information you’re going to get from a child.  You never know what perspective a child has and you know showing pictures and getting them to talk about it really helps out with this.”

That’s such a powerful example of how one simple image can elicit different levels of mathematical thinking and give you insight into their mathematical understandings. 

You all know that I love using visuals in math but another one of my favorite ways to get kids engaged in math is through the use of manipulatives.  However, I know they can be a big pain to actually use. Not only the managing of storing and distributing them but once kids get them, they often use them as toys instead of tools. 

 If you’ve not been using manipulatives for those reasons, I’d like you to try out digital manipulatives.  My favorite place for digital manipulatives is BrainingCamp.com.  I love their live feature that allows you to see all your students working with the digital manipulatives on your screen, I love the Share Codes they have with math activities they have already built for you to use, but I also just love the people who own and work for BrainingCamp.  Every year I try to have at least one session from them.  They don’t pay me to have a session at the summit, but they are very generous and give 6 months of access for free to all the educators who register for the summit. I get nothing, except knowing I’m getting these amazing tools into the fingertips of educators and their students.  Jeff Gobin is doing the session for BrainingCamp this year and I absolutely love how through his entire presentation he’s showing how to use the digital manipulatives but then connecting it to more formal math strategies and procedures. I chose this clip of his because he is talking about one of the operations kids are the most disconnected to: division. In this clip he shows how you can use the BrainingCamp tools to engage your students with a math concept they don’t usually enjoy but also connect it to the formal procedure we are expected to teach them.

“You can see that we have two problems on the screen. I’m going to work out the first example without making any connections to the standard algorithm. We are just going to work it out conceptually. If you have never modeled division conceptually like this with your students, I cannot recommend it enough. So many students get turned off by division because the algorithm does not make sense to them. I used to introduce division like this in my model lessons as a math specialist and I’ve watched several fourth grade teachers have light bulb moments. This is not New Math, this is just making an incredibly abstract concept visual for your students. We are going to start by dividing our 3 hundreds using the break feature modeled earlier. It is going to be super helpful for this task. And now we have 12 tens that we are dividing equally between our two groups so each group gets six. Next we will divide our 6 ones, so each group gets 3. And now you can see the quotient of 163. For the second problem, we are going to pause between each step and make connections with the standard algorithm. First we’ll divide the 8 hundreds between the four groups so they each get two. Next I’m going to grab the pen tool and change the color to green so I can annotate where we see the division problem. So we just gave each group two. We already shared 8 and as you can see on the screen there are zero green hundreds remaining. I’m going to change the color of the pen to magenta. The step of ‘Bringing Down The Next Digit’ is so abstract for kids. Here they can actually see the magenta colored discs that we will be dividing next. All right so we’ll go ahead and continue dividing our tens, so each group will get one. We’ll go ahead and finish the algorithm steps. So we have subtracted four and we have one remaining which you can see on the screen. We’ll go ahead and break up our 10. Grab our marker so we can identify now that we have 12 ones that we’re working with. So I’m bringing down that two. And the last step, we’re going to take those 12 ones and divide them into 4 equal groups. I’m going to speed up this section of the video. We all know 12 divided 4 is 3. And there you can see the answer of 213.”

The beauty of these tools is that they allow students to visualize and interact with mathematical concepts in ways that kids don’t get when we just focus on repeating back algorithms.  You are using these tools to engage students while building that conceptual understanding and connecting it to those formal algorithms. Now you don’t have to use digital manipulatives, you can use physical ones, but the reality is that kids now are very much engaged by digital items.  Whether you like it or not, kids are using online resources.

In fact, in \’s session, he shares some eye-opening research about students’ learning habits:

“One of the research studies that it had to analyze for my dissertation, they did a study of students and if they went to view YouTube like to learn stuff for their classes. The study found that over 90% of students had gone to YouTube to learn something to help supplement the learning in their class whether the teacher ever recommended it or not. Did you hear that? Students are going to YouTube, over 90% of your students will go to YouTube to get help for your class whether you ever mention it or not.”

Think about that for a moment – our students are already seeking out additional help online and they go to one of their main sources for engagement: YouTube. And let’s be honest here, he said 90% of students but depending upon your grade level it’s probably more like their parents who are doing the searching on YouTube. But there’s an important caveat to them using YouTube:

“There was another study. I’m sorry, I’m just gonna keep reciting studies. There was another study, they analyzed the Top 100 YouTube videos on this important medical topic. You know how many of those videos were actually done by medical professionals? A third! 33% of the videos, out of the top 100 videos, on a hugely important medical topic, only a third were done by actual medical professionals. What does this mean for us? It means our students, over 90%, are going to YouTube to learn stuff for your class and they have a one-in-three chance of getting it done by someone who knows what they’re talking about.”

This presents us with both a challenge and an opportunity. We can either ignore that our students are going to YouTube for help, or we can embrace it and guide them toward quality content that actually supports their learning. 

Let’s pull all of these ideas together. From Dr. Shah, we learn that engagement requires the right level of challenge and student agency. From Kristin Acosta, we see how visual elements can create natural entry points to engage students in mathematical discussions. Jeff Gobin shows us how digital manipulatives can make abstract concepts concrete as a way to get all learners interacting with the mathematics. And Tyler Tarver (AKA Ryan Gosling’s doppelganger) helps us understand how to leverage the platforms our students (and their parents) are already using.

Here are four actionable takeaways you can implement tomorrow:

1. Start with accessible entry points – make sure every student can get started
2. Use images to spark mathematical conversations
3. Incorporate digital tools to help students visualize and explore concepts
4. Guide students and parents toward quality online resources that support the learning

These are just a small sample of what you’ll learn in their full session. Head to VirtualMathSummit.com to get registered so you can watch these sessions and many more. Plus don’t forget that anyone who is registered for the summit gets a code for 6 months of access to BrainingCamp, the digital manipulatives website Jeff Gobin uses in his session.  So go get registered!

Remember, engagement isn’t just about making math fun – though that’s certainly part of it. It’s about creating opportunities for every student to access, explore, and succeed in mathematics. We need to meet students where they are, whether that’s through pictures, manipulatives, or digital content, and guide them toward deeper mathematical understanding.

Until next week, my fellow Recovering Traditionalists, keep letting your students explore math, keep questioning, and most importantly, keep Building Math Minds.