Why I Hate Math Pacing Guides

Teaching Mathematics | 0 comments

Recently I have had multiple emails from people who follow me, asking, how do they balance the need between building number sense yet keeping up with their pacing guide? Now, I have to tell you that this is an area in education that really irks me.

Watch the video or read the transcript below:

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Why We Have Pacing Guides

Now I want to start off with first understanding why we have pacing guides to begin with. I know that some of you have pacing guides, some of you don’t, so you may have never had the really horrible experience with using a pacing guide. And then some of you might have had great experiences with pacing guides.

The general idea of a pacing guide started off with the best of intentions, which all things do, don’t they? But the idea was, to give teachers a guide of how and where their students should be by the end of the year, so that we could help ensure equity for all of our students. There were a lot of times where even in the same building and same grade level, kids would be getting very different experiences around mathematics based upon what the teacher decided to teach and what they decided not to teach. And so districts started to implement these pacing guides to ensure that no child be left behind.

The nice part of a pacing guide is that it does give us a guide to follow. That is really helpful if you are coming into a grade you’ve never taught before. Or you’re a brand new teacher, and it’s your first year teaching, and you’re like, “I don’t even know where to start.” Because as elementary teachers, we have to teach everything. We are responsible for language arts, for math, for science, for social studies, and some of you also have to do art and music. So it’s hard to be able to know everything that you need to teach and the correct order to teach it in. So these guides are meant to be able to help you to know where to start and where to go throughout the year.

What To Do Instead

The downside of the pacing guide, and why I think they suck, is that most of them are not truly a guide. Most of them have been turned into: Be On This Page, On This Date. Now if you have a guide that is truly a guide, pop in the comments and let us know, because it is really hard to find districts where the pacing guide is seen as a guide. It is often pushed on teachers that you have to follow this or else.

The other reason I really dislike math pacing guides is that they have turned into not this idea of here’s where we need to guide the kids, but here’s where we need them in order to perform on our state exams. Now, I get the pressure, and I’ve talked about this in other videos. I know that some of you have really big pressure to get your students to perform, and that’s another reason why I hate this whole environment around education. It is not focused on what is best for our students, learning, it is just to get the score on the test. And we’ve got to start standing up in all of these areas to say this isn’t right for our students.

One of the big things that has happened because of this state testing and these pacing guides is that other areas of education are starting to get pushed out. So we have pacing guides for language arts and for mathematics because those are the two big areas that are tested. Now science has started coming around for certain grade levels, and those teachers are feeling the pressure there, but for a lot of grades, science and social studies have been basically pushed out. Or they’ve been told to integrate science and social studies into language arts and mathematics because teachers are fully using their time during the day to teach language arts and math in order to keep up with the pacing guide and to get their students ready for state exams.

And that my friends, is not what we went into teaching to do. You guys know it, you guys are emailing me constantly, saying, “How do I balance this need of what I know is best for my students, versus what’s coming at me from my district?” And it is time that we start stepping up and saying, this is not good for our students.

You guys know your students. You’ve gotta rise up and say, this is not what’s best. Because another big thing that ends up happening as teachers especially in mathematics, is that we go back to that traditional way of teaching. Because we feel the pressure of teaching all of this content by the end of the year. Let’s face it, the traditional way of teaching math, of “I’m just going to tell you how to do this concept”, is way faster than letting your students explore and discover different ways to think about it.

That kind of teaching takes time. And you feel the pressure to keep going and keep going and you don’t have the time, so you fall back into that traditional style of teaching. So, that’s why I want to help encourage you, because I see so many teachers knowing this is the best thing for my students, but we go back to old ways because of the pressures that are put on us.

Why Math Guides Suck

So what can we do instead? Let’s focus in on that piece, okay?

Now I want you to think for a moment of the true meaning of a guide. Let’s say that we were going on a trip somewhere where we’ve never been, and we hire a guide to take us around to show us where to go, which is basically in my mind what a pacing guide should be doing. Or let’s call it instead of a pacing guide, a curriculum guide, okay, whatever you want to call it. Some districts call it a scope and sequence, but it’s basically telling us this is where we need to go and how much time we should spend on this concept.

But the idea of a tour guide is to be able to take you to those high points, show you the wonderful spots that you don’t want to miss if you’re traveling somewhere, and they kind of keep you on pace, right? We’re going to spend this amount of time here, and then we’re going over here, to ensure that you get the high points of your trip. Now a good guide should also allow for some flexibility. So if they’re noticing they’ve got a whole group in the tour who love art and museums, they’re going to spend more time at that area. Or if they have a tour group who loves more of the historic architecture, they will take them to those high points.

The same is true for our curriculum guides. They should be guiding us to those high points, those really interesting points, the points in mathematics that are super important for our students at that particular grade level. It should help us navigate those waters to know what the journey is for this group of kids, and tell us, these are the high points, these are spots you may need to watch out for, because kids are known to maybe not have a lot of fluency in this area, whatever it might be, and how that impacts our ability to complete that journey. Now that is what a guide really, truly should be for us in education. And if you have a great guide like that, then by all means, go with it. But if you have a guide that is like; I don’t care if you want to spend more time here, we gotta move on, we gotta move on, we gotta move on…that is not how you want to spend a vacation, and it is not how we want to spend our time teaching our students, especially in mathematics, and we’ve got to stand up to this.

You guys know that I’m a math person, but I know a lot of the other subjects have these as well, and when you have that for every single one of your subjects and you have that pressure every single day when you’re teaching, that does not make teaching fun. This is one of the areas where teachers start to feel like, this is not why I got into teaching! So I want to help you be able to say this is the way we want our guide to be. It’s not that you have to say, “No, I’m not doing it,” right? It’s the same thing with our students, and our kids, right?

We want to help them be able to express what don’t they like about this situation, and how can we change it. So I would like you to be able to look at your guide that your district has given you and look at the good parts of it. What parts are good? And what parts could maybe be fine-tuned to make it feel more like a guide?

In this article from ASCD, that was actually published back in 2008, so it’s been a while, that talks about pacing guides. One of the lines that I love from that is that it talks about how, if you slow down, you risk not covering everything. If you speed up, you sacrifice building that depth of knowledge. So teaching is an art and a science altogether, and it’s hard if mathematics has not been your specialty, to know that fine balance. So whether you have a curriculum guide or not, it is nice to have a guide of some kind.

So a couple of things that I want to encourage you to do to help ensure that you create or have the type of guide that I just talked about:

#1: I want you to become informed. We do the best with the knowledge we have at the time, so the only way we get better is by learning more.

The first thing to do is to join professional organizations, and the one in education that I highly recommend is NCTM, which is the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and read articles. NCTM publishes great articles about the best teaching practices. And other resources, it doesn’t have to be NCTM, just get informed. If you want to change something about mathematics, you have to become informed about it.

Going to conferences is another great way. Taking online courses, I’m a little partial to that, because I teach online courses, but I don’t care how you get your knowledge, just go get ya some. Another big piece is comparing where your students are right now to where they need to be by the end of the year.

#2: Know where your students are in their math journey. In a prior video, I talked about ways to assess in mathematics and making sure you’re assessing the correct things. If you haven’t watched that, you should, but you want to be able to assess in order to inform your instruction. It helps set the pace, right, of where you’re gonna be going. Not necessarily the pace, but the journey. It helps you map out where you need to go. You gotta start with where they are, where your students are, because every class of whatever grade level you teach, it’s always different, every year. So we need to know where they are in order to map out their journey to the end point.

#3: Always be evaluating. Not the students, not yourself, but evaluating where you are along that journey. You need some guide markers along the way. Unfortunately a lot of times in pacing/curriculum guides, it’s like we have to be on this page on this date. No, not everybody works that way, not every kid learns that way. But you do need some mile markers along the journey. If not, it’s gonna be April, and you’ve only covered three topics. So you have to be mindful, again, of those mileposts along the journey, to ensure that you aren’t sacrificing coverage for depth. There are definitely things that you can just cover in mathematics, and there are things where you need to go way more in-depth on.

Now, if you need some information on that, there is also a video I’ve done on the content emphases, which talk about, what are those essential things at each grade level that we definitely need to be spending more time on, and then the things that we can just kind of ensure that we cover?

I hope that this video has given you some knowledge about what a guide should be like, and I hope that it will help build your math mind so that you can go build the math minds of your students.

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As you start off the school year, I want you to keep in mind what is really important as we're trying to teach mathematics to our students.