In last week’s video, I shared how flexibility is the missing piece to building students’ math fluency. Well, a big question was how do we actually build that flexibility for students?

I’m Christina Tondevold, The Recovering Traditionalist, and today I’m sharing the four parts of The Flexibility Formula in our quest to build our math minds so we can build the math minds of our kiddos.

Watch the video or read the transcript below:

Here are links to products/activities mentioned in this vlog. (Some may be affiliate links which just means that if you do purchase using my link, the company you purchased from sends me some money. Find more info HERE about that.

The Flexibility Formula Courses will be opening for registration on April 30th.  Get more information here: https://buildmathminds.com/enroll/

Download the Step-by-Step Guide to Increase Elementary Students’ Math Fluency here.

So the answer to how we build flexibility for our students is way more than what I can share in this video here on the vlog. I have full online courses that are like 10 hours long where we go into all the details about building flexibility at the different grades in elementary. 

But today I want to give you at least an overview of it and encourage you to download the Step-by-Step Guide to Increase Students’ Fluency. Because remember the way to build their fluency is first work on building their flexibility. 

As they become more flexible thinkers in mathematics, they become more accurate and more efficient. Kids need all three of them: accurate, efficient and flexible to become fluent with math.

So let’s talk about the four parts to building that flexibility with our students.

Part 1: Understanding

The first part is understanding. We have to build our own understanding of the math content before we can build it for our students. That’s why, in this vlog,you always hear me say let’s build our math minds so we can build the math minds of our students.

If we don’t fully understand the mathematics and we’re not flexible ourselves, it’s hard to help our students build their own flexibility. I know that was a difficult part for me. When I first started teaching, I felt like I was fluent in math. I could be accurate and I could be efficient. But what I lacked was that flexibility.

I was not a flexible thinker and I really struggled when it came to problems that were in a context like story problems because it wasn’t just the bare problems on a worksheet. Tell me what I need to do and I could do it. I could follow a script, basically. I could follow the procedures, but I wasn’t a flexible thinker.

So for me to be able to help my students build that flexibility, that was really hard because I didn’t have that. It didn’t happen honestly until I built my own understanding of math, I became a flexible thinker with mathematics. Then I could help build that with my students. 

Part 2: Observing

The second piece is observing. Now, when I created the flexibility formula I almost called this part assessing. But there are too many negative connotations around that word. When we think assess, we tend to think: “test” and “grade” but assessing our students is something where we need to learn about our students. And most of the assessments that we have don’t do that.

I did a whole video about the best math assessment tool and I’ll link to it. But the short story is, it’s observing. 

Observing our students, informs our instruction. It lets us know what our students understand right now and then allows us to be able to build into that flexibility. 

A big part of helping students become flexible thinkers is doing that student centered instruction where we are looking at what our kids know right now and then helping them learn the next pieces based off of what they know right now.

Part 3: Connecting

This leads us into number three: connecting. Once we are able to observe their thinking, right because that’s the best way to assess what our kids know and what they don’t know, we need to take their understanding and connect it to the things that they don’t know. 

So let’s say, for example, I have a student who is struggling with 3 + 4. They never seem to know what that is. They’re always having to count to be able to solve that problem.

Well, I could make that student just memorize, 3 + 4 = 7, 3 + 4 = 7 but that doesn’t build their flexibility, right? It might make them more accurate and faster because they’ve just got it memorized but it’s not building their flexibility. Instead, if I’m observing the student and I notice that they know some things that I could use to help them make a connection to 3 + 4, that’s a better way to build their flexibility. 

As I’m observing, I notice that maybe they already know 3 + 3 or maybe they already know

4 + 4. So I’m going to use that information to help them build a connection to the thing that they know (whether it’s 3 + 3, 4 + 4) to the thing they don’t know: 3 + 4.

When I can help build those connections for kids, then they will build their flexibility. Once we see what they know and think about how we can connect that to information we need them to learn, the final piece is changing the experiences that we’re providing for students. 

Part 4: Experiencing

So part four to the flexibility formula is experiencing: how we allow kids to experience math, because we are the ones that are providing the experiences. We are allowing them to experience math in whatever way we choose. 

Are we choosing to give them worksheets or are we choosing experiences that will actually build that flexibility?

If their only experience with math is solving bare problems on a piece of paper, like 3 + 4, 27 + 38…just the bare problem on a worksheet or in a textbook. Then that’s the experience they have with math. That’s what they think math is about. 

But if we provide experiences that allow kids to play with numbers, they’re building their number sense.They’re solving problems that are in a contextual situation, not just the bare problems on a piece of paper. 

We’re also encouraging them to build some fluency through purposeful practice. Those types of experiences will build flexibility for our students. Kids need all of those types of experiences around math in order to build their flexibility around math concepts. 

The by-product will be that when they build their flexibility, they become more fluent. As they build their flexibility and their understanding around numbers and around mathematical concepts, they become more accurate and they become more efficient. 

All three of them work together, but there’s four parts that help build the flexibility piece.

Pin This To Pinterest for Later