I got an email a while back from a principal who was concerned about ways to help her staff collaborate. Part of her email said, “As a small school, we only have one teacher per grade level. And thus it can be difficult to have authentic collaboration with our teaching staff. It seems that unless you’re talking about the same set of students or the same standards or planning the same unit of study, you just never truly feel like you’re working with each other.” 

Now I found this email interesting because it isn’t just small schools that tend to have this trouble. Most of us in education only think about collaborating with each other if we are talking about the same students or teaching the same standards or planning a unit together. 

I’m Christina Tondevold, the Recovering Traditionalist. So today we’re gonna take a look at an often unused way to collaborate within your school. Vertical PD meetings. 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:

Now vertical PD meetings are especially important if your school does not have a set curriculum that is consistently used throughout all of the grade levels. Some of you may not even have curriculum that you are told to use. I’m not a proponent of having fidelity to a textbook, but there are some benefits to that fidelity. 

Usually we only collaborate with other teachers who are in our same grade level and this is known as that horizontal collaboration. Everyone in the same grade level is getting together to talk about stuff. This is a powerful way to collaborate but every district should also be making time for teachers of various grade levels to collaborate together. That’s called vertical PD meetings. 

During those vertical PD meetings when every grade level is represented there are certain things that you should be looking at. You notice I said, vertical PD meetings, not vertical curriculum alignment meetings. There’s a big difference. I do not want you spending all of your time in the meetings looking at alignment of your curriculum. 

When I did vertical PD meetings with districts I used to work with, there were three main things that we’ve looked at during these vertical meetings. 

#1 Vertical Alignment of Standards

This is where you are looking at the whole progression of standards throughout the grades, not your curriculum.

One quick activity that I’ve done before is actually cut out the standards, like let’s say it’s all the standards for fluency, anything that mentions fluency. Then the teachers have to decide what grade level those go, helping them see where fluency happens and what the expectations are throughout the grade levels is very, very powerful. 

It also helps us feel a bit more responsible for the content that we are taking care of. So often we think we need to teach certain concepts. It may not even be you, it may be your curriculum. I have seen so many textbooks that have us teaching these standard algorithm for subtraction in 2nd grade. When you look at the standards, the standard algorithm for subtraction is a 4th grade standard. Now it’s not to say you can’t introduce it but it’s helpful to know you’re not responsible for the mastery of that algorithm. That’s in 4th grade. So if the kids are still just building their place value understanding and building a sense of what subtraction is, that’s okay in 2nd grade. The algorithm comes in fourth grade. It allows you to let go of some things when you can see that it’s coming in future grade levels. 

#2 Vertical Consistency

There needs to be consistency in the strategies that students are being exposed to, to what kinds of models we’re exposing them to, to the vocabulary that we are using. This is one of the things that is very helpful when you have a set curriculum because that curriculum uses the same strategies, the same models, the same vocabulary year after year after year. So it is very important that we sit down and have these conversations especially if you don’t have a set curriculum but I think it’s also very important, even if you do have that curriculum to have the conversations.  

Having consistency in the names of strategies that kids are using makes it way less confusing for students.  It’s also helpful when we see how those strategies work year after year.

Let’s say, I’m a first grade teacher, and I’m wanting to help kids build strategies for single-digit addition, stuff like their basic facts. Sometimes we feel like maybe I shouldn’t take that time to really build those strategies with kids, because I just need to get them to be able to memorize their facts. But it’s really helpful if you can see how those strategies pay off in the long run. 

If you can see that the way that you’re helping them build strategies for single-digit addition helps with multi-digit addition, those same strategies work when they are adding decimals, and when they’re adding fractions. It really does pay off in the long run, but that’s hard to see when you’re just seeing what’s happening at your grade level. So, when you can see that consistency of the strategies throughout the grade levels, it really does help. 

Another thing that talk about strategies brings up is whether or not things we are teaching are a trick or a strategy. When we look long-term, that’s how we can tell the difference between a trick and a strategy. 

So here’s a strategy that sometimes gets taught to kids, “when you’re multiplying by 10, just add a 0.” So if I do 7 x 10 it’s just 7 and you add a 0. That’s a strategy we may be tempted to teach kids but when you get into a vertical PD meeting and you are talking with 6th grade teachers about how when they are multiplying with decimals you can’t just add a 0, that doesn’t work. It doesn’t do anything to the number. It’s about making the number 10 times larger. It’s about moving it up in the place value chart. There’s so much that goes into that that when you have those discussions it helps you see what is a real strategy and what is a trick.

A strategy is something that works long-term no matter what kinds of numbers we’re doing, but a trick is something that only works for right now and will not last students as they progress through the grade levels. Sometimes we only hear those things when we have the opportunity to sit down and have those discussions in vertical PD meetings so that you can chat with teachers above you and below you to see how it all works together. 

#3 Discuss the Must Haves

One of the things that I love to do is to get each grade level together during the vertical PD time. So all the teachers of 5th grade and if you’re a small school, that’s one teacher. But get them all together and on a poster, they need to write their top three “must haves” that if they had kids coming into their grade level with just these three things it would make a world of difference. 

There’s a couple of things that this does. It really does help that grade level teacher to think about what’s really important. What is it that I need to make sure that my students have before I can do the other things at my grade level? 

But also, it helps you to really see if there’s some consistency throughout all the grades. Almost every time that I’ve done this, there are two things that always pop up no matter what grade level it is: place value and fluency with their facts. 

So 2nd grade will say, “It would be helpful if the kids came in with some place value understanding and being fluent with some of their addition facts.” 3rd grade says, “Place value and fluency with addition facts so that then we can attach that to understanding multiplication and division.” And then 4th grade is also saying, “They’re still struggling with their addition and subtraction facts and they still don’t understand place value.” 

When you see that consistency over and over and over again, it really does spark conversation. We aren’t going to play the blame game, but it’s to have a discussion about what have we been doing and why isn’t it sticking with these kiddos??

What happens is that you’ll hear the young grade teachers saying things like, “I feel this pressure to get the kids ready for next year. I felt like I need to get kids to memorize their facts.” Or “I felt like kids need to know all of this content so that they’re ready for 2nd grade.”

And then the second grade teacher can say, “Hey, no. Remember our vertical alignment of the standards we talked about? I’m gonna be focusing on XYZ and I can add onto the things you’ve been doing but it’s really helpful in 1st grade if you spend a lot of time building an understanding of place value and building their number sense so they can develop their fluency and not just have things memorized.” 

Whatever the conversation comes out to be, it tends to be things like that that you’ll hear the younger grades teachers say things like they feel the pressure to get kids ready for the next grade or years ahead trying to prepare kids for this or that, but it’s really helpful when they can see what kids in future grades really do need. 

In schools, we are so used to only collaborating with our own grade level but there is so much power in arranging that time for those vertical collaboration times so that you can ensure consistency and create a cohesive math experience throughout all the grade levels. This is especially true if you have a smaller staff or if you have a curriculum that isn’t used throughout the entire school or isn’t used consistently. 

All right. I hope that this video has helped you build your math mind so you can go build the math minds of your kiddos. Have a great day.

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