Math Coaching at EMES: The Sequel

Ellen Shedd's freshly renovated room at EMES is to die for.

A cancelation left me with an open week, so we carved out some time to work with the fifth grade teachers at EMES since our last attempt at a coaching week was foiled by snowfall and programming conflicts.  I had a blast (love those fifth graders!).

A couple of things I really love about EMES: the "Acts of Kindness" announcements and the gorgeous classrooms (see left).

Focus

We focused entirely on fifth grade this time.  As readers may recall a couple of weeks back, I spent a couple of days at EMES and the focus of the fifth grade was division (Division, Order of Operations and Ugly Fraction Problem... post).

This time, our goal was to move students from the intuitive to concrete/pictorial to abstract/symbolic understanding of division using the standard algorithm efficiently.  We had three days (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) to spend.  For each of the three days that I was there, our schedule was the same:

7:45 - 9:00 -     I was available for planning/debriefing.  
9:00 - 10:00 -   I worked in one fifth grade class.
10:00 - 10:30 - The teacher and I debriefed.
10:30 - 12:45 - I was available for meetings.
12:45 - 1:45 -   I worked in the other fifth grade class.
1:45 - 2:15 -     The teacher and I debriefed.

The focus of our collaborative time was looking at the evidence of student understanding collected using formative assessments to decide how to mold our instruction to improve understanding.

Math Coaching at U-32 and Dealing with Apathy for Deep Math

I was back at U-32 this week, which made me feel nostalgic.  Much has changed in middle school math from last year to now: heterogeneous grouping, math on core, a few new babies, a new schedule...  but I am appreciative that our administrators and superstar representatives on the scheduling committee (that's right, CG!) have made it so that the middle level math teachers still have common planning time.  We were able to pull together a coaching schedule that involved planning, modeling, debriefing, data analysis, and more planning. All of this on a (somewhat) half-time coaching schedule!

Focus

The prior week, the middle school teachers and I sat down on at our Thursday math huddle to map out our week of math coaching.  After batting around a few ideas, we decided to focus on seventh grade content and instruction (with our next week of math coaching focusing on eighth grade content).  The content would be operations on fractions starting with multiplication.  The modeling would involve using the "Square 1" concrete area of a rectangle.  The focus of our collaboration would be using formative assessment to inform instruction because we know that this is something we all need to do better.

Division, Order of Operations and an Ugly Fraction Model! Math Coaching at EMES and Beyond

Well... A snow day on Monday, in-service on Friday and Fitness on Thursday gave us only two days to focus on math coaching this week at East Montpelier.  So, we did the best we could with the time we had.

Goals

Fifth grade teachers, Robin and Ellen S. were looking to work on teaching long division using the area of a rectangle model so that they can move onto Divisibility, Least Common Multiple and Greatest Common Factor.  Our math coaching work this fall focused on models for multiplication and using the area of a rectangle to model the partial product method and the standard algorithm for multiplication.

Fractions Galore! The Week of January 26 - 30: Math Coaching at Doty

I had so much fun at Doty this past week working with Lisa (who teaches 6th grade math) and Sonya (who teaches 5th grade math) and their students.  Thanks to their careful questioning, I had a couple of "Eureka!" moments.

Right after Thanksgiving, we combined the 5th and 6th graders to teach the area of a rectangle model for multiplying fractions using the instructional plan:

• Outlined here.
• Illustrated in this blog post.

Since then, Lisa continued on to generalizing a conjecture for multiplying any two fractions and worked on developing contexts for multiplying fractions.  Then she moved on to teach multiplying mixed numbers, which I demonstrate in this video:

From there, she taught division of fractions and mixed numbers.