Steve Leinwand American Institutes for Research SLeinwand@air steveleinwand

1. What Every Education Leader Needs to Know About Strengthening Mathematics Instruction in the Era of the Common Core Steve Leinwand American Institutes for Research SLeinwand@air.org www.steveleinwand.com March 21, 2013

2. What a great time to be convening to worry about math! • Common Core State Standards • Quality K-8 materials • A president who believes in science and data • The beginning of the end of Algebra II • A long overdue understanding that it’s instruction, stupid! • A recognition that the U.S. doesn’t have all the answers.

3. Today’s Goal To engage you in thinking about (and then being willing and able to act on) the issues of the Common Core, more effective instruction, higher expectations and building a culture of professionalism among the teaching staff. That is, perspectives, understandings and strategies for providing effective instructional leadership in K-12 mathematics.

4. Today’s agenda • Setting a context and providing a set of critical perspectives • The Common Core in a nutshell • Our roles in shifting the culture toward greater transparency and collaboration • Questions

5. My Process Agenda(modeling good instruction) • Inform (lots of ideas and food for thought) • Engage (focused individual and group tasks) • Stimulate (excite your sense of professionalism) • Challenge (urge you to move from words to action)

6. Hong Kong – Grade 3 - 2007

7. Hong Kong – Grade 3 - 2007

8. Part 1 Contexts and Perspectives (glimpses at the what, why and how of what we do)

9. Opening Gambit Your knowledge, experience, insights, creativity, energy and expertise are desperately needed to significantly improve the knowledge and capacity of the nation’s teachers of mathematics. (If you don’t feed inadequate…..)

10. The Math Leader’s Field of Activity The heart of ensuring instructional quality and producing high levels of student achievement includes four key elements: • A coherent and aligned curriculum that includes a set of grade level content expectations, appropriate print and electronic instructional materials, with a pacing guide that links the content standards, the materials and the calendar; • High levels of instructionaleffectiveness, guided by a common vision of effective teaching of mathematics and supported by deliberate planning, reflection and attention to the details of effective practice; • A set of aligned benchmark and summative assessments that allow for monitoring of student, teacher and school accomplishment at the unit/chapter and grade/course levels; and • Professional growth within a professional cultureof dignity, transparency, collaboration and support. (What, how, how well and with what support to do it better)

11. Professional Culture What? How? How well?

12. But….as we need to acknowledge, too often: • Our curriculum is stale, • Our instruction is underperforming, • Our assessments are mediocre, and • Our professional development is essentially useless!

13. BUT…Great News • Our curriculum is stale – enter CCSSM • Our instruction is underperforming, • Our assessments are mediocre – enter SBAC/PARCC • Our professional development is essentially useless! Welcome to a far more simplified world: Instruction and Culture

14. WHY BOTHER? (in case there is any doubt) Here are 5 opening perspectives on why teacher effectiveness is indispensable

15. 1. Where we fit on the food chain Economic security and social well-being    Innovation and productivity    Human capital and equity of opportunity    High quality education (literacy, MATH, science)    Daily classroom math instruction

16. 2) Let’s be clear: We’re being asked to do what has never been done before: Make math work for nearly ALL kids and get nearly ALL kids ready for college. There is no existence proof, no road map, and it’s not widely believed to be possible.

17. 3) Let’s be even clearer: And because there is no other way to serve a much broader proportion of students: We’re therefore being asked to teach in distinctly different ways. Again, there is no existence proof, we don’t agree on what “different” mean, nor how we bring it to scale.

18. 4) Another perspective: Most teachers practice their craft behind closed doors, minimally aware of what their colleagues are doing, usually unobserved and under supported. Far too often, teachers’ frames of reference are how they were taught, not how their colleagues are teaching. Common problems are too often solved individually rather than by seeking cooperative and collaborative solutions to shared concerns.

19. 5) The key things we know People won’t do what they can’t envision, People can’t do what they don’t understand, People can’t do well what isn’t practiced, But practice without feedback results in little change, and Work without collaboration is not sustaining. Ergo: Our job, as leader, at its core, is to help people envision, understand, practice, receive feedback and collaborate.

20. Comments? Questions?

21. Part 2 The Common Core for Math in a Nutshell

22. Take-away perspectives For as long as most of us can remember, the K-12 mathematics program in the U.S. has been aptly characterized in many rather uncomplimentary ways: underperforming, incoherent, fragmented, poorly aligned, unteachable, unfair, narrow in focus, skill-based, and, of course, “a mile wide and an inch deep.”

23. Let’s continue to be honest Most teachers are well aware that there have been far too many objectives for each grade or course, few of them rigorous or conceptually oriented, and too many of them misplaced as we ram far too much computation down too many throats with far too little success.

24. But…. Hope and change have arrived! Like the long awaited cavalry, the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for Mathematics presents us with a once in a lifetime opportunity to rescue ourselves and our students from the myriad curriculum problems we’ve faced for years.

25. Why? • Coherent • Fair • Teachable more specifically:

26. Some design elements of the CCSSM • Fewer, clearer, higher • Fairer – rational grade placement of procedures • NCTM processes transformed into mathematical practices • Learning trajectories or progressions • Spirals of expanding radius – less repetitiveness and redundancy • A sequence of content that results in all students reaching reasonable algebra in 8th grade • Balance of skills and concepts – what to know and what to understand

27. CCSSM Grade 6 (pp. 41-45) Ratios and Proportional Relationships • Understand ratio concepts and use ratio reasoning to solve problems. The Number System • Apply and extend previous understandings of multiplication and division to divide fractions by fractions. • Compute fluently with multi-digit numbers and find common factors and multiples. • Apply and extend previous understandings of numbers to the system of rational numbers. Expressions and Equations • Apply and extend previous understandings of arithmetic to algebraic expressions. • Reason about and solve one-variable equations and inequalities. • Represent and analyze quantitative relationships between dependent and independent variables. Geometry • Solve real-world and mathematical problems involving area, surface area, and volume. Statistics and Probability • Develop understanding of statistical variability. • Summarize and describe distributions.

28. Grade 6: Understand ratio concepts and use ratio reasoning to solve problems. 1. Understand the concept of a ratio and use ratio language to describe a ratio relationship between two quantities. For example, “The ratio of wings to beaks in the bird house at the zoo was 2:1, because for every 2 wings there was 1 beak.” “For every vote candidate A received, candidate C received nearly three votes.” 2. Understand the concept of a unit rate a/b associated with a ratio a:b with b ≠ 0, and use rate language in the context of a ratio relationship. For example, “This recipe has a ratio of 3 cups of flour to 4 cups of sugar, so there is 3/4 cup of flour for each cup of sugar.” “We paid $75 for 15 hamburgers, which is a rate of $5 per hamburger.”1 3. Use ratio and rate reasoning to solve real-world and mathematical problems, e.g., by reasoning about tables of equivalent ratios, tape diagrams, double number line diagrams, or equations. a. Make tables of equivalent ratios relating quantities with whole number measurements, find missing values in the tables, and plot the pairs of values on the coordinate plane. Use tables to compare ratios. b. Solve unit rate problems including those involving unit pricing and constant speed. For example, if it took 7 hours to mow 4 lawns, then at that rate, how many lawns could be mowed in 35 hours? At what rate were lawns being mowed? c. Find a percent of a quantity as a rate per 100 (e.g., 30% of a quantity means 30/100 times the quantity); solve problems involving finding the whole, given a part and the percent. d. Use ratio reasoning to convert measurement units; manipulate and transform units appropriately when multiplying or dividing quantities.

29. Promises These Standards are not intended to be new names for old ways of doing business. They are a call to take the next step. It is time for states to work together to build on lessons learned from two decades of standards based reforms. It is time to recognize that standards are not just promises to our children, but promises we intend to keep. — CCSS (2010, p.5)

30. 8 CCSSM Mathematical Practices • Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. • Reason abstractly and quantitatively. • Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. • Model with mathematics.

31. 8 CCSSM Mathematical Practices 5. Use appropriate tools strategically. 6. Attend to precision. 7. Look for and make use of structure. 8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

32. from Everybody Counts Virtually all young children like mathematics. They do mathematics naturally, discovering patterns and making conjectures based on observation. Natural curiosity is a powerful teacher, especially for mathematics….

33. Unfortunately, as children become socialized by school and society, they begin to view mathematics as a rigid system of externally dictated rules governed by standards of accuracy, speed, and memory. Their view of mathematics shifts gradually from enthusiasm to apprehension, from confidence to fear. Eventually, most students leave mathematics under duress, convinced that only geniuses can learn it.

34. Accuracy, Speed and Memory Tell the person sitting next to you what is the formula for the volume of a sphere. V = 4/3 π r3 4/3 ? r? 3? π?

35. Sucking intelligence out… Late one night a shepherd was guarding his flock of 20 sheep when all of a sudden 4 wolves came over the hill. Boys and girls, how old was the shepherd?

36. So…the problem is: If we continue to do what we’ve always done…. We’ll continue to get what we’ve always gotten.

39. 7. Add and subtract within 1000, using concrete models or drawings and strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction; relate the strategy to a written method. Understand that in adding or subtracting three-digit numbers, one adds or subtracts hundreds and hundreds, tens and tens, ones and ones; and sometimes it is necessary to compose or decompose tens or hundreds.

40. Ready, set….. 10.00 - 4.59

41. Find the difference: Who did it the right way?? 910.91010 - 4. 5 9 How did you get 5.41 if you didn’t do it this way?

45. Algebra: The intense study of the last three letters of the alphabet

46. So what have we gotten? • Mountains of math anxiety • Tons of mathematical illiteracy • Mediocre test scores • HS programs that barely work for more than half of the kids • Gobs of remediation and intervention • A slew of criticism Not a pretty picture!

47. If however….. What we’ve always done is no longer acceptable, then… We have no choice but to change some of what we do and some of how we do it.

48. “The kind of learning that will be required of teachers has been described as transformative (involving sweeping changes in deeply held beliefs, knowledge, and habits of practice) as opposed to additive (involving the addition of new skills to an existing repertoire). Teachers of mathematics cannot successfully develop their students’ reasoning and communication skills in ways called for by the new reforms simply by using manipulatives in their classrooms, by putting four students together at a table, or by asking a few additional open-ended questions…..

49. Rather, they must thoroughly overhaul their thinking about what it means to know and understand mathematics, the kinds of tasks in which their students should be engaged, and finally, their own role in the classroom.”NCTM – Practice-Based Professional Development for Teachers of Mathematics

50. So it’s instruction, silly! Research, classroom observations and common sense provide a great deal of guidance about instructional practices that make significant differences in student achievement. These practices can be found in high-performing classrooms and schools at all levels and all across the country. Effective teachers make the question “Why?” a classroom mantra to support a culture of reasoning and justification. Teachers incorporate daily, cumulative review of skills and concepts into instruction. Lessons are deliberately planned and skillfully employ alternative approaches and multiple representations—including pictures and concrete materials—as part of explanations and answers. Teachers rely on relevant contexts to engage their students’ interest and use questions to stimulate thinking and to create language-rich mathematics classrooms.