MWSubstack 003: Math Love; Trauma Support
Which strategies actually build math confidence class wide? And, shifting focus, how do we best offer trauma support to our middle grades kids?
Welcome to MiddleWeb Substack. It’s a twice-monthly, two-topic, five-minute read for middle grades educators, featuring several of MiddleWeb’s most popular and influential articles, a book review, and a cool 4-8 resource or project we’ve spotted. That’s it!
►THE MATH CLASSROOM
Can Students Learn to Love/Like Math?
Developing fans of mathematics in the middle grades is a stretch – no subject is more unloved. Just listen to adults talk about it. “Oh, I was never very good at math.” This lack of confidence in math ability “seems so pervasive as to be more cultural than personal,” writes author-consultant Jerry Burkhart.
And yet some math educators are managing to flip their students’ attitudes. It takes time and effort, acknowledges teacher-coach Mona Iehl, but once the right elements are in place, you can turn hate into like, and maybe even like into love. It all begins with community building, she says In Four Moves to Help Tweens Overcome Math Anxiety.
Part of creating that sense of belonging is making sure students feel seen, heard, and understood in our math community. With strong relationships and open communication we will push each other to reach expectations and goals we never dreamed possible.
But what about the specifics of day to day teaching? In a second post, Mona offers A Plan for All Kids to Build Math Proficiency using (of all things) the dreaded word problem.
The Word Problem Workshop lesson plan is focused on providing an opportunity for students to experience math and practice the behaviors of mathematicians. The goal is to ensure that students build not only math proficiency, but a math identity where they feel confident in their ability to problem solve and share their ideas in math discussions.
Here are some other MiddleWeb articles about math identity and proficiency:
Five Strategies to Support Math Thinking for All (Kelemanik & Lucenta)
Developing the Why for Middle Grades Math (Christian Polizzi)
Turn Your Math Class into a Math Community (Gina Picha)
A Rough Draft Mindset Boosts Math Learning (Taylor and Jansen)
Use Music and Exercise to Teach Math Fluency (Kathleen Palmieri)
Challenging Harmful Beliefs in Math Class (Lidia Gonzalez)
►STUDENT WELL-BEING
Understanding Anxiety and Trauma
“As schools set out to become trauma-informed or implement social-emotional learning, some teachers may feel concerned that their role is becoming fuzzy,” wrote teacher educator Alex Shevrin Venet in our 2021 article Trauma and Teaching: Boundaries and Bridges. Teachers might wonder: “Am I supposed to a therapist? Or a social worker? That’s not my job, right?”
We know it’s important to acknowledge students’ emotions and be there for them during hard times, but this can get sticky pretty fast. Should we strive to be the ones that our students turn to? Or should we shut down conversations when we fear they could be getting too personal?
There are no easy answers to these questions, but there are key understandings about equity and trauma we can use to navigate them. (T)eachers are indeed not supposed to be therapists, and we shouldn’t try to be. When we are clear about our role and our boundaries, we create the conditions for healthy relationships with our students.
The author of Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education goes on to discuss ways to find the “messy middle” in relationship building with young adolescents who need our care and attention.
For some classroom-ready ideas and activities, see 3 Fun and Effective SEL Strategies for Grades 4-8 by the authors of Social-Emotional Learning Starts with Us. These four MiddleWeb articles also address trauma and school supports:
Actions We Can Take to Reduce Student Trauma (Katelyn Oellerich)
Leadership: Embedding SEL in the Heart of Middle School (Jason Ablin)
Help Kids Take Charge of Their Emotions (Katelyn Oellerich)
Student Trauma in 2020 and How We Can Help (Stephanie Filio)
Still pertinent - with individual and group activities.
►BOOK REVIEW
The Social-Emotional Learning Playbook by Fisher, Frey & Smith
Grounding their advice in research and real-world situations, these all-star authors deliver on their promise to help you, your students, and your community achieve social-emotional growth, writes reviewer Anne Anderson, who calls the book “a great PD resource.” (Read the review.)
►ELSEWHERE
What’s So Great about Great Teachers?
Middle school principal Mike Gaskell is an award-winning leader, multi-book author and host of the Big Ideas in Small Windows podcast. His lively 2022 interview with ed thought leader Todd Whitaker explores one of Whitaker’s favorite topics: What great teachers do differently. (Listen at Spotify or Apple.)
Send your ideas for our ELSEWHERE feature to: ask.middleweb@gmail.com
►NEXT TIME
How do we make sure students understand what they’re reading? We’ll share our most popular articles on reading comprehension in the middle grades. We’ll also hear from teachers about their experiences during the year that artificial intelligence got chatty. And perhaps a little scary.