Hey everybody and welcome to Tier One Interventions podcast, where we look
at your core classroom and we try to maximize your gifts and help you reach
every student with their math, with their writing, and with their reading skills.
But we concentrate mostly on math here at Tier One Interventions podcast.
And our math leader, miss Jonily, is ready to share some gold nuggets today.
Welcome to the podcast Jonily, and they are gold nuggets because these
last few weeks have been a whirlwind.
I'm gonna kinda take us back a little bit, and there's another community that
I teach called a Math teacher Mastermind, and I'm going to launch our session today.
It's not our age level right now, because I at 50 years old, cannot
attend for 50 minutes probably without some kind of break.
But our, my freshman, 14, 15 year olds, it's funny that they will do
that every day about that time because what they're telling me is I'm zoning
out now, which actually connects to this research that says that they can
only focus for about their age now.
Sherry, do you wanna say anything on that?
I know you're big into that and if you don't that's fine.
No, you said it very plainly and very direct.
Okay, excellent.
That's exactly the case.
But there it gets to a point where our executive function skills around age
35 start going the other direction.
That's why you at 50.
Me At 61, yes.
I'm at telling everybody my age today.
That's why our attention spans gets to be shorter.
And then as our brains start to age, the time decreases, but that
dopamine hit that everybody wants.
And that's why scrolling on Facebook is addicting happens and
is re-triggered every seven seconds.
That's why you need it again every seven seconds.
So it's perfectly makes sense why after about 15 minutes the kids are
saying, hello, I'm zoning out now.
Can you help refocus me?
Create another novelty trigger, create that dopamine hit.
And what I have done since the beginning of the year is after we transition, after
warmup, and we start to get into the lesson, because sometimes we'll only be
on warmup for about six or seven minutes, sometimes longer, and then we transition
to the lesson, or I start going over the warmup depending on what that next six or
seven minutes look like in my classroom.
I purposefully, since the beginning of the year, after about 14 minutes,
I will randomly break out in song.
And I do that deliberately and intentionally.
It's not about mathematics and there is a song of the day.
One day it might just be, and girls just wanna have, they just wanna,
it has nothing to do with the math.
It's totally random.
And all of a sudden the kids are like, now, in the first couple
weeks when they met me, they were like, get me out of here.
I don't know what's happening right now, but now they're asking for it because it's
just funny to watch their teacher do that.
But subconsciously they're asking for it because after about 14
minutes they need triggered again.
They want to focus, they want to learn, they want to keep hearing me,
but they're fighting with their brain.
They're fighting with their brain because they want to so bad, but
their brain isn't letting them.
So they need something that's going to trigger their brain again.
And that is something that I have done all year long, deliberately and intentionally.
Now it'll start really connecting to math.
And I actually have a couple little math jingles and a previous colleague of mine,
I'm gonna say her name 'cause if she ever listens, she'll probably freak out.
Her name is Julie Metheny.
I taught with her my very first years of teaching.
She started teaching before me, and then I was her eighth grade teaching partner.
So her name is Julie Metheny.
And she is an amazing person, first of all.
And we haven't talked in years.
I think I've liked a few things on Facebook with her and her with me.
And, but we literally, in, in dozen, a dozen or more years, we haven't connected,
but she actually made up multiple math.
This was her bread and butter.
She made up, she's a math teacher and she made up math songs to lots of different
concepts and it was absolutely beautiful.
Now, in my first years of teaching, I would not break out in song with
my kids 'cause I just, I cared more about what people thought of me.
When we're younger, we do now I don't care what anybody thinks of me.
And so she would then, oh, back then it was on cassette tapes, so
she would record on cas cassette tapes, her doing the songs, and then
I would play them in my room for my kids, so I didn't have to sing them.
But I think I, I wanted to hold onto this music thing a little longer.
And now that Sheri said that, and Sherry, you said music triggers before
auditor and something, you said something visual something and I didn't get it.
We always talk about the fact that there's three different learning styles,
vision, auditory, and movement, but.
Music and rhythm are going to trigger even before those.
Okay,
so I just put a new post in school.
It says, what math jingles do you use in your classroom?
So later on after we're done go ahead and let me know what
jingles you use in your classroom.
And there's actually one that I use and I can't take credit for it.
And I, since I'm talking and fci I'll have to find the link.
But it's the 12 song.
I've sang it to all of you before and with my second graders in the last
couple weeks with my second graders, we've been skip counting by twelves.
I do this with kinder in first grade also, and I do it this early in the year.
We skip count by twelves and teachers are like, I can't have you come in and
skip count by twelves in my classroom.
They don't even know how to like count by ones.
And I'm like, yeah, but that's the point because math isn't sequential.
See, we have to do a lot of outta context math.
We have to do what cognitive science calls interleaving, some things that
are outta context outta the ordinary.
Ordinary.
One of the reasons that we have so many deficits and math scores are so
dismal in the US is because we try to stay linear and sequential and
we don't do certain concepts until kids have mastered the previous ones.
That is not how math should be taught because that is not how math is learned.
So I wanna randomly go in and have kids skip count by 12.
Now what I do in those earlier grades to do this is I have quick
dots, a set of dots that there are 12 of 'em, and we whisper count.
So to get to the first number, we whisper 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
And so once we count that chunk of dots, there's 12 dots in a chunk.
In a rectangle.
I want you to hear this because in our level two math session, rectangles are the
most essential for every kids to engage in every week of school, every week of
school, no matter what the grade level.
I need kids seeing rectangles every week of school, every grade level.
In mathematics, I need kids seeing rectangles.
There are so many variations of rectangles, and that is really
what today's session is about.
But I have quick dots, 12 dots in the form of a rectangle.
The dimensions are three by four.
My second graders know what dimensions mean.
It means how tall, how long.
It means that a rectangle is two dimensions because we name it
with two numbers, three by four.
And so my kids have all this lingo and terminology.
Now they circle 12 on a hundred.
Charter, 120 chart, because that's the first number we count
when we skip count by twelves.
It's the first number 12, the second number we count.
We can whisper count to figure it out so we can touch dots again.
13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. Now, yesterday when I
was doing this with a group of second graders, when I got to 7, 8, 9, some
of the kids said nine 'cause they saw the rectangle of 12, but in their
head they wanted it so bad to be nine.
So when we got to 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, like they yelled 21 and I knew
they were going to, 'cause they yelled nine on the previous instead of 12.
So only a couple kids.
So we call that the loud number.
So two kids were like 21 and then we, the rest of the class kept going 22, 23.
And so they just experientially caught, oh shoot, it's not 21.
I'm not sure really sure why it's not 21.
But nobody, and then we continued, they saw, then there,
there were three more dots.
22, 23, 24.
So I said, okay, how much is one?
12? 12? How much are two twelves?
24. And they're seeing this with dots with a visual touching them and the
dots are arranged in a rectangle.
This is all very deliberate and intentional.
And then they have their chart, their number chart.
They now circle 24.
So then I'll reiterate how much is 1 12 12.
How much are two twelves?
24. What's the first number you circle on your one 20 chart?
12. What's the second number?
You circle?
24. So it's always doing things the same thing in a different
way with a different flavor.
Now we whisper again from 24 to know the next number that, and then I'll
have kids predict, what do you think?
Before we whisper, what do you think the next number's gonna be?
25, 30, 27. They don't know.
So then we whisper count.
Okay, we just said 24 was our loud number.
Let's whisper.
25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33.
Nope, nope.
34, 35, 36. So how much are three twelves?
36. What are you gonna circle on your chart?
36. So it's very repetitive, but very visual.
It's very tactile because they can touch dots.
Very iterative.
So huge thing I want kids to see and experience every week at every
grade level in math is rectangles.
The second thing I want them to see and experience, I'm gonna say
every week, but I'm, I really mean every day, every week is iterations.
Iterations.
In the math standards.
The very first year that the word iterate is in the standards, in the
actual standards document is grade one.
We do not have kids iterating enough.
Those are in the content standards.
It says iterate.
Now, in the mathematical practices, the practice standards, there is a standard
called repeated reasoning, which is very closely aligned to iterating.
So I need kids to do this a lot.
Now you might be listening to this and thinking, that's great John
Lee, I'll do whatever you say, but I don't know what that means.
Pin that for a moment.
You've seen an example of it, but pin it.
Then we say, how much are four twelves?
Let's do it together.
Let's whisper count as a class.
Then I released the kids and I said, okay, go ahead on your own
and you're gonna circle how much 5, 12, 6, 12, 7 twelves are.
Now they had one 20 charts.
So one of the questions I wrote on the board is, how many skip
counts by twelves is one 20?
And then I wrote it a different way.
How many twelves is one 20?
'cause that was the last number on their chart.
And then the next question I wrote on the board as they were working then on
their own was, how much is 12 twelves?
You see how that jumped from a very linear, iterative process to very
non-linear, out of context, cognitive science calls that inner leaving.
So I'm using science of learning for mathematics.
In those examples I just gave.
Yes.
Some of what we do needs to be iterative, repetitive, linear, but there needs to
be lots of jolts of what I'm gonna call novelty, because novelty motivates us.
Novelty re-triggers the brain, expect the unexpected.
And the science behind novelty is interleaving.
I use the phrase out of context because for them it seems out
of context, but connected.
But what it does is it breaks the linear, repetitive cycle.
Because if kids only learn in linear, repetitive cycles, if kids only
learn in linear, repetitive cycles, they're falling sh they're falling
short of high math achievement.
“That’s a wrap on today’s look at nonlinear instruction and why our Type A
math habits sometimes hold students back.
Next week, we dive into the heart of the Mastery Math Method:
rectangles, interleaving, iteration, and why kids should be working
with structure—not worksheets.
This is where classrooms get transformed.
And hey—if you’re loving this and want to get the full workshop where
we go step-by-step into the Mastery Math Method, you can sign up to
experience one workshop for just $47.
The link is waiting for you in the show notes.
Leave you comments below.