Thoughts On Making Math Tasks "Stickier"

Last year, the book that changed my teaching practice the most was definitely Dan Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. It helped me to think through how I wanted to structure classroom tasks in order to maximize intrinsic motivation and engagement.

This year, the book that is influencing my teaching practice the most would have to be Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. I bought it to read on my Kindle, and I kind of regret that now because it is one of those books (like Drive) that really needs to be waved around at meaningful PD events.

The Heath brothers' thesis is basically that any idea, task, or activity can be made "stickier" by applying six basic principles of stickiness. Their big six are:

1. Simple
2. Unexpected
3. Concrete
4. Credible
5. Emotional
6. Story

The writer in me is bothered by the failure of parallel structure in the last item on this list (Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Would it have killed you to have used a sixth adjective rather than five adjectives and one noun? OTOH, that does make the list a little stickier for me, because my visceral quality of my reaction only adds to the concreteness of my experience, so there is that). But that is a small price to pay for a very useful and compact rubric. It also fits in with nicely with a lot of the brain-based learning ideas that @mgolding and @jreulbach first turned me on to.

This framework can also help us to understand — and hopefully to improve —a lot of so-so ideas that start with a seed of stickiness but haven't yet achieved their optimal sticky potential.

I wanted to write out some of what I mean here.

For example, I have often waxed poetic about Dan Meyer's Graphing Stories, which are a little jewel of stickiness when introducing the practice of graphing situations, yet I find a lot of the other Three-Act Tasks to be curiously flat for me and non-engaging. Some of this has to do with the fact that I am not a particularly visual learner, but I also think there is some value in analyzing my own experience as a formerly discouraged math learner. I have learned that if I can't get myself to be curious and engaged about something, I can't really manage to engage anybody else either.

Made To Stick has given me a vocabulary for analyzing some of what goes wrong for me and what goes right with certain math tasks. The six principles framework are very valuable for me in this regard, both descriptively and prescriptively. For example, Dan's original Graphing Stories lesson meets all of the Heath brothers' criteria. It is simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and narrative. The lesson anchors the learning in students' own experience, then opens an unexpected "curiosity gap" in students' knowledge by pointing out some specific bits of knowledge they do not have but could actually reach for if they were simply to reach for it a little bit.

But I would argue that the place where this lesson succeeds most strongly is in its concreteness, which is implemented through Dan's cleverly designed and integrated handout. At first glance, this looks like just another boring student worksheet. But actually, through its clever design and tie-in to the videos, it becomes a concrete, tangible tool that students use to expose and investigate their own curiosity gaps for themselves.

Students discover their own knowledge gap through two distinct, but related physical, sensory moments: the first, when they anchor their own experiences of walking in the forest, crossing over a bridge, and peering out over the railing as they pass over (sorry, bad Passover pun), and the second, when they glance down at the physical worksheet and pencil in their own hands and are asked to connect what they saw with what they must now do.

This connection in the present moment to the students' own physical, tangible experience must not be underestimated.

Watching the video — even watching a worldclass piece of cinematography — is a relatively passive sensory experience for most of us.

But opening a gap between what I see as a viewer and what I hold in my hands — or what I taste (Double-Stuf Oreos!), smell, feel, or hear — and I'm yours forever.

"My work here is done."

This way of thinking has given me a much deeper understanding of why my lessons that integrate two or three sensory modalities always seem to be stickier than my lessons that rely on just one modality. Even when the manipulatives I introduce might seem contrived or artificial, there is value in introducing a second or third sensory dimension to my tasks. In so doing, they both (a) add another access point for students I have not yet reached and (b) expose the gap in students' knowledge by bringing in their present-moment sensory experiences. And these two dimensions can make an enormous different in students' emotional engagement in a math task.

#made4math | Words into Math - Taming Troublesome Phrases with an interactive foldable translator

It's been busy here in the Intergalactic Cheesemonkeysf R&D Laboratories
(see trusty assistant hard at work, right). Ever since Twitter Math Camp 12, I've been working on implementing all the lessons and activities I learned about in person from my fabulous math teacher tweeps!

I'm using the Interactive Notebook structure that Megan Golding-Hayes showed us, and I'm also incorporating a lot of Julie Reulbach's foldables. The most helpful insight (out of many) I received from Julie was the idea of using a foldable as a way of getting kids to SLOW DOWN and trust the steps of the process as they're working on word problems. So I've made a nifty little foldable like hers that will go into an INB pocket the first week and will be usable on all quizzes and tests.

One of the reasons I like having students develop tools they can use on tests is that many of the discouraged math learners just don't trust their own learning. They have a habit of "collapsing" when they encounter a first speed bump. So from the perspective of encouraging students' courage in problem-solving, it is good to allow them to have tools they can use, even if the tools are sometimes nothing more than a security blanket — a talisman or a good-luck charm they can touch as a tangible reminder of their own courage and resourcefulness. So a four-step problem-solving foldable serves double duty: it acts both as a checklist (as in Atul Gawande's New Yorker piece and book) and as a reminder to have courage and perseverance in working through problems.

However many students have a habit of either not using the tools or finding the tools too complicated or frustrating. Nowhere has this been more evident than when I've given them approved lists of words and phrases they should stop, consider, and look up if need be. The charts and lists seem to turn into giant floating word clouds that signify nothing. So I wanted to come up with a slightly more interactive than usual foldable that students could use as a way of isolating and decoding some of the most troublesome words and phrases they get hung up on. Not only does it slow them down, it gives them a focal task that redirects an anxious mind.

After a lot of research on both blogs and on Pinterest ("PINTEREST!" #drinkinggame), I came up with the idea of a folded sleeve with a sliding chart insert, containing the phrases that often confuse kids or cause them to second-guess their translations from words into math. Here's what the finished product looks like:

Here is a close-up:

I used OmniGraffle to make the sleeve template and I used Pages, Preview, and Adobe Acrobat to make the insert. I'm linking to the Troublesome Phrase Translator sleeve, a generic sleeve you can customize for your own fiendish purposes, and a PDF of my exact insert (Troublesome Phrase Translator INSERT). 

If you want to make your own inserts, you'll need to set up your own table (Word, Pages, Excel, etc) making sure that your row height is exactly 1/4 inch. Your LHS cells should be 1 9/16" wide and your RHS cells should be 1/2 inch wide. You can have about 19 or 20 rows, depending on what you put in them.

Sometimes a little magical thinking is just the thing to displace a discouraged learner's anxiety (or freaked-out-ness) for that extra second it might take to recommit to the process of solving a problem. If that helps me hang onto just one extra student a day, it's a win. But usually I find that a tool like this will encourage multiple students to encourage each other's confidence as well, which is an even bigger win in my book!

On choosing sanity, and on modeling this choice for our students

I want to talk a bit about sanity — not because I think I'm an expert (I'm not; no one is) but because I have come to understand sanity as a choice we make moment by moment, and because, in so doing, I have seen how we either model — or do not model — it for our students in our classrooms and in our lives. And this is an enormous part of the social and emotional life training they either receive or do not receive in this crucial part of their lives.

I teach middle schoolers, or rather, I should confess that they teach me. Every student and every class is a mirror in which I can see what I am teaching them. Perhaps because their access to it is new, middle school students have a finely tuned hypocrisy detector. More so than any of the high school or university students I've ever taught, middle school students want to see who "walks their talk." Do so, I have learned, and they will follow you anywhere. Fail to do so at your own peril.

So a big part of this year's learning, for me, has been learning how to tune in to what I am actually doing and checking in on whether this is consistent with the social and emotional lessons on appropriate self-care I am trying to teach. Sometimes that has meant being the adult in their lives who tells them to stop the madness. The only way to stop the war is to stop fighting, stop struggling, stop efforting. There really are only so many hours of the day, and for middle schoolers, about eight of those need to be spent sleeping. That means every piece of homework can't always get done every day all the time. Sometimes a person has to choose sanity. So I try to understand that and allow for it, because learning to allow space for all of life is something they are going to have to learn if they are going to do better in running this world than we have done so far.

I've also had to learn how to trust my training and my gut. I was blessed to study for over ten years with a pioneer in integrating social and emotional intelligence and mindfulness into learning environments ranging from special education to mainstream classrooms to therapy situations. You probably haven't heard of him because he has spent his life being what I think of as a guerrilla bodhisattva — a pioneering educational psychologist and an undercover evangelist for social and emotional health in daily life. His name is Dr. Fred Joseph Orr, and I am blessed to count myself among his students. Actually, we think of ourselves as his disciples, though he would undoubtedly discourage that characterization. But it's a fair one. He taught us to integrate teachings from whatever sources might be beneficial to ourselves and our communities — teachings from Adlerian psychology, spiritual development, meditation, yoga, Buddhism, his own mischievous sense of humor and spirit of adventure, writing as a practice, the practice of joy and creativity in whatever form they might take, and environmental restoration and ecological rebalancing. I came to him as a writer, writing teacher, and longtime meditation practitioner, but I quickly became much more than that under his mentorship. And it was the kind of mentorship that is a true spiritual gift — the kind you can only repay by sharing it with others. In his life, he suffered in ways that most of us would find unimaginable, and yet he remains the most radiant and joyful person I have ever known. And although his active teaching practice has been cut short by a medical condition that has become the focus of his own personal life practice, his students carry on his great efforts, sharing the learning and the gifts we received from his teachings. His teaching of us was an investment in the future and a labor of love. I wake up every morning determined to be worthy of the effort, love, and energy he poured into teaching me.

There's an urban fable Fred used as a teaching tale. It's known as The Hundredth Monkey principle. It began in the 1950s as a call to end the escalating nuclear arms race, but Fred believes it has broader applicability as a model for how human awareness and sanity can be activated too, and I have come to believe this too. The idea is simple, yet profound: when a critical mass of individuals' consciousness gets raised, it inevitably triggers a paradigm shift in the dominant culture. So this turns out to be a more leveraged model for social change than the conventional wisdom tends to think, for when we direct the focus of our daily efforts on helping individuals and small groups to shift their energies, awareness, and attention, we are doing our part to put our culture on the path that leads toward greater sanity, in addition to greater achievement.

So what does all this squishy-sounding woo-woo stuff have to do with teaching and learning mathematics?

I believe it provides us with an on-ramp, a way to reach the hearts and minds of the students who are most discouraged and shut down in the math classroom. It's differentiated for the most capable students because most of them have never been given tools to cultivate self-awareness and other-awareness as a part of their learning. And by learning — and by teaching these discouraged students how — to cultivate their social and emotional intelligence in how they engage in mathematical practice in our classrooms, we can change their relationship with mathematical studies to one based on what the American Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron describes as "unconditional friendliness."

Over the last couple of days, as I've begun my yearly summer rituals of cooking and storing school lunches in the freezer for days when I need the loving self-care of hand-made soup in the middle of my day, I have realized that this is the heart of my Twitter Math Camp talk. My topic is Dan Pink's book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and how to use his ideas about intrinsic motivation to reach the discouraged math learners in our classrooms. I've begun to understand how Fred's work with me is an arrow that flies straight to the bullseye of this target, and it's given me some hopefully valuable insight into how to create the toughest of Pink's three pillars of intrinsic motivation. That pillar is autonomy, and I'll write more about it in an upcoming post as I flesh out my talk with ideas and activities.

In the meantime, I'm going to let my subconscious mind work on the problems while my conscious mind takes a nap.