The 4-year-olds steady themselves in a raggedy circle around their veteran teacher, box braids and crew cuts and fluttering hands wiggling in anticipation of what comes next. All eyes are on the teacher.
She checks the circle one last time before she yells, “Ready, set, go!” And suddenly, the whole wobbly circle gets transformed into a high-precision brigade of counting jumpers.
“One! Two! Three! Four …!”
One hop per number. Smiles big and eyes wide, every kid is confidently connecting each jump with its correct corresponding number in the whole-number counting sequence.
An experienced teacher can see that the teacher is constantly scanning the group doing formative assessment — checking to make sure that each and every student is on track to meet the learning target. And at the same time, each student is also experiencing a whole host of social emotional learning skills in parallel with their classmates, practicing self-management, self-monitoring, and self-assessment.
It’s a thing of beauty to observe.
There’s a quality of what sociologist Émile Durkheim termed collective effervescence — that intense, shared state of flow that bonds a community in their individual and pooled efforts. It’s the activation of something precious.
While SFUSD is still messing around with our own mediocre home-grown curriculum, these students in Boston Public Schools’ equivalent of our Transitional Kindergarten (TK) have been benefiting for at least 10 years from an evidence-based TK math curriculum known as “Building Blocks.” It was developed by early learning experts under a National Science Foundation grant and has been rigorously tested, monitored, and improved for effectiveness for more than 17 years.
Early numeracy has always been deemed important for later elementary mathematics, but a recent study has shown it could have a snowballing effect.
Boston’s 4-year-olds are already thinking rigorously, joyfully, and mathematically. You can read more about their program here.
This is my fondest hope for SFUSD’s TK students. And here’s why.
There’s a new piece of research going around that’s been sending shock waves — in a positive way — through the math education research community ever since it was published in January. Conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, this meta-analysis looked at 54 distinct longitudinal studies of over 58,000 students from kindergarten through 12th grade. That’s an enormous amount of vetted, high-quality data — even though they come from various different sources. The researchers’ goal was to use statistical methods to narrow down the predictive quality of what we call early numeracy on later mathematical achievement.
And what they discovered — as the clickbait headlines always promise — will shock you.
When we talk about early numeracy skills, what we are referring to is the initial set of mathematical skills that children start to learn well before they arrive in any classroom to begin formal schooling. This includes a number of powerful, logical, language-rich, and nuanced sets of nested skills with many embedded internal moving parts that early childhood educators are experts in helping them learn to navigate. Learning to count, for example, involves learning to recite numbers in their proper sequence, but it also requires mastering the logic of one-to-one correspondences, the semiotic and representational challenges of communicating your counting, developing the ability to instantly recognize certain sets of familiar numbers. Young children also need to develop fluency with a wide range of different types of quantities — both countable and continuous — and they need to develop both conceptual and procedural skills to be able to compare those quantities or collections, along with the ability to begin to make estimations and sort different qualities.
So obviously, this reveals a huge constellation of issues of educational equity right from the start. And one of our major domain-specific goals for TK — within each of the domains students begin to engage with — is to find ways to narrow the differences in preparation so that children from all backgrounds can engage with their formal schooling with confidence and success.
Here’s what’s blowing researchers’ minds. They state it right up front in the abstract:
Early numeracy does not merely serve as a steppingstone with temporary effects on foundational mathematics; instead, it likely triggers a snowballing effect, cumulatively influencing mathematics development over time.
This flies in the face of everything we’ve always suspected. We’ve always considered early numeracy to be important for later elementary mathematics, but it never occurred to anyone until this study that it could be a kind of snowballing mechanism.
And that’s why it’s worth fighting to get a high-quality, evidence-based TK math curriculum like this one — including professional development — approved and rolled out for SFUSD TK teachers and students as soon as possible.
It turns out that all those jumping, counting little TK warriors on the blue padded mats in Boston are laying the ground work for becoming the mathematically confident, socially and emotionally grounded middle school and high school students we all want to help them become. And we could leverage that proven track record to make TK in SFUSD a truly spectacular experience for our youngest learners — one that fulfills our vision for STEM learning and community for decades.
And because we can do it with the educators we already have, we should be able to make it happen using supplemental funds, even while we’re digging our way out of our current budget crisis. SFUSD’s TK program should be one of the most compelling reasons to choose SFUSD and stay here.
The only thing we have to find is the collective will to demand it.
