In my early years in SFUSD, I remember being seated at a district math professional development session with two of the other Ph.D.s who had also stuck out our math teacher credentialing program at San Francisco State. Each of us had returned to school as an older student because we wanted to teach secondary math in California. And to paraphrase Euclid, there’s no royal road to teaching high school math.
The majority of our cohort were still in their early 20s, having just finished their undergraduate degrees. They were now completing their follow-on fifth year required to earn their credential. Most were young enough to be our children, making us look like things that don’t belong. But if there was one thing we had each learned from having racked up more than 20 years of education apiece, it was how to play the game of school. So we participated politely, knowing we’d get time to think and talk later, once we were released for the work period.
The professional development, like most, was about as informative as the average depiction of learning in a Charlie Brown holiday special. Once the district speakers were finally done womp-womp-womping at the front of the room, we began breaking down the sample task and doing our own analysis rather than pretending to be students who had never before tackled an intermediate algebra word problem.
As we explored the task, they talked amiably about the mathematics while I raised questions about cognition, emotion, motivation. I provided citations and summaries as we went along. Finally, the statistician smacked his pencil down, gave me his best teacher death stare, and then we all busted up laughing. “Where did you learn all of this?”
“Not in our credential program!” I responded, and we all laughed again.
This memory resurfaced the other day when my inbox was flooded with news stories about U.C. San Diego’s report on its catastrophic surge in the number of entering students needing not just one but two levels of intensive remedial math courses just to stay afloat.
Yeesh.
There’s an order of operations problem that all the outraged coverage keeps skipping over. We can feel angry that California students are being robbed of the competency they’re entitled to, but we’ll never make any headway if we don’t distribute responsibility where it belongs.
The UCSD report isn’t so much an indictment of high school math classes as it is a failing report card for California’s entire math teacher preparation pipeline.
How is it that despite having a near-perfect monopoly on math teacher prep in our state, these programs manage to raise the bar on graduating new teachers who are failing students more completely than ever?
And why do we keep giving these people control over our state’s math standards and instructional frameworks?
Color me baffled.
This is a crisis hiding in plain sight.
What, you may wonder, are some of the things a newly minted math teacher needs to know and be able to do to help students succeed?
Over the years, I’ve created a reading list for mentee teachers of some things I’ve found that make a difference.
How is it that despite having a near-perfect monopoly on math teacher prep in our state, graduate schools of education keep graduating new teachers who are failing more students more completely than ever?
I start from two frameworks: one I’ve adapted from developmental psychologists in the U.K. (Terezhina Nunes and Peter Bryant) whose work makes sense of how children develop functional mathematical understandings and the other, the classic How People Learn, which gives a rigorous synthesis of the four stages of the learning process, emphasizing cognitive science and motivation.
None of this was in my credential program.
As Nunes and Bryant outline it, there are three basic pillars of children’s mathematics. The first is the generative nature of children’s mathematical development. Kids constantly mathematize their world. They develop theories, which spawn new theories and revisions of ideas. If you don’t believe me, just ask them. As my friend Christopher likes to say, “How many?” is a perfectly formed mathematical question.
A math teacher has to know not just where students are in their learning, she has to know where the next most appealing attraction is on an attentional shelf just out of reach. This point of maximal learning impact has a name: the zone of proximal development, or ZPD. The teacher who can craft learning experiences that frame that irresistible next right question doesn’t have to deal with a lot of behavioral problems. She can instead focus on harnessing the motivations of the majority of kids in the room who – let’s be honest – have to be there, so they’re mostly receptive to not being bored to death.
But most math teacher prep programs in California spend almost no time teaching prospective teachers how cognition and attention work, or what overloads them.
The second pillar consists of the three conceptual categories which get woven together to form any mathematical concept from a learning and sense-making perspective. These are what most nonteachers think of as “what math teachers teach”: the interwoven strands of logical invariants, conventional systems (both language and notation), and the various mathematical demands of different situations in which math can be applied.
Here too, preservice teachers receive very little instruction in teacher prep programs. They are instead force-fed a constant stream of Frantz Fanon and the oppressor/oppressed binary, which isn’t actually all that helpful in a roomful of disadvantaged students who are hungry to learn.
The third pillar is the roadmap of children’s social and emotional development – including the social dimensions of children’s mathematics. Most teacher prep programs separate study of the child’s social and emotional growth from the social construction of doing and learning math, even though this is a key success claim for many of the activist-scholars who headline these programs. In practical terms, this means that preservice teachers receive a grossly under-structured approach to learning about the social dimensions of children’s mathematics while receiving an entirely over-structured approach to techniques for facilitating collaboration — read: compliance between and among students.
As the UCSD report indicates, we are discovering much too late in the game that a large percentage of high school graduates are under-prepared to enroll in the STEM majors they want to pursue.
So what’s going on here?
Graduate schools of education are failing to create and maintain accountable math teacher preparation programs.
Their marquee-name faculty control our state standards and curriculum frameworks, yet their methods are failing our children.
California graduate schools of education have a lucrative monopoly on training public school teachers; yet, cohort after cohort of underprepared new teachers are being sent into classrooms each fall, only to fail as teachers and drop out of the teaching profession.
Rather than equipping new teachers to understand and work toward an agreed-upon level of competence — a level that they themselves have set — these programs set new teachers up to produce students who arrive at college, take a placement test, and get a very rude surprise.
Why do we insist on accepting this?
What would it take to break the stranglehold on California’s math teacher production pipeline? Or to fix it? Do we perhaps need to seize the means of production?
One thing is for sure. Judging by the results UCSD is facing, our state is nowhere near ready to ask that question yet.