A Brief Blog on Math Leadership

Every student can be successful in math and a strong math foundation is essential for every student. Math provides opportunities to develop and strengthen critical thinking and problem solving skills - essentially, life skills. Leadership plays a key role in ensuring every student has opportunities to learn and to be successful in math (Balka, Hull, & Miles, 2010; Seeley, 2016).

Math leaders exist at all levels of education from district level to the classroom. Teachers can be leaders in math education as they continually strengthen their knowledge and pedagogy, and more importantly, advocate for their students to have opportunities to learn and apply math. Teachers can also collaborate with their peers across grade levels to ensure continuity and flow of concepts, instruction, and support for students. One strategy that I find effective for strengthening this collaboration is vertical mapping of content and standards to strengthen teacher understanding of the impact of what they teach on other grade levels and how their content aligns with the overall content across the grades. These conversations can provide a foundation for conversations about content and student learning from one grade level to the next, and they build coherence across the grade levels. This coherence can then impact the instruction to strengthen student learning and student retention of learning. These conversations can provide a forum for sharing ideas and strategies for strengthening scaffolds and supports for student learning. They can also establish common vocabulary across grade levels and contexts for application of concepts and skills.

For these collaborative discussions to be productive, district and school leadership needs to provide time and resources for these discussions to occur. Building time into the school calendar and school day for these discussions emphasizes their importance and demonstrates leadership support for these discussions. In addition to time and resources, the school culture needs to foster and support these discussions. Teachers need to value them and want to participate. These discussions need to occur with teachers and not to teachers. If teachers have no interest in the discussions and only participate because they are required to, then the conversations will not be productive and will not result in changes in instructional practices or student learning. Leaders should address formal and informal barriers that may exist for these discussions, including addressing aspects of school culture that may be limiting the effectiveness of these discussions.

In this section of the website, I provide resources, information, and blogs on instructional coaching, particularly for math. I also provide suggestions and tips for implementing a math lab in a school. The lab can be used by coaches and other teacher leaders to model effective instructional practices for teachers. It can also be used as a place for students to explore math concepts and ideas with tactile activities, technology, and projects, among other activities.

References

Balka, D.S., Hull, T.H., & Miles, R.H. (2010). A guide to mathematics leadership: Sequencing instructional change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Seeley, C.L. (2016). Building a math-positive culture: How to support great math teaching in your school. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.