Math Blog

It is well known that our expectations for how well our students will do impact student learning. When we use words like “low” or “high” to describe our students, we are assigning competence to different students, and the consequence is that our “low” students tend to do worse than they would have had we not held lower expectations for them. Instead of describing our students as “low,” it is more productive to be as specific as we can about their characteristics. For example, instead of “low,” one could say “weak background knowledge” which has the advantage of suggesting a solution for this student -- build their background knowledge.

For the past four years, we have been using instructional routines both in our curriculum work and in our professional learning opportunities. A good question we get from teachers frequently is, “But how do these routines prepare students for the Regents examination?”

It's one of the most common problems of practice teachers face. Students often forget what they have learned in what seems like a very quick amount of time. This is because students tend to remember what they think about and forget what they don’t think about.