0:00 Hello and thank you for listening to the teaching math teaching podcast. The teaching math teaching podcast is sponsored by the Association of mathematics teacher educators. The hosts are Eva, Sennheiser dusty Joan Jones, until Amazon. Today we're talking with Courtney Kessler, who is the director of the Ohio center for equity in mathematics and science at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. And Matt Felton Kessler, who is an associate professor in the Department of teacher education at The Ohio University as well. We are talking to them because they ran summer camps, which will, which they will tell us a little bit more about. Welcome to the podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started teaching math teachers and why Sure. 0:48 So I became a teacher about 20 years ago, and I started teaching math teachers about 17 years ago, when I became a math coach. So I worked at a title one school and I was in a school based math coach for about 60 or 70 teachers. And I did that for a couple years before I ended up going to graduate school. And when I started graduate school, I was teaching methods courses every semester. And so that's what I've been doing for the past 17 years. My first faculty position was at the University of Arizona, and now currently I'm at Ohio University. 1:24 Thank you, Courtney. Matt, do you wanna respond to that question, 1:28 I was a math undergraduate student. And I actually ran into my former first and second grade teacher who had done a lot of work with cognitively guided instruction, Maisie Jenkins. And so she had a project she was working on. And she invited me to be part of it, where I'd go into elementary classrooms, and do geometry, quilting and symmetry activities. And that kind of led to me getting interested in education. I finished up my undergrad and I keep the work. I kept working on that project through the scale project, which was one of the math science partnerships. So that led I just, I just kind of kept going. Then I did my masters, I did my PhD. And during that time, I taught a couple of content courses at Madison. And then I went to Arizona with Courtney and I taught math content courses there in the math department. And now we're at Ohio University. I teach methods courses. Thank 2:17 you, I heard that you guys are teaching or doing different camps. Courtney said, elementary mat sets a middle, could you guys each talk a little bit about the camps that you guys are doing, 2:27 I run a summer camp called moving with math and literacy. And that camp, I collaborate with a colleague of mine, Julie Francis, who is the director of our Stevens literacy Center at the college. And we had this idea to run a summer camp that integrated both math and literacy and movement, math, literacy and movement, so that kids had a place to experience integrated content, and to have a place where we could do it in a fun way. So come up with themed units. And we also have we work with undergrad students, which are literacy ambassadors. So we train the students to think about the content is integrated and to think about the camp as a way to see students from assets based perspectives. And they run the camp and they develop some of the curriculum, and we just supervise it. Thank you, 3:21 Matt, you want to talk a little bit about yours? Yeah, 3:23 so we also do a middle grades camp coordinator do it together, but I can't take the lead on the curriculum. And part of what happens is maybe Middle School is a time where a lot of students start to get a little less interested in math. So we wanted to have a chance for kids to experience math that was more connected to real world issues. And also that was just approached in a different way. So trying to remember the first year we did it, we we just sort of advertised we're going to do math and connected to social and political issues. When we recruited students, we asked them, like part of the signup process was if there's any issues that are particularly important to them, and then we designed a few units around that. So what did we do the first year, we did sort of diversity or representation in media and kids came up with their own ways of measuring how representative films were, we also did a unit on greenhouse gases and a unit on the living wage, like a living wage versus minimum wage. And partially also, we just they come in, they play games, like it's a different chance for like mathematically oriented games. So it's a different chance for them to experience math in a way that might look different than sort of a traditional classroom where they're doing lots of worksheets. That was kind of where it started. We did to usually kids who are going into seventh and eighth grade or seventh, eighth and ninth grade, one thing I want to know maybe both of you can talk about this, if I was wanting to start my own math camp, and I'm looking for advice, like what sorts of things would you want to know before you started just in terms of practical advice, and this may not apply everywhere but one thing that happened at our university was our legal department realized the year that we wanted to start our project was the year they realized that We better have a lot more oversight if we're gonna have unaccompanied minors on campus. So that may not apply to you exactly. But the idea of figuring out what requirements there are, what's the proper documentation you need. And we were able to do all that. But you know, just what is the form look like, what's everything I need to collect, I was happy that we did an IRB and our like registration form all together, I think that's a smart thing to do if you want to collect data and look at it. So this so that can all be in one place. That was one of the big things, just the practicality of having all your registration together all your information together and making sure that you have all that prepared for and stored where it needs to be stored. 5:40 I also find it really fun to collaborate with people. So the movie with math and literacy camp, like I said, I collaborate with this with the literacy Center Director. And with this middle school, camp, Matt and I collaborate together. So it's just so much more fun to collaborate with people and to think about having fun with the camp. One thing that I think about when we're planning is to think about what's going to make kids feel good and have fun. And so that's my main goal. And the math comes second, even though I think our math content is really rigorous and fully developed. I just want kids to really feel good about themselves and to see themselves as competent problem solvers. And having fun. 6:23 Right. So I got a question for you. So I think I've known both of you since 2007. Maybe? I think, yeah, so I'm like that. So ever since then, I've seen you both exhibiting just doing more with mathematics, like more than what I had traditionally seen in the classroom, more than I was doing in the classroom, but always trying to think, what can we do? You know, how can we do more in the math classroom or even outside the classroom with mathematics? Where did that come from? for how to 6:53 answer that one? I think that, frankly, to me, a lot of that just came from graduate school. For me, I came kind of from a more of a math background. And I liked that. And then I was surrounded by a lot of people, including Courtney, who were asking questions about what is critical literacy look like? What does it mean to have adjust education. And so that included some of my peers, and many of the faculty I studied with, and I thought those were cool ideas I hadn't thought a lot about before. And it just kind of made me want to do more of that. I have always sort of enjoyed politics. One of my majors as an undergrad was in political science. And so when I found I could start to merge those two or think about those, I just got more and more interested in asking those kinds of questions. And so then I just kept bringing that into my content courses or my methods courses. 7:42 I think part of my perspective comes from being an elementary school teacher. So not, not thinking about math is only being you know, this part of the day, but thinking about it more integrated throughout the day. I know that there were times when I would overhear kids talking to their parents or caregivers and say, Oh, we didn't do any math today. And I'm like, Oh, my gosh, we did math all day today. But in a way, it's good that they didn't necessarily see as math being separate from the integrated unit that we had done that day. In particular, they're moving with math camp, we think about how to integrate it throughout the week and do some sort of service learning that connects to community service. And so for example, last summer, we did a lemonade stand with. So we read some books about lemonade stands. And we did a lot of graphene. And so they had to come up with some ideas about what they might want to donate the money to. And so there was so much math integrated throughout the whole week. And so it was kind of fun that they didn't see that they were doing any math 8:40 that saw with the camp that you did the lemonade stand. And I just wanted to talk about so I'm glad you did. Because again, thinking about it wasn't just Hey, we're gonna go to camp, you know, my kid has been sent to camp just to do some math, and they're in this isolated space. No, no, they're in the camp, but they're also in the community and doing things in the community. They're seeing math at work. And it's just, that's just exciting to see part 9:01 of the work that Julie and I did was mentoring these literacy ambassadors that did a lot of the day to day teaching. We spent a lot of time talking to them about how teaching should never be punitive, which was sometimes a little bit difficult and more of a unstructured setting like a summer camp. So one thing that we set up from the very beginning, we had a shared Google Doc, where all day long, we would be writing notes about the kids about things that we were noticing, it was okay to put notices about math or literacy. But really, I wanted them to notice things about the children as people. And so at the end of the week, we sent home notes to each family about all the really great things that we noticed about each child. And the families were so thankful. We got feedback from almost every family thanking us. Their notes were really about their emails, backward things like I've never gotten this kind of feedback about my child from a summer camp. Can you give some examples of what those noticings were that you sent back? So One example I can think of immediately is this one little kid who is a first grader. So she was just so fiercely loyal to her to the other kids in the group. Like, if she ever saw kids sitting by themselves, she would always pull that kid in or say, hey, do you want to play the blocks, I see a group of they're playing blocks, like she always took care of other kids. And those were the kinds of things that I noticed. And so I wanted the undergrads to also notice those kinds of things, because they're so important to recognize and to make public to the kids in the group, but also to families who might not see those things in their kids, when they're at home. Someone might be listening and thinking, why would I want to start a camera, I'm just thinking of all the different things that work here. He said, you know, with you did the permission forms you collected IRB, so you have the opportunity to study your own work here, you also have the opportunity to develop relationships with parents with teachers, and then thinking about the undergrads and like, I mean, all the different things that can happen in this seems like a highly creative space as well. And it just, 10:59 I know, it kind of like, makes me want to start a camp. 11:02 That was another reason I wanted to start, especially the middle grades one, you know, I do a lot of sort of social issue explorations with mathematics and my courses, I wanted to do them with kids, I wanted to have a there's a sort of space in a, you know, there's an openness and a space in a camp where you don't have to like adhere to a curricular schedule, you don't have to worry about the timeline. And so I partially wanted to create it. So I had a chance to do those. And then I could say to my undergrads, you know, when I did this with middle grades, students, here's some of the kinds of things they did, or, you know, my students sometimes say, Well, this was really hard for me, there's no way kids could do it. And they'll say, Well, here's an example of what they did with this content. And so I wanted that, that was another reason I wanted to do it. Yeah, 11:44 I've run after school camps and summer camps. And I usually recruited children that were related to my own children. So as I'm sitting here, I'm wondering if somebody's listening, and let's assume they don't currently have children in a school? How might you guys advise somebody like so you want to do a summer camp? We heard a little bit about the university and permissions and you have a needle room. But how do you find the kids, 12:11 that's a real challenge we did. In fact, when we started have a lot of we had a friend who we recruited a lot of students through them, I think, Courtney can talk a little more about this too, with her relationships with the schools. But part of what we did is we made a flyer in our schools will send a flyer out if you make copies for them, and they'll send it home to people. We advertised on social media, my goals, especially middle grades campus to keep it small. So we I think, had around 14 students the first year, and that was fine for me for what we're trying to do 12:40 for the movie with math and literacy. One year, we had an out at a community center. And so that that was a way to focus on a certain community, that doesn't always it was farther out from the university. And so that was our attempts to, to work with a community that we don't always work with. Last year, we ended up having it on campus because it was more convenient for us. And so I think that we're just more cognizant of our attempts to be at different sites so that we can work with different groups of students. We also do charge a fee so that we can pay our literacy ambassadors, but we also give a lot of scholarships, because I want the families that come to our programs during the school year to be able to participate. So even though some people in our college want me to charge money, I still also have a lot of kids participating anyway, just practicality 13:31 wise, is there an insurance issue that you have to take? Like, 13:36 is that covered to the university? It's all covered when they have to sign up through that we have a long, long form, it's like, I don't know, 15 pages of you know, it feels like 13:48 there's a waiver. So the waiver, I guess, covers whatever. To be honest, I have not read the waiver in depth, I just know which parts I'm supposed to change and put my the title of the camp in. I will say one thing I did get as a positive is like the waivers all online, and it's we use Qualtrics at our university, but people could do it on their phone. And so I did hear from some parents are like, No, that was fine. And like every other camp and can 14:11 you talk a little bit about the structure is it like a morning camp and all day camp? How long one week, two weeks, those kinds of things. 14:20 The middle grades camp is one week, we do half half days, like nine to 12. And then also what we usually do is like when they first come in there might be like if you know the game prime climb, or we found some other sort of STEM related games. So those might be out on tables or Magna tiles or different sort of math tools. Because not everyone necessarily gets there right at the same time. It's not like school where there's sort of the same kind of attendance. So there's sort of at least 15, maybe 30 minutes of them just messing around and sort of creative math activity. And then we usually do something like that at the end also, to sort of wrap up the day and then we can kind of clean up and get ready 14:58 the elementary grades campus. Usually about nine to 330. And I wish it could be longer just so it was a little bit more flexible for families. But we had somewhat of a routine, like we always did a morning meeting where kids could share and just have some sort of community building, we did number talks, that was the only time when math was really separate with a number talk, we always had read alouds that had some sort of math component. And then through day to day, it would change, like, we always had, like, outdoor play time or outdoor explore time. We had snacks we had, like, you know, that kind of thing. But it was always very, sometimes the kids would ask for quiet reading time. I mean, they craved that time. But then the literacy ambassadors could have reading conferences that they were used to during the school year. But I just felt like those times, you could really see this multi directional learning, you could see the kids learning from the adults, you could see the undergrads learning from the kids, you could see, there were several learning literacy ambassadors that would say, you know, I've seen you modeling these number talks, could I try one this afternoon. And it was just amazing to see these literacy ambassadors really step up and wanting to learn more just from these week long summer camps. So if we're going to ask one more practical question, when you ran it through the community center, do you get a room there and take care of everything? Or did they run it through their program, and you just facilitated it, we still did all the logistical stuff. But the community center was an old school building that the community uses, they did provide lunch, which was a huge budgetary issue that we didn't have to provide. And then the families didn't have to pack their lunches. When we have it on campus, the families send their lunches, but they have other kind of community groups and other camps that use that space. So it wasn't something new for them just 16:48 as an idea. So if you don't, if you can't do it at a university, you could look around in your community, I would imagine that schools might also be open to letting you run stuff on their spaces. So let me close out the podcast by just asking you is there anything else you would like to add to our discussion today? 17:10 For me, the camps have just been there a lot of work, but they're also invigorating, it's something new for me to do. And like I said, I wanted to be able to do these activities with real kids also. And so that's just that's part of what I find exciting about it is just something new for me. 17:24 I just thought of another question for you. And while you were saying that, the activities I know you have a book that has a bunch of activities, which is called reflecting the world, are your activities from your summer camps available? somewhere? Like if people want to start? Would it make sense to go to that book, or like in Courtney's case, where we do send people to say, you can look up some activities here, 17:50 you could start with the book, partially, we made new activities specifically for that summer camp, and I'd be happy to collaborate with people. So don't point contact, you can contact me, at some point, they will hopefully be published somewhere. I just, we have not gotten to that phase of the work yet. But some of them are in in the book, someone came from that. 18:09 How about yours, Courtney? 18:10 I would say that I that's one of my downfalls is documenting the work that I do. So I do have a very unique position in that I'm out in schools a lot. And I do a lot of outreach work like this. And I don't always take the time to document it and put it out for other people to see, other than the quick snapshots I take and share. But that's one thing I'll work on. 18:31 All right. Thank you again, for listening to the teaching math teaching podcast, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, we hope that you're able to implement something that you just heard, and take an opportunity to interact with other math teacher educators. And thank you both for joining us today. 18:50 Thank you. 18:50 Thank you.