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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 myself, Eva Sennheiser, dusty Jones, and Joel Amidon. Today we're talking with Patti Volkert from Park Academy about empowering students in the classroom. Park Academy offers a unique experience for students in grades actually three to 12, whose learning styles are not complemented by the traditional academic setting. The students at Park Academy are highly capable, but may struggle with dyslexia or language processing difficulties attention deficit disorder, executive functioning organization and or memory processing and processing speed difficulty Patti's teaching middle school math into setting and just to be fully disclosing any connections we have. She's currently my youngest daughter's sixth grade mathematics teacher. We are very excited to speak with Patti today to learn about how to adapt typical mathematics lessons so that they are more inclusive to all learners in any setting. We are hoping that teachers and teacher educators will learn something from listening to this podcast. And just to make things more interesting, we're not only talking about this, but we're also talking about how to move things online, because that's what we're all doing these days. All right, we're gonna tackle our typical questions. Welcome Patty. And let's just jump right in. Can you talk a little bit about the classes and ages that you're teaching and about the population of your students? Yes, so I am teaching middle school math, I have sixth, seventh and eighth grade. I teach them at grade level, so I am teaching them their grade level content. Our classes at Park Academy typically max out at 11 students per classroom. However, my seventh grade classroom has 13 my eighth grade classroom has 12, the sixth grade classroom, there are 16 kids, but they were broken into two classes, one of 11 and one with just five kids when we were at school. Now it's 10, and six due to scheduling issues. The kids, like you said they have dyslexia, and other language processing difficulties. Many of them have attention deficit disorder. They struggle with executive functioning and organization and are affected with memory processing and processing, other processing difficulties. One of the things I just want to touch on here at the beginning is that I have heard other math teachers that I've come across, tell me that students with dyslexia have reading difficulties. That's not a math issue. And it really is math that affects math, simply because of processing speed, or visual and auditory processing of how they take in information and use it. Visual spatial difficulties can really be a problem as you start to graph. And of course, there's the things that, you know, should be obvious but aren't always obvious, such as just tackling story problems. And all of our math these days, they come word related, we've got word problems, and explaining your reasoning. It's really difficult for a lot of students with dyslexia to write out their explanations, or even sometimes to process the information and explain it verbally, although that's usually much better. So just before we move into the next question, I also wanted to mention that I think research has now found that there is a lot of students with dyslexia. And it's very likely that most teachers have at least one if not more students in their classes that face these problems, which is I think, partly why we wanted to have you on the podcast. So maybe we can hear what works in your setting, and maybe how to move that into other settings as well. So let's move into the next question. How do you teach math to reach this population? Well, right, actually, you'd said they does student teachers need to know that they're there. And the stat that I heard is that it's actually one in five. So if you consider our class of 30, you know, you have quite a few in there. So what do I do? I like to present problems too, as we begin to start something as a low floor, high ceiling type of strategies. And my favorite one is, what do you notice? What do you wonder? And there are quite a few warm ups out there that specifically are very specific to that. But you can take anything, you can take a graph that you're about to work on, or you can take Fraction Bars, just a visual of Fraction Bars, put it on a project or let the

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I see it, and let them tell you what they notice or what they wonder. And the nice thing about something like that is that no matter what the level of mathematics is, there's something they can notice, even if it's a color or a shape, you just accept all of their responses have things that they notice things that they wonder. And you will get the higher level students seeing connections between objects that they see being projected, you know, like with the fraction bars, they might be noticing the connection between a denominator and the number of parts in the bar. Whereas some of the lower level, students might only be noticing the colors at first. But they're looking for things and they're listening to others. And they pick up things simply by having that discussion. And then as for solving problems, I really encourage multiple strategies. I like to put the problem out there, and have students tell me how they solve it. And not just to me, I like them to go up to the document camera or the whiteboard, and show the class how they tackled the problem. And that's fantastic. I had a seventh grader this year, she was new to our school this year. And one of the things that was very encouraging to her was not that I was up there saying, here's how you do it. Follow me. It was here's a problem. How would you solve it, and being accepting of different strategies helped her become more confident with her math. And she really appreciated that. And so not only multiple strategies, but also seeing problems in different ways. So visual is very important. I'm using visuals all the time with mathematics, it needs to make sense. So visuals I find to be very helpful for most students. So multiple representations using drawings to draw out a problem, so that students can actually see what it is you're talking about. I'm using diagrams to organize information, or number lines, when we were solving algebraic equations, I actually brought a hanger from home and hung in the front of the class, so that I could demonstrate that if an equation was out of balance, we needed to fix that. And so I had different things with the hanger just to make the point, you know, it's out of balance, how do we fix it? What would I need to add to the other side, so that students could visually see how equations were you know what needed to happen two equations to keep them in balance. One thing that I wish I had now that I don't have are word walls. So if you don't know what a word wall is, it's a visual of the vocabulary that you are using at school. And students with dyslexia, a lot of them have a difficult time hanging on to vocabulary. And there is a lot of vocabulary that you use in math that you might not use anywhere else. Or you might use it in math one way, like the word bass,

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that you would use in a different way, if you were playing baseball, one word can have so many different meanings. And to have a visual in the classroom of what the word is, and how we are using it is very helpful. But I'm noticing as I'm listening to you is that almost everything you've mentioned so far are things that are also good for English language learners and other groups that might need a different form of access. And I also wanted to quickly bring Joel and or dusty into the conversation and see if they have anything that they want to follow up on. I was racing to that to make the point and head to you if there's no competition here on the teaching math teaching podcast, but I'd be just thinking about the word while I was just thinking about this, you know, given our current situation I've got a an eight year old and a 14 year old and talking just about the you know, when you think about the word wall and and being conscious of our vocabulary, if I talk about zeros with my eight year old, and I talk about zeros with my 14 year old who's in you know, algebra two, and thinking about what that zero, I can mean two different things with those, the word zeros with regards to Hey, what are the zeros of this quadratic function versus what is what does it mean to have a zero in a place value for the eight year old, and so just I love that being conscious of it and just, you know, having it on the wall and

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actually making you put something like what does this actually mean in our current context? I love that. But also to to jump on with what Eva said, is like, I love these strategies, not just you're talking about a specific population, but there's just so much just good stuff that can be beneficial for many populations, right? Yeah, I'm really glad that long time ago, I was working at a bilingual school. I'm not bilingual. Math was being taught in English. But one of the classes that I needed to take for my training was psyop. And that has been really helpful. A lot of those strategies work for all of our learners. What psyops strategies

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into practice. I forgot the Oh, but yeah, it's basically just using all of these strategies of taking things visual, the word walls, and Gosh, I'm having a hard time explaining that. But yes, it's s i o. p. And if you Google that, it's got a lot of fantastic stuff. I did just Google it. It's the sheltered instruction observation protocol model there. Yeah. Yes. You're welcome. Thank you. I was just thinking about your hangar using me just Yes. We could say balance and good. Yeah, yeah, everyone should understand that. But just even to have that it's like see, oh, no out of balance, and like to put that visual to put that experience that we can all have commonly That's good stuff. Sorry, dusty, I think I cut you off. No, no, that's fine. Joel. Patty, while I'm on the line here, I did want to ask you, you're talking about something that you did when you were learning? And I'm wondering how we can translate this into working with student teachers. Have you had student teachers work with you recently? No, I have not. Okay. Whereas if you were thinking about having a teacher, come with you come alongside of you at Park Academy, maybe they're a new teacher, what's some advice you would give them as a new math teacher, be patient?

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Patience is is key for any deaf, you know, no matter what you're teaching, they definitely need to be patient, not only with the students, but with themselves as well. And they need to be ready to, to learn, I think that I have learned things from my students that have been very, very helpful, just throughout the years, especially when I am having students teach the class and they come up with a strategy or they see things differently than what I did. It broadens my ability to teach others, I guess maybe that's a big thing is make sure teachers realize that their students are teaching them. While they are teaching the students at the same time. It's it's going both ways. And they need to listen to the students, and really hear how they're explaining how they're doing what they're doing. Because it might not make sense to you at first, but it might still be correct, or it might be almost correct. And you just need to fine tune where that little error pieces. So listen, I guess would probably be my biggest, helpful hint. It's great. And I love how you kind of frame that in the teacher, okay, there's a teacher, but they're not the know all be all end all of that knowledge. But those students are still teaching them about those mathematical ideas. That's great, right? I think that this is like one of the most powerful takeaways, because you know, all of us have been doing this for a long time. And we see I'm still like blown away, I learned something new every single time I teach by listening to my students, and seeing something in a different way. How are we moving things online? And especially I think we can learn from you because you have to tackle things like attention with your students. So what do you do to move your teaching online? You know, it's been fun, interesting, challenging. And we had spring break, luckily, to kind of sort things out and I, I explored so many different options. I was like, Oh, this would be fun. This might work. This is a great way to do it. But after all my exploration, I really went back to what the students were used to doing. Rather than trying to put together a hyper doc with links to different videos and different ways of presenting information. It really just worked best to continue what they were used to. So Cammy is an extension that has really been a lifesaver for me, because it allowed me to upload the same type of worksheets that we were used to working on together. And they can actually draw whether it's a Word document or a PDF, they can draw out

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They're diagrams, they can graph they can type their answers. And if a student has a difficult time with written explanations, there's actually an opportunity for them to click on a microphone and verbalize their answer. And if they have a difficult time reading, there's a text to speech feature. So that's been a lifesaver for me. We meet online, three days a week. And originally, my thought was, okay, I'm going to teach some like I normally would, they can do some practice problems the next day, then we'll go on to the next lesson on the next day we meet. And we would try and keep up a similar pace as what we normally would if we were in the building. But

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I was in one of my first classes, and I was saying, Okay, let's open up this document, we had already all downloaded the or not downloaded, but added the extension to our Chromebooks. And we were ready to go. And I was teaching and I was moving along through the lesson. And then one of the students says, Mrs. Volker, where is this?

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How do I open this, she was still at the beginning. And she didn't know how to open up what I was talking about. So I couldn't see that they weren't all with me that they weren't where I was. So I had to backtrack, slow it down. And I realized that working online is so much harder, because you're not just dealing with your math content, you are dealing with the tools for accessing the content and the tools for working with that content, and, and writing your answers all of that all of that takes a lot of time. And with this population, having a worksheet to work on online, while having the teacher in another tab online. You can't easily flip back and forth. You can't complete the worksheet. You know, like with the teacher, it has to be a watch. Now you do. Yeah. And that instruction needs to take place on when they're with you. And when they're not. And it is much more difficult. I think we all agree with that.

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I saw that Joel, you highlighted Cammy feature. Do we want to learn a little bit more about that? I just want to make sure everyone understood what wood candy was. I don't know if you have a thumbnail of that Patty. Oh, you don't actually on the the sheet that I that you guys have there. But the bat bottom there is a link, I think it was Cammy. And then it's something that you can upload PDFs and you can annotate on it. That's what I'm getting from the website. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yes, it's fantastic. And I have seen my daughter voice explain some of her math on there, which is really cool. You just click a button, and instead of having to write it out, you can just explain it out. Right? It's fantastic. So I mean, we don't have this for my, my son, a younger son, but he's got something where he has the option of annotating something, and just he's really stressed out about typing, and like trying to explain things typing, and just being able to either write something, or to voice it out has just been like, when you see it, like the tension in him just drops like oh, I can just do that. Like, okay, we don't need to learn typing right now. Like this is focusing on math. So we get we can do that later. But let's let's focus in on the math and like whatever Avenue lets them, you know, voice their reasoning. We'll just go with that. So I love that. I love that. Thank you for sharing this. Yeah, right, no problem. It's great to just take away as many of the barriers as you can and just limit it to what you want them to know, you know, just as much as possible. So if the worksheet is a problem, make it accessible. I've actually taken some of the worksheets, and after talking with a student, it's like, okay, don't worry about completing that, well, we're just learning this together. Don't worry about the rest of it. You've got it. So you have to be flexible. That's really, actually you have to always be flexible. You can tell your teachers that you're teaching that to be flexible. Don't insist that a student write out an explanation. If they've told you the explanation, just write verbal on the paper and move on. You are asking what are some other things that I was doing online? Is that correct? Yeah, I'm editing the worksheets that I use a lot. I'm really lucky that I'm using illustrator of mathematics

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And all of their resources are online. And they're free. So any teacher that is going to be teaching mathematics, if they have a choice on what curriculum they use? illustrative mathematics is a really fantastic choice, because it has visuals and it has exploratory it's, it's great. It's actually rated really high for like a commercial right now. But and it's online.

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It's free online. Yes. And Joel is gonna make sure like, because I know, Patti is providing a bunch of links here. And Joel has a website that we link to our podcasts. Thank you for making all of these available to the people who are listening. Yeah, no problem. No problem. Yeah. And so there's the worksheets that they provide, are available as both PDFs or as Word documents. And even when I was in the classroom, I would often edit the worksheets so that they would be more accessible to my students, make sure that the illustration that the question is referring to is on the same page as the question, it's hard for some students to track and going back and forth between a page in a diagram, you know that being on different pages is difficult. So I was already editing them. And now that we're online, it's even more important to edit them to take out pieces that just don't work for an online lesson. And

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just more of the the

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skills that maybe they don't have, I might need to add something into the document, maybe is something that they had learned previously, but we didn't, haven't touched on for a while. But they're going to be using that skill in that lesson, having a short problem where they're reviewing that, it can be helpful as well. This has just been really helpful for me to listen to. And I'm really thinking about myself as a teacher, and then also about how I can share these things with my future students. So I just really thank you, Patti, for the the work that you're doing. And thanks for coming on here and sharing with us. And given you you took the time to fill out our little Google form here, and you put in something that I just want to make sure to touch on, because I don't think maybe something for our audience to hear you talk about game based learning. speak a little bit more about that. And like maybe, is there any elements of that that you are using within your online version of the course? Yes, actually, that's been a lot more difficult. I do have one group, I forgot to mention at the beginning, a group of two students who aren't at grade level, that's more of a special ed type approach with them. And it's very difficult to teach them something new if it's not game based. So when we were in the school, a lot of times I would think about what I wanted to teach them. And then I would create a board game or a dice game, or some type of game so that they would use those skills, but rather than going Oh, no, this is scary. I can't do this and closing down.

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And they're a little more open. Right. So I learned that I needed to do that with these two kids. Online has been a lot more difficult. I did put a couple of links there. I think it was the Glen Cove link is I believe, I haven't named something different on mine. Where it's it has manipulatives and storyboards and game boards on there. And I'm able to use that to do some games create some games, but it has been harder. But yeah, kids learn a lot better when it you know if if they can relax and they're playing a game and not think about that, you know that it's scary, because it's something new. Yeah, we've been having some like logic sort of puzzles come through. And for you kind of like really getting at your logical thinking for my eight year old. Well, then we had him play a card game with us in which like, you know, there's a highest card, and then there's he had a card and he's like, around, went around and he saw everything played. He's like, Well, I know, this one's gonna work. You know, this one was the highest card left. And it's like, well, how did you know? And you just, like, explained it out. And it was just like, Wow, he just did something that it was, like in a battle with him like two hours before trying to get him to explain his reasoning on something else when he just did it in this game. And it's just like a stress to the audience like the power of games, and how do we tap into that power within our teaching? And how do we, you know, for us, like in teaching teachers like how do we incorporate that into at least expose our teachers, our pre service teachers to some of these ideas about game based learning? So thank you for including that. Yeah, no problem. So I'm trying always to listen and summarize and I was trying to do

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Do this for this interview. I feel like there's a few points and maybe I'll tell them to you. And you can let me know if I got it right. Or if you want to add some things, it seemed like what you're talking about big picture is that you had to really focus on what the goals are, and maybe have less goals, because it's hard to get through everything. at the same pace. You had to listen to students for multiple purposes. One was to make sure that you know what the student is thinking. And maybe it looks like a mistake initially, but it isn't. It's just different thinking. Or maybe you just don't know how to do it that way. But it's a really valid way to do something. So you could learn from them.

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I'm trying to think and Joel and dusty, you can jump in it, what the other big messages were from this interview, I mean, I heard to be a good teacher, you also have to be a good student. And I think we're being a good student with regards to how to teach in this different environment, how to best teach our students might be listening to them and figuring out what we can learn from them. That being the good teachers being a good student. Yeah, that would be good, too. For those of us who teach at the college level, if one in five students potentially has dyslexia, or some other thing that they're facing and dealing with in their life, I mean, what does that look like at the college level? are we are we seeing those students? Are we Am I thinking about different ways that I can not only prepare my teachers for their future career, but how can I structure my own classroom? How am I dealing with vocabulary, things like that? And how are we building in this flexibility of not always requiring them to do the standard written responses? Right, right, exactly. Right. I think students a lot of times, they have grown up with especially probably the older ones, they've grown up with the idea that the teacher is you know, the know, it all, you know, knows everything. I don't mean that in a know it all away, but the teacher has the information, and they need to impart it upon them. So they maybe aren't looking for the flexibility or maybe they don't realize that their way of doing it has validity. And making sure that that those students or your student teachers are thinking about their own strategies their own way, and then maybe just kind of seeing if those work. I mean, I don't I'm not really sure exactly at the college level, how you necessarily go about doing that? I do you know that when I was a student teacher, the master teacher was someone who was far more vocal. And I guess you could say she was a yeller if a student wasn't on task. And I've never never been that way. I've always had more of a quiet manner about me. And after she had watched me teach, you know, she had kind of been surprised that I was able to teach and discipline. Without the authority. She was more of an authoritarian type teacher. And I wasn't and so she had noticed the change. And of course, this was a long time ago. I don't think we quite have the same yellers out there. But just being able to see different ways of teaching and that it might work, I had more than one teacher tell me, don't smile, don't smile till after December, and there is absolutely no way that I could ever go away. So sad. It's kind of a typical bit of advice in America for new teachers don't smile until Christmas or something like that. I don't think it's a good one. Yeah, my heart.

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I can't follow that. I smiled on the first day, because

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I also

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I wanted to point out that you noted down in our document that you had a Facebook group that is full of teachers. And I think that is something that we've all felt really useful in this time to be able to talk to somebody else and say, hey, how did you do that? And just get some ideas. So I guess that might be another bit of advice is to join some kind of group and talk to them? Yes, yes, actually, there are a couple of them. So the one that I have jotted down is the one that is for the curriculum that I am using, and which is always helpful because they have lots of different strategies all the time for different things. But also you cubed is a really good one. That's one through Stanford and Joe bowler, and that's a really great group as well. Okay, well, thank you so much for sharing these bits of information with us. This was amazing.

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Is there anything else you want to add? Before we close up? I think that that's about it just, I'm still figuring things out. You know, I'm always figuring things out. And especially with online, I found that some of my students that are a little more difficult in the classroom because they got a lot of ADHD and they have to talk about everything and, or they're disruptive or whatever, they've actually been kind of a lifesaver for me because they're vocal. And it's so so hard to know where kids are, when you're online, and you can't see them. And you can't just jump in there with some sort of help. It's really tough. And so just be patient and trying. Alright, well, thank you so much. And I just wanted to point out that I think that this podcast recording could be really well paired with the rough draft math podcast that we recorded a little while ago. All right, so let me thank you for listening to the teaching math teaching podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast. We hope you're able to implement something that you just learned and take an opportunity to interact with other math teacher educators. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thanks, Patti. We really enjoyed it. It was fun. Good. Thanks so much.