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 fan hyzer dusty Jones, that's me and Joel Amidon. Today we're talking with Sandra Dr. rajko. Sandra is an associate professor of mathematics education in the department of learning, teaching and curriculum at the University of Missouri. We're talking with her for a number of reasons. But specifically, we want to hear from her about addressing equity issues in mathematics education courses. And because of the current situation we're all in. We're also interested in hearing about how equity can be addressed in various course delivery formats, including online. Welcome, Sandra, it will be tackling four questions today. Just overview, like what classes are you teaching? How are you moving them online? How are you addressing equity in your classes? And then how did it go? So let's get started. Tell us a little bit about what classes you're teaching right now.

1:03  
Thanks for having me. I am super excited about this podcast. It's a great resource. I was actually teaching online already this term. And so one of my classes is contemporary equity issues and math education. It's for master's level students, and mostly in service teachers. And then the other class I'm teaching is a capstone research and research project where my students are finishing up a year long action research, like project for their master's degree. And they're also in service teachers, but they're like pretty brand new, they're in their first three years of teaching. So those are the two classes I'm currently doing.

1:37  
Cool. And so are they both of them already online? Or just the first one? Or

1:41  
they're both online? Yeah, they both been fully online, I taught the equity class a number of times, and then this other one is a new class for me.

1:50  
So when everybody had to move online, you were just kind of chill about it. Like, what's the big deal? Hmm.

1:55  
Although I was teaching in service teachers, and so I had to be very mindful that this was different for them. So even though my workload was kind of moving along the same, there's was not.

2:06  
So can you tell us about the equity class that you are teaching?

2:10  
Sure.

2:10  
Um,

2:11  
so we start I started this class, I think it was like four or five years ago. And we wanted to do an online equity focused course, for in service teachers as part of our online master's degree that we have at Mizzou. And so I developed a course and I was trying to think about what to include in such a course, because we have a doctoral level course also that's face to face. That's equity. But we wanted to make this one really practical for in service teachers. And that's probably like one of my big slants. And all the work I do is I really like to bring in things that teachers can do and implement as they work. And so it's kind of set up in several different units. So one unit is kind of like exploring our own practice in terms of equity, our students, things like that. And then another unit is kind of around activity, like planning lessons and activities and stuff. And then the last one is like doing advocacy work and your role as a teacher. So those are like the three big kind of like ideas I wanted to get through. And then the weekly format of this class, it's pretty intensive, I would say, but every week, they have an investigation, and they have a reflection. So the investigation is kind of like exploring, they always explore three different levels. So they explore at the community level, some phenomenon or issue at the school level, and then at their individual teacher level, like so that at the classroom level or personally. And so for example, one of the units is on English language learners, which is also a main area of my research. And so that investigation will have them looking at like the statistics, different websites and things on English learners in the United States, and then their state, and then their school community looking for resources for refugee students, things like that, then they explore their school and how students are classified because a lot of teachers actually don't know how students are classified and what different levels mean, in terms of access testing, which is what we use in Missouri, and then they'll look at and they'll actually have to talk to some English learners in their classroom and get some ideas about how to teach math, what works for them, what they enjoy, when teachers do and stuff like that. So I really like make sure that all three of these levels, the community school, and the classroom or individual are tackled for each issue in the investigation. After they do that investigation and get like excited about what they learned, then they read some literature and research and or visit like websites or watch TED talks or whatever I can find. And then they reflect on that in light of the research that they've connected to. So we do like that every week. That's kind of the format and we have discussion boards and things like that, too.

4:52  
That sounds great. I'm gonna throw it to Eva or Joel to see if they have any questions at this point. Yeah, I'm

4:58  
kind of curious. How much time commitments is one of these classes? Is it like three credit class or? Huh? Yeah, this

5:08  
one is the three credit class. It's pretty time intensive, because they do have assignments do twice a week in this class. So the investigation is due by Wednesday. And then the reflection is due by Saturday. And I deploy the whole module at the beginning of the week. So it's a lot of time, but it was made for a traditional online master's degree program. If I were just transitioning to online, I would have backed off quite a bit. And I have backed off given that, you know, the Coronavirus is real and my students are stressed. So we've like back down. And I've made only one week's worth, like things do once a week now to kind of accommodate their schedules and their new lives.

5:46  
I have Sorry, I have some more follow up questions. Do they interact with each other in these assignments? Mm hmm.

5:54  
Yeah, so they have a discussion board every week. So typically, the discussion board kind of follows up on what they're learning in their investigation, so they can compare notes, because it's really interesting. Right now I have a student that's in Germany, on an American Air Force Base. And then I have a student that's in Panama, teaching an American School in Panama. And then I have students from all over the country. So they're in really different contexts, I'll have students that are in schools better urban, that have 100%, free and reduced lunch and 100% student colors. And then I'll have students in rural areas that have like no students of color. So it's really interesting for them to talk about and see across all these different contexts how these issues play out,

6:35  
it's, I had a question too, just given all the different situations from you just described where your students are coming from, like in the global impact of what's happening. Now, besides adjusting the, you'll have only one turn in time during the week, for everything in the module, anything else that you've had to do to make adjustments like given, like minimal interaction with students, or just other things that might be occurring within their lives

7:00  
initially, like some of these things they would do with their students like they would interview students, things like that. So I'm trying to make sure that like, they don't have to have students to do any of the work because I'm just assuming that students are, you know, disconnected from them from synchronous. So yeah, I've done that I've made sure that they know that they can redo any assignment like this week, I said, let's just take a pause for the week, because I'm a little overwhelmed. I think some of you are overwhelmed, because some of them are graduating and trying to finish up an action research project as well. I said, like, take the week, see what you're missing, see, if you want to revise anything, and just let me know what you want to do. So just like kind of a check in week to like, calm things down. And then I've made it so that I'll put out a couple of weeks for the last three weeks, I'm actually going to put all the assignments out at once and combine stuff that used to be separate, just so they can have more flexibility and when they complete it, and that kind of thing. So I'm trying to like be a little more flexible, and just make sure I reach out to them. So I reach out to them weekly, and check in and make sure if they need anything. I've been sharing some resources, like the webinar I did with AMT and things like that, just so that they know I have expertise in this area if they want help. I really

8:12  
like with how you're approaching that. And just the fact that I mean, just for the whole purpose of this podcast is for those that might be newer novice to teaching math teachers and thinking like, okay, here's my syllabus, and even though it's online, and yeah, I'm already I have to move online, I'm already online, but still even seeing like, I need to take the temperature of my students and being able to react and, and adjust things that might it's going to disagree with my syllabus, like, oh, is the world gonna, like fall apart? Like, no, it's just, I'm doing what's best for my students, and just having that justification behind things. It's just, I like that you shared that they appreciate it.

8:45  
Yeah, I want a second that I like the idea of taking a pause. And you know, everybody can decide for themselves how long that pauses, but to just kind of say, Okay, lets everybody kind of check in. I think that's a great idea. And I am only in week two, actually, I'm in week three now, of my term. But I already went as I was listening. So I'm thinking in week five or six, I might need to do one of those pauses. And I think that's a great idea. Thanks for sharing that.

9:12  
Yeah, I made I just made a video real quick and throw it up on YouTube, because I thought it would be nice for them to see my face and just make sure that they know like, you know, not I don't really care about evaluation, I care about you learning and you know, getting whatever you wanted to out of this class. And I still have goals, but I think that's one of the luxuries of being an academic professor, is that we don't have standardized testing. The syllabus is our own making for the most part. So we have a lot of flexibility. And I think we should remember that. And also, would you ask, like if you were training a teacher or supporting a teacher, would you tell them to like keep plowing on at the tragedy happened in their classroom? Of course not. You would say like, stop and let's talk about this and make sure everybody's safe and Okay. And then because you can't learn when you're not, you know, when you're overstressed and things Absolutely, yeah.

10:02  
Yeah, perfect. Yeah.

10:04  
Sandra, you and I have kind of been covering the same ground, but at different times, I went to the University of Missouri, you're working at the University of Missouri. You went to the University of Florida, I worked briefly at the University of Florida. So I've been kind of following some of your work. And one of the things that's been interesting to me is this two minute Teacher's Guide that you put together with some colleagues, can you tell us a little bit about that?

10:27  
So Sam Otten, who is my colleague at Mizzou and I, we have a writing retreat, I think we had some extra money in the grant, we were like, wouldn't it be cool if we had an unofficial Teacher's Guide to resources that would help teachers learn, you know, some of the inside things that we've learned as academics? And because I want to do over of all the teaching I did as a high school teacher. idea. And I was like, Cool, let's do something with this. And so we were like, well, we don't want to write anything. We want something that's easily consumable. And Sam does like a podcast, also, the method podcast, and he also has like a comic book, podcast, and all these things. And I was like, let's make videos. And so we agreed to make videos. And we wanted to keep them short, because people's attention spans are short. And they're really just ideas for doing lessons in easy way. So we don't want to like, say, throw out everything you're doing. We're saying like, Okay, everybody, what we did is we started with a textbook, like a Pearson textbook or something. And we said, let's look at this lesson. If we were teaching this lesson today, what would we want to do based on this lesson, and we just do little tweaks that could fit in. So we don't want to like give whole big tasks and stuff, because that's a really big change for a lot of teachers. We're like, what if you're just a traditional teacher, that lectures or whatever, and you're just looking to spice it up a little bit. And so we've done these things where we try to get students talking, we try to get at deep mathematical concepts, but in ways that are like pretty easy to take up. And so that's what we've been doing. So we started with quadratic equations. So we have several lessons on those. We hired an animator with some seed money we got, and now we have a bunch of scripts, and we can't afford the animations very expensive. So we've been trying to like figure out how to get more funding for this project. And we I think we have a way forward, but it's been really fun to minute to just dead calm. It's all free. It's on YouTube. And we've been making some like little supplement lesson mean things that people can utilize as well.

12:26  
Right? Yes,

12:27  
I just I really like it. I remember going to, I think a session maybe at nctm, regional in Kansas City, where you guys were talking about that. And I thought, wow, this is perfect, because two minutes is really I mean, it's an attention span thing, but it's also for a teacher, maybe they don't have a half hour to you know, read this journal article, or dive into this new way of thinking just these two minutes, let's, let's just focus on some interesting tweaks that you could make, I really think that's pretty cool. Yeah,

12:57  
that's a really good point. Because like, one of the things is like we have all this research, a lot of it's behind paywalls. As a teacher, I probably don't have access to the ideas that we're writing about. So how can we like bring it to the teachers in a friendly format that they might actually have? And you're totally right, I mean, I pulled teachers a number of times to see how much planning time they have. And I'm not knocking on like, there's so many great lessons from math educators. But a lot of them would just take like an hour to read through and get the gist of. And if I have six, like preps a worst case scenario, and I have all these classes, I'm not doing that every day for every class, right? I just want something that I can bring into, like, keep teaching fun. And so that's kind of like the lens we bring to that project.

13:40  
I also like how these videos and these materials are aimed at teachers, specifically, from a we're here to help kind of we are also teachers, and we're working alongside of you to do this. And they're not two minute videos to introduce quadratic functions. This is not something that you would send to your students and say, go watch this video. But it's really specifically helpful for teachers. I really appreciate that.

14:05  
Thanks. Yeah, it's it's a, it's a different audience to try to think of, because almost all the videos online are for students and content. You know, thinking about how to support a teacher and thinking about it a little differently was fun and challenging.

14:20  
It's using the things that you have, right? It's like not like, okay, we're gonna go find the most ideal textbook or whatever, we're No, this is something off the shelf. This is what I've been given. And now we're going to start there. That's I like that a lot.

14:31  
Yeah, I think, you know, in our flipped fan study that we've had, we've seen all range of curriculum and resources from those that have very little to those that have so many. And so we really just wanted something that anybody could do if they were just looking for an idea.

14:45  
So can you tell us a little bit more about that flip study that you just mentioned?

14:50  
Sure. So we have an NSF National Science Foundation funded study that's in its third year of three years, and this is sad in a way because we didn't have Students and classes to post us because it's a pre post design where we're looking at flipped teachers and comparable non flipped teachers flipping being that you send home a video or multimedia to deliver content basically. And we were trying to see if there's different components of instruction that correlate with student learning outcomes. That's why we needed the pre and post test. Unfortunately, our study this year, we've observed a number of classes three times, but the post test is going to be online, which means our findings are going to be compromised a bit because in prior years, the pre and post were both on paper and pencil, but we're finding, you know, we're just trying to see like, does the amount of whole class discourse that a teacher uses or independent work time Do any of these different ways that you can look at instruction correlate with student learning, and then we're also looking to see if flipped or non flipped has any correlation with student learning, we're trying to hold as consistent as possible instruction. So one of the things that I think is really innovative of our study is that prior studies just say flipped or non flipped, and they compare classes. Were saying that's not a fair comparison, or it's at least not nuanced enough, because there's a lot of range of flipped and a lot of range not like Okay, get as close as possible in terms of approaches to instruction in a flipped and anon flipped environment and then see if it really is making a difference, or what's making a difference. So we've had one, well, two full years of data collection, we don't have like a comprehensive set today, this year will be the last set of teachers, we need to make final results or findings. But preliminarily, I would bet that flipping doesn't matter. And not flipping doesn't matter. It's really some other aspects of teaching, that's gonna matter a lot more.

16:40  
Is there a blog post that I seen somewhere that gives info about this,

16:45  
that we have a website, it's flipped math study, dotnet. And we have some resources and some summaries of papers that we've written on this project before. We also have a blog post of like, lessons we've learned from this study that we think connect to translating your teaching online, because one of the things we're trying to study now is we're going to interview some of the teachers that were flipping and some of the teachers that weren't, and seeing how that transition to online instruction or remote instruction due to COVID is happening. So did the flip teachers have an easier time? Because they already had all these videos they made? And we're kind of already halfway to online teaching? And are they helping their colleagues things like that. So the website has some resources for folks, if they're more interested in, you can always reach out to me as well,

17:29  
that looks great, we'll make sure and put these links somewhere maybe on the Twitter's or something to minute teachers guide.com and flipped math study dotnet. I really like how you're avoiding acronyms. And just like putting the words up there, because it's really easy to talk about

17:43  
will so appreciate that. He's my collaborator in both those studies, because we've talked about acronyms, and I like a good acronym. But we also were like, it's so hard to do well, that we just started having short phrases for our grants and projects instead. Yeah.

17:59  
That's beautiful. That's a great idea.

18:01  
Yeah. So is there anything else that we want to talk about? With Sandra,

18:05  
I have one question. I mean, so thinking about the world as being a little bit unknown, going forward, like thinking about maybe even to the fall of something like if things kick back up? Have you thought, like, kind of long term? I mean, we've kind of gotten to this place where we're dealing with our current reality, but what if reality keeps extending, like, what ideas might you have for going forward? If something similar happens in the future? Well,

18:30  
I just read an article that said, it's well, and I know my university is planning contingency plan for fall 2020 being online as well. Since we don't have a vaccine yet,

18:43  
I think that it's awesome.

18:45  
When people say it's opportunities, and they get really jazzed about it. I'm still in the phase where I'm like, this is not fun. I'm not enjoying life right now. I don't have children at home. I can't imagine people that do. But I wouldn't think that staying at home is hard. But for some reason it is and I think it's just the mental, you know, grief and all that. So, you know, a part of me is like, yes, it is an opportunity. And you could try some new things. But then the other part of me is like, Don't overstretch yourself more than you need. It's a time to be kind to yourself and to others. So I would say though, if you are looking forward to fall 20, or some other time, I think a lot of people are trying to directly translate what they do face to face in an online format. And that's just not the way to go. If we think about k 12 students. So my parents are immigrants, they didn't go to college, to think that parents are gonna sit at home and they also worked a lot so and teach students, you're basically saying that a teacher is not a professional, that you need, like expertise for a parent could do it with no training. And that's not fair. So I would say like, think about things that you could do new or different ways to engage. I think every online course design that I've seen, it says start with your goals. And then move from there. So you think about what your outcomes you want to have for your students are and then you work from there. So like a backwards design. And I think that's really, really important in online teaching. So if I were teaching k 12 students say, first graders, what do I really want first graders to know, I really want them to be able to count count in lots of different ways. So if I were a teacher, I'd be like, count with your kids constantly. Let's count by twos. But then let's not start at four, let's start at five, or let's start at, you know, 20, instead of zero, or whatever, I would just do counting collections over and over again, and different things, or we'd skip count a lot. Or we'd add things in different ways and find different ways to make 20. You know, like, there's a lot of fun things that you could do as a parent, or as a teacher, that's not like, I'm going to teach you an algorithm. So it's a real opportunity to do I guess, number sense and deeper learning. As a college instructor, I would say, take advantage of videos as much as you're able, if your students have them. I always have my students introduce themselves at the beginning of semester around a video and say their name so I can hear how they say it. Because sometimes you assume that you know how to say their name, and you don't actually somebody with a name, Sandra, I get that a lot. So just showing your face and getting to see them. You can make video comments on YouTube, or like, you know, record it, and then just post them on YouTube just for that student. And they love that because it's it's a conversation, even though it's asynchronous. It feels like pastor knows you. So I mean, talk with your colleagues, good ideas were smarter together, right, like the book said, so take advantage of your networks and like get some cool ideas from other people that are smart to love it.

21:39  
That's good. I've taken so many notes today. Thank you so much, Sandra. Thanks again, for listening to the teaching math teaching podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and we're hoping that you're able to implement something you've just heard, and take an opportunity to interact with other math teacher educators.