Differentiating in Math

A few years ago, when I started teaching fourth grade, our school's "policy" was that students who scored __% (it varied) on the beginning-of-year math assessments (which also varied), and were deemed "strong in math" by previous teachers, were moved up to the next grade level for math.  The third, fourth, and fifth grade teams had to align our schedules so that math happened at the same time in all classes, so that students could go to which ever math class they were assigned to without missing other subject-areas.  In a lot of ways, this worked for our school -- the kiddos who were moved to the grade-level above felt good about themselves, their families felt good about the "challenging" math instruction their kiddos would receive, and at least some teachers felt good about having all of the students in their math class working on the same grade-level standards. This method of "differentiation" was also pretty easy; we made the decision at the beginning of the year about who was in which math class, and it basically stayed the same all year.

However, it wasn't a perfect system. Other trends started to emerge. Within math classes, the range of abilities was still quite wide, but it was now students working well below their own grade-level mixed with younger students working one or two grade-levels above. The kiddos who were "left back" in their own grade-level math classes started to say that they were "bad at math."  The younger students who were pushed forward consistently out performed the on-grade-level students, often dominating class discussions, but also sticking to themselves during partner or group work.  Families of children who were not pushed forward but felt that they should have been complained that their kids were bored and/or not challenged, which sometimes came to a head when a student would be moved mid-year; although this also led to more questions about what qualified a student to move up and how and when.

Last year, when our school fully departmentalized fourth and fifth grade (and got a new principal), we decided to move away from this system.  We justified the shift for a variety of reasons, including that we had a new curriculum, which was more rigorous than our previous curriculum, and that there was new a district-wide focus on mathematical discourse, which we felt required students to engage with peers at a variety of levels.  We also felt that this change would help us address the culture around math that had developed in our school -- with kids thinking they were "bad" at math if they were working on grade-level.

To ease the shift, we also put in place a few opportunities for students to continue working in more homogeneous math groups within and outside of the math classroom. I held "lunch bunches" with the students who were essentially repeating fourth-grade math to set individual goals and reflect about their math growth. Another teacher pushed into my room two or three times per week to pull a small group of these "high kids" to work on challenge problems. Once a month we held "math seminars" where we split the kids across fourth and fifth grade to work on more critical-thinking problems at different levels.

I learned a lot from these experiences! It turned out (not actually surprisingly) that some students who were good at mathematical computation, and even interpreting basic word problems, really, really struggled with open-ended questions. Other students who had weaker computation skills, were very strong in reasoning. And many students struggled with communicating precisely about their mathematical thinking.  As a result, I introduced more problems that required reasoning, practiced math vocabulary to improve discussions, and looked for more ways to have students demonstrate their understanding about concepts.

Even as I'm typing this, it's hard for me to believe this was all just last year!  Thinking back about all of the questions and challenges we faced last year, I'm realizing how quickly some of the issues resolved themselves, while others we've still barely addressed.  I've come a long way in my own way of thinking about and planning for math instruction and differentiation. This year, I have a completely different group of kiddos, with different strengths and areas of need which has led me in different directions.  As I remember all the things I tried and learned last year, I'm realizing that some practices have already become second nature and many more are still very much a work in progress.

More on this soon 😉