Blog Archives - TouchMath

Ensuring Equity During Distance Learning

October 29, 2020/in Blog /by egossens

Over the last two decades, technology has played an increasingly pivotal role in learning. Yet, with nearly one in five students between kindergarten and 12th grade lacking access to computers or speedy internet connection, the sad reality is that inequity surrounding technology exists in our educational landscape. This inequity has been exacerbated during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

As former Secretary of Education and current Executive Director of Education Trust, John B. King said in a recent interview with EdSurge, “COVID-19 has put our existing inequities in sharper relief and exacerbated them. The sad reality is we give the least to the students who need the most. We give low-income students and students of color less access to early childhood education, less access to resources in K-12…” When COVID closed schools, the “schoolhouse door was barred for them because they didn’t have internet access.”

With many school districts switching to fully online or hybrid class schedules temporarily, access to technology is more essential than ever. Without reliable internet or a laptop or tablet, vulnerable students already facing challenges are put at greater risk of falling behind their peers. Luckily, there is a bright side! While the shift to hybrid and distance learning does shine a light on existing inequalities, it can also help address some of the gaps surrounding education and inequality. This blog will explore the role of technology in improving equity in education, including several best practices to use in hybrid and distance learning environments this fall.

Before we can address the challenges facing equitable education, it is important to understand what equity is. In the simplest terms, equity focuses on fairness, which is not the same as equality. Equity recognizes that all students do not come from the same starting point. Unlike equality, the concept of equity is not about everybody receiving the same resources. Instead, equity in education requires a flexible approach that embraces the idea that everybody will need to receive different resources in order to stand on an equal playing field. The below image of “the fence cartoon” helps explain the difference by attempting to simply illustrate the complex idea.

(Image Source: Interaction Institute for Social Change | Artist: Angus Maguire)
A note about the above image: There have been numerous constructive conversations about “the fence cartoon”, and we use it here as a very simple example of a very complex issue. This blog post from Cultural Organizing goes into detail about the image and how it could be improved. It’s worth a read!

We recently connected with Joe C., the vice principal of a charter school in Washington, DC, where he is helping to create the next generation of leaders. Joe works hard to provide students with rigorous content that is balanced for their social emotional learning needs. Over the course of his career, he has been a special education coordinator, a special education teacher, and a math teacher. Through his experiences, he has faced the opportunity gap that presents challenges for students of differing backgrounds. He has also seen the impact COVID-19 has had on educators as more classes are moved from brick and mortar classrooms to virtual experiences.

We talked to Joe about the impact of COVID-19 on the educators at his school, and what his students are facing as they seek to continue learning during the pandemic. When schools closed in March, “educators had to become more reflective and innovative. The pandemic has showcased the disparity, not just in math pedagogy, but in the equity gap students have in terms of what resources are available to them. It’s making educators look at things more holistically than they have in the past.”

Joe also reflected on the impact technology will have in this upcoming school year. He looked back on spring 2020 noting that there was “this assumption that we would give everyone a Chromebook and the needed resources while maintaining some level of live instruction.” Ultimately, it became “clear that approach wasn’t equitable because all of their students didn’t have access to the same resources.” There is a massive difference between each child in a family having their own computer or iPad to work on and each child in a family sharing one cell phone with their parent. This is why it is important for schools and districts to recognize the different starting points of each student and work to provide the needed resources. Imagine being a student living in a more under-served area of town. By having the school system provide you with similar resources a friend across town receives from their family it allows you a greater chance for similar academic success.

Even though COVID-19 has highlighted the disparities around access to technology, this moment in time also provides ways that technology can be used to level the playing field by understanding the needs facing each student. Technology lets educators look at the data quickly, accurately, and validate their gut feelings. Teachers can use data to focus instructional strategies around each individual student’s access to technology and learning preferences.

Second, technology provides a whole host of resources and programs that educators can use to personalize learning for their students. To Joe, technology can be used to “accommodate and scaffold the level of support. If you have two students working on percentages, one student might need a hands-on guide, while another can use a digital tool. Technology allows teachers to keep the bar high but understand that individual students need different things to reach that bar.”

“Some resources worked well for some students but not all. Some parents could support them, some couldn’t. Closing our school building because of COVID-19 forced us to revise our approach to teaching and learning, to balance equity with rigor and incorporate remediation.”

There are some things to keep in mind when considering the best practices for making technology more equitable in education. Joe urges teachers to take time to understand their students so they can know what resources and technologies are available at home. Looking back at what he and his colleagues learned this spring, Joe reflected that “some resources worked well for some students, but not all of them. Some parents could support their kids, but some couldn’t because they weren’t able to work from home.”

It is imperative in these challenging and changing times that educators take time to build relationships with their students, even if it’s over Zoom or Google Meet. They need to understand each student’s individual situation at home in order to know how to meet their needs. Taking a personal interest in each student is also essential with limited in-person interactions. This helps build the bond between teacher and student. A simple way for teachers to work on establishing these relationships is to utilize a student’s name or preferred nickname, paying particular attention to proper pronunciation.

While the global pandemic has caused massive disruptions to education in the United States, it’s also provided an opportunity for teachers, schools and districts to make a concerted effort to be more equitable. After schools shifted to distance learning, Joe’s school “had to offer a fourth quarter grade of completion because there was no way to equitably assess what students had done.” But the positive outcome is that “it forced us to revise our approach and balance equity with rigor while we incorporated remediation.”

How are you ensuring equity in your classroom, school or district? We’d love to know! Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn and share your thoughts. If you’re looking for math resources to use in distance learning, click here. We’re currently offering a discount, so if you’re ready to buy, click here!

Effective Intervention and Remediation Must be Personalized

October 7, 2020/in Blog /by egossens

Even with talented educators and solid plans, there will always be students who do not fully understand a concept the first time they learn it. Without addressing those gaps in knowledge, students are unable to form the foundation needed for future success. Imagine never mastering counting from one to 10 and being thrust into learning addition or subtraction. Instead of ignoring these gaps, educators usually do an immediate remediation or reteaching to address the area of weakness. If that is not successful, an intervention is necessary.

(Image credit: Edmentum)

Remediation to Avoid Formal Intervention

Teachers engage in remediation strategies as a normal part of their teaching in order to quickly address any misunderstandings of a concept. Intervention is a more formal process and usually entails the involvement of fellow educators and the examination of data to determine where a student is struggling and why. An intervention plan is implemented and reviewed at regular intervals with the goal being to quickly address the problem and have the student stay on track in their core curriculum. The PLC process or a similar data driven process is the common avenue used in schools today.

Personalization of learning is critical for intervention and remediation to be effective. The U.S. Department of Education defines personalized learning as “instruction in which the pace of learning and the instructional approach are optimized for the needs of each learner”. Look at it as students working on the same goal, but with differentiated activities and pacing. Personalized learning enables teachers to listen to individual students in order to understand how they would like to learn, engage, and prove mastery of a concept. It shifts instruction from a one-size fits all approach to one that works with students and encourages them to have a voice in their educational journey.

Intervention & Remediation in Distance Learning

As COVID-19 has redefined what it means to be “in the classroom”, many teachers are struggling with how to conduct intervention and remediation through remote or distance learning. One key to successful reteaching is utilizing parents or caregivers as partners in the process – especially when trying to personalize learning for our youngest students. It is important for teachers to lead the direct instruction of a topic through their lesson plan.

After the initial instruction, guardians can help their children interact with the concepts in the real world. Relating math concepts from class to real life situations can be as simple as asking a child to help measure ingredients while cooking a meal or incorporating guided reading. This allows the guardians to take part in their child’s education as well as provides additional pathways for learning, yet it is more accessible than a learning plan or worksheet. With help from educators, parents and caregivers can identify ways to connect academic topics with moments in their child’s day and make the learning more relevant.

Another best practice of personalized intervention and remediation during distance learning is utilizing the right resources. Technology can provide the tools needed to identify gaps in learning. Right now, many teachers are using AI and predictive analytics to catch the students who are struggling with a concept or subject. After identifying students who have not mastered a concept, they are able to to start personalizing.

The most detailed level of personalized learning involves setting individual goals for each student. This is usually only necessary in a SPED situation or in 1:1 tutoring. But remediation and intervention can be done on a large scale, too. Educators can use video calling software to connect with their learners. For example, a math instructor may see the need to take a fresh approach on a concept. They can get on Zoom or Google Meet and have each student work with bottle caps in baggies of 10 for a more hands-on and visual learning approach to learning math.

Another option is for teachers to utilize curriculum resources to personalize the pacing and assignments for the class. Teachers can use formative assessments to identify the foundational skills that the whole class, a small group, or individual students need to work on. If the whole class is struggling with double digit addition, a teacher may decide to give each student the concepts they need to work on outside of class, using targeted resources like our Above+Beyond Learning Progression Workbooks. As soon as 80% of the group achieves those skills educators can move them back into the regular curriculum. For those students who still haven’t got it, the teacher can then take another step back and do a formal intervention to understand why this individual student is still struggling.

The fact is, every student has a unique background with their own personal strengths and weaknesses. This presents a massive challenge to the education system to not only recognize these differences, but to develop strategies which address each student’s needs. This is why personalized learning, and relearning through intervention and remediation, is essential. By using the right tools and resources, teachers can quickly identify when remediation or intervention is needed. It allows educators to address the gaps in knowledge and work to help every student build a strong foundation for them to continue with in their educational journey.

Browse our new fall catalog to see the full range of resources we have for personalized intervention and remediation. Click here to save $250 on your next TouchMath order!

Three Best Practices for Effective Professional Learning

July 26, 2020/in Blog /by egossens

Educators know it’s not sufficient to treat every student with a “one size fits all” approach to instruction. So why is this how so much of the professional development (PD) for teachers is designed? Where are the instructional strategies, careful planning, and sustained, engaging approaches to teaching and learning that we expect to see in any effective classroom? Rather, teachers are most often given one day of PD on a specific topic in August–a day which likely feels irrelevant and is quickly forgotten. This is a great irony and a great shame. Ongoing learning (note the shift from “development”) is critical to the success of any professional, especially educators. A “one and done” model is ineffective and insufficient. It is no wonder that a 2013 report from the National School Board Association’s Center for Public Education describes “the most prevalent model of PD nothing short of ‘abysmal’’.

Our teachers deserve better, and, in truth, we know how to give them better. As the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss noted in 2014, “the reason traditional professional development is ineffective is that it doesn’t support teachers during the stage of learning with the steepest learning curve: implementation”. In contrast, effective professional development is characterized by three critical best practices. It is built to be differentiated, scaffolded, and applicable.

Differentiated

Every educator understands that classroom content must be differentiated. Students start at different places, have a variety of preferences and motivations, and engage with learning in their own individual ways. Effective instruction is built around that reality. And effective professional learning is no different. When it’s not differentiated, it’s more than just poor practice. It’s actively disrespectful! No teacher enjoys sitting through a bland, one-size-fits-all presentation (half the time covering the same content presented last year) with no notice given to what the teachers in the room already know and are most eager to learn. This disincentivizes teachers from wanting to improve their skills, which, in the end, hurts kids.

Differentiated professional learning follows the same basic approach as Universal Design for Learning. Participants should be able to make three affirmations when participating in a well-designed, differentiated experience:

There are different ways that a trainer or the materials engage me;
There are different ways I can participate; and,
There are different ways I can demonstrate my understanding.

Good professional learning should meet teachers where they enter the learning progression on the topic and build from there. This doesn’t have to be so difficult. Often, it is as simple as modifying an activity, changing an example, or implementing the same type of group and model activities that a teacher might in a classroom. But differentiation also means incorporating a variety of approaches to checking for understanding and assessing the knowledge of participants.

At TouchMath University (TMU), we reconnect with participants after a few days and check to see what teachers may have forgotten to ask or give them a chance to check-in with us if they are unsure they are using a skill or technique correctly. This is crucial because learning new instructional methods is not something you should expect to do perfectly the first time. It takes time, practice, and feedback, and teachers deserve that support in their professional learning.

Scaffolded

Scaffolding is another best practice common in classrooms and yet almost entirely absent from most professional learning. Whatever you want teachers to learn, you need to build up, layer by layer. Engaging with prior learning allows participants to build neural pathways that help them more easily access new content. Scaffolding also makes it easier for teachers to apply their learning and connect it with what they do in the classroom.

Whether a teacher is brand new to a certain technique, approach, or topic, or is a long time practitioner, a comprehensive approach is critical for ensuring lasting impact. Sadly, lack of scaffolding is why so many classroom tools, software, and programs get purchased but never really implemented with fidelity. Effective professional learning should meet teachers where they are and build up, using multiple ways to present information. As always, we must check for understanding and give the learners (in our case, educators and sometimes administrators) multiple chances to demonstrate their knowledge and growth. Many of these techniques (such as “I do, We do, You do”) are well-known instructional methods that educators use with students in the classroom yet are somehow neglected when it comes time to teaching adults.

When designing our professional learning partnerships, the TMU team strives to ensure that nothing is presented before it is first connected to what participants already know. When we approach professional learning this way, we create impact. At TMU, we know our approach is working when we get feedback like, “as a district new to Touch Math, the entire process from the initial information stage to setting up professional development, to implementation has been seamless.” We can see that we achieved our goal of offering a comprehensive and scaffolded approach to professional learning that took complete beginners in our system of math instruction, built them up, and facilitated real adoption and resulted in meaningful use of our resources.

Applicable

As math people, we know how challenging it can be to teach students when they don’t feel that what they are learning connects to their life and interests. Imagine how much worse it must be for educators with competing pressures and tasks who are being asked (or forced) to sit through another irrelevant professional development session. Getting one day of training in August on a new piece of software and then not using that tool until January is definitely not applicable. By the time you’re using the resource, you have forgotten 80% of what was taught since it was never used and never had the chance to enter long-term memory. If professional learning isn’t applicable, educators won’t retain the knowledge. For teachers, this is a waste of time; for districts, it is a waste of money; for students, it provides no benefit at all.

Applicable training is both differentiated and scaffolded. It’s tied to what educators already know and what and how they learn so they are ready to apply it, practice it, test if implementation is successful, retrain or adapt as needed, and really see impact. Only when educators see that their training is making a difference to students will they incorporate it into their wider instructional practices.

Providing applicable training treats teachers with respect. It treats them as partners. And it requires that we check back in. When teachers leave the initial training, they will have something of a handle on the new content, but that isn’t the end. When a student leaves a lesson having shown progress, we don’t wait until the summative exam to revisit the topic!

Instead, approach professional learning as an ongoing process where each piece of training is delivered with the appropriate timing that allows teachers to use it immediately and revisit it throughout the year. At TMU, we hold follow-up “Office Hours” between five and ten days after each initial training and we don’t just conduct sessions in August. We work to develop true partnerships with multiple, ongoing checkpoints. We celebrate when school leaders can reflect on the professional learning they receive and say “training was hands-on, interactive and adjusted throughout to ensure all participants were able to walk away with a solid understanding to implement in the classroom.” Our team of Special Education and math experts provide schools and districts with a wide range of customized schedules and options, all able to be delivered in a virtual format.

Putting it Together

Creating highly effective professional learning is not impossible. In fact, all it really takes is the same kind of attention and effort that we ask from all of our classroom teachers daily. It’s unsurprising that teachers so often feel frustrated, jaded, or downright disrespected by the half-measured professional development they all-too-often experience. We can all do better to be authentic partners with the schools, districts, and teachers using our products and services. To do so, we simply need to keep the three best practices of differentiated, scaffolded, and applicable at the forefront whenever we design professional learning partnerships.

Ultimately, we need to approach every professional learning opportunity as an exercise in partnership. When we think of our teachers as partners, we see how important it is to engage authentically with them. Teachers learn from us, but we must learn from them–from the ways they are using the curriculum, from their needs, and from the needs of their students. We should walk away from every training with new ideas and new knowledge that we can use to improve what we do as companies and leaders.

Effective professional learning is not one-and-done. It is holistic and designed to build internal capacity at school and districts. Our dream for TMU is that we leave behind experts who are available in the school or district for the teachers who understand the full context and who know the needs of students and teachers. That’s a true partnership.

To learn more about TouchMath University and explore a custom professional learning partnership, click here or fill out the form below.

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Making Math Concrete: Getting Started with TouchPoints

March 25, 2020/in Blog /by egossens

Touching manipulatives is how we learn; We improve when we do something physical.

By starting with concrete use of patented manipulatives, TouchMath makes it easier for students to move into written representational content and strongly understand abstract mathematical concepts.

TouchMath uses each number as a manipulative, making the learning experience real for students. Each numeral has the same number of TouchPoints to help students make physical connections with the representational figures.

Each numeral from 1 through 9 has TouchPoints corresponding to the digit’s value. Numerals 1 through 5 have single TouchPoints. Numerals 6 through 9 have double TouchPoints (two concentric circles), which means you touch and count each point twice. Numerals 7 and 9 have both double and single TouchPoints. Zero has no TouchPoints, so you never touch or count zero.

Students excel when they can see the numerals, touch the TouchPoints, say the numbers, and hear the problem. Students should touch and say the numbers in sequence as they learn the Touching Counting Patterns and the TouchPoints. First graders need about a week to master the TouchPoints and an average third grader can usually pick it up in one lesson. Mastering these foundational patterns will set students up for success with TouchMath!

Student Activity

Items Needed:

Printer or nine sheets of paper
Crayons, markers or color pencils (purple, dark red, green, yellow, blue, orange, pink, teal, light red)
Individual TouchNumeral pages

Parents/Caregivers: Print out the pages for each TouchNumeral (here). If you don’t have access to a printer, draw each numeral on individual pages (nine total) and draw the TouchPoints as indicated on each numeral.

Ask students to color in the numerals – but not the TouchPoints. Start by coloring zero blue.

Purple
Dark Red
Green
Yellow
Blue
Orange
Pink
Teal
Light Red

Introduce the Touching/Counting Pattern for each numeral. As students touch and count each numeral, ask them to fill in the corresponding color for the TouchPoints on each numeral. Remember, zero has no TouchPoints!

The one is touched at the top while counting: “One.” Color the TouchPoint orange.

The two is touched at the beginning and the end of the numeral while counting: “One, two.” Color both TouchPoints green.

The three is touched at the beginning, middle and end of the numeral while counting: “One, two, three.” Color all three TouchPoints yellow.

The four is touched and counted from top to bottom on the downstrokes while counting: “One, two, three, four.” Color all four TouchPoints red.

The five is touched and counted starting at the top right, moving left, down, right and down around to the left, while counting: “One, two, three, four, five.” To help students remember the fourth TouchPoint, it may be referred to as the “belly button” of the numeral. Color all five TouchPoints pink.

The six begins the use of double TouchPoints (two concentric circles), which are touched and counted twice. The six is touched and counted from top to bottom: “One-two, three-four, five-six.” Color all three TouchPoints purple.

The seven is touched and counted from top to bottom, counting the double TouchPoints along the right side of the numeral first: “One-two, three-four, five-six,” followed by the single TouchPoint on the top left side of the numeral: “Seven.” The single TouchPoint can be thought of like the nose. Color the four TouchPoints teal.

The eight is touched counted from left to right: “One-two, three-four, five-six, seven-eight.” Color the four TouchPoints orange.

The nine is touched and counted from top to bottom, counting the double TouchPoints first: “One-two, three-four, five-six, seven-eight,” followed by the single TouchPoint on the left: “Nine.” Color the five TouchPoints yellow.

To see the TouchPoints in action and learn how to use TouchMath for specific concepts including counting, addition, subtraction, place value, multiplication, division, time, money, fractions, story problems, shapes, sizes, and pre-algebra, visit our YouTube channel.

It’s About More than the Benjamins: Financial Literacy Starts with Math

February 15, 2020/in Blog /by egossens

Money is an integral part of our everyday lives. From paying for goods and services to managing a personal budget, knowing how to think about money is something many of us take for granted. But the concept of financial literacy is much more complex, especially when it comes to making smart decisions. In many ways, the role of K-12 education is to prepare students for life beyond high school. This means being able to think about paying for college, how to manage wages from a career, and smart spending and saving practices.

A 2017 survey from T. Rowe Price found “that 69% of parents admit they are reluctant about broaching the topic of finances with their children.” (Forbes). If students aren’t learning about money at home, it’s critical that they have the opportunities during the school day. Fortunately, more states are adding financial literacy courses to their high school graduation requirements (CNBC). But is it enough to introduce students to these topics as teenagers?

Anxiety about math is directly correlated with anxiety about money.

In 2018, Dennis Duquette (from the MassMutual Foundation) wrote in EdSurge, “[today’s] young people face an overwhelming number of complex financial decisions. However, many are unprepared to make informed financial choices as they move into adulthood. In fact, three out of four young adults cannot answer basic financial questions.”

A 2016 report by Bank of America found that “only 16 percent of millennials ages 18-26 were optimistic about their financial futures” (Education Dive). Introducing students to financial literacy topics at a young age can directly help kids rescue their future. Annamaria Lusardi (the Denit Trust Chair of Economics & Accountancy and the academic director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center at the George Washington University School of Business) and Nan J. Morrison (president and CEO of the Council for Economic Education) expressed this in more pressing terms in a 2019 Education Week article, stating “[perhaps] the most important reason to incorporate financial education in schools is that it levels the playing field. The data on financial literacy from the international assessment and other surveys show that college-educated males from wealthy families do just fine without personal finance in the classroom, furthering the gap for young people born without these advantages”.

We recently spoke with Dr. Donna Knoell, an educational consultant who works with schools and districts nationwide to improve academic performance to get her perspective on why financial literacy matters, and how math is an important part of the solution.

To Dr. Knoell, “financial literacy is one of the best examples in which mathematics is applied to the real world of daily living. So many major and minor decisions are dependent on a basic understanding of math and essential financial literacy concepts. Knowing the cost of borrowing money is certainly an important aspect of financial literacy. Simply knowing if the amount of change you are given back after a purchase is correct is certainly basic mathematics and basic financial literacy, too.”

Math can be difficult to understand because it seems so abstract. Incorporating money is something students are familiar with and helps them make important connections between what they are learning, the math skills involved, and better-prepare them for life.

It’s critical to start this learning with young students.

In a January 2020 article in Education Dive, Danielle Orange-Scott (former 2nd-grade teacher and current high school counselor and educator in California) explained, “[numerous] studies on child cognitive development have highlighted the benefits of early exposure to language, role-playing, and even mathematics. Over the first few years of life, the brain grows rapidly, allowing children to learn quickly — even more so than adults. Unfortunately, as we age, underutilized synaptic connections are deleted in a process called synaptic pruning, and we’ve missed our chance to lay a firm foundation to complex concepts.”

Dr. Knoell is excited that financial literacy courses are being added to the curriculum in many states but notes that “it should have been added long ago. Requiring students to learn basics of financial literacy will certainly help to assure that individuals can make better life decisions when finances are involved, and help students have a much better understanding of the real cost of living.”

Fortunately, there are plenty of resources available to elementary school educators who want to introduce these topics to their students. The TouchMath Money Kit uses the research-backed Concrete-Representational-Abstract approach to helping students understand both money and math. Our Upper Grades Money Workbook reinforces core financial literacy topics for older students. This 2014 Edutopia article includes several additional ideas and lesson plans to teach elementary school students financial literacy.

How do you teach your students about money? Is it part of your regular math instruction? Let us know!

Three Ways to Improve Math Intervention

January 15, 2020/in Blog /by egossens

Angelica Graves is a K-3 Math Interventionist at the Alliance For Progress Charter School in Philadelphia where she works with small groups of students in a shared resource room. When her principal noticed that her first-grade students were excelling on their STAR tests, Angelica was encouraged to shift into this role.

She works with six groups of eight students per group for 30 minutes each day. As a math interventionist, Angelica is focused on getting her students back on track. She appreciates that her school is great about pushing kids to achieve, but recognizes that some students need to take time to master basic concepts.

“I have second-grade students who can’t do addition in their head, which makes learning third-grade concepts much harder,” says Angelica. “It becomes a struggle for them when they don’t have that solid foundation. That’s why we’re using TouchMath.”

For Angelica, the best approach to helping her students get back on track with math is to work closely with each student depending on their individual needs. Angelica uses the TouchMath Standards-Based Units to help her students master basic mathematical concepts so they can progress on to higher-level thinking.

As an interventionist, Angelica likes to build her own curriculum using content that aligns with Pennsylvania standards. But it can be a challenge to meet the needs of her students who are all on different levels. As she puts together her curriculum, Angelica looks for content that aligns with three areas of best practice for math intervention.

Hands-On Learning

Much of math is conceptual, requiring students to master the concrete and representational aspects before they can advance to abstract thinking. For Angelica, content that includes hands-on learning is critical. “The TouchMath worksheets and activities are good for my students, but it’s the hands-on approach that makes them excel in math,” said Angelica.

Hands-on activities make math concrete for students but also go one step further by allowing students to make creative physical connections with numbers and values. In a 2019 article for Education Week, assistant professor of education Kathy Liu Sun asserts, “It is important to attend to mathematical learning goals while fostering creativity early in a child’s education. We need to create more opportunities for young children to explore mathematical ideas in interactive and playful ways.”

Math Literacy

The word literacy is often thought of only in relation to reading. But literacy is critical to a student being able to make meaningful progress in any subject, including math. Angelica has observed that many of her students don’t understand the language that’s used in math. “You can’t go into math education assuming every student knows the vocabulary,” noted Angelica. “I realized early on that when I was saying “subtraction sign”, some of my students didn’t know what I meant.”

Math literacy requires a deep understanding of the vocabulary behind math before progressing into using that language in practice. In her role as an interventionist, Angelica takes care to ensure her students are math literate, before introducing new concepts. This blog post, from Math Geek Mama, has some great ideas for using literacy strategies to teach math.

Frequent Formative Assessments

“Sometimes it’s okay to get to the end of a week and see that some students still don’t get certain concepts,” reflected Angelica. “But if I’ve spent two or three weeks on a topic, it’s difficult to have to go all the way back to the beginning.” Formative assessments enable educators to “discover what their students know while they are still in the process of learning”. These can take many forms, from exit tickets students complete by themselves at the end of each lesson, to more formal, short quizzes at the end of a unit.

Formative assessments help educators pause and take stock. For Angelica, whose students are on different levels, formative assessments are a critical part of her approach to math intervention. They allow her to more effectively plan lesson plans and activities while personalizing learning for each student.

How have you incorporated hands-on activities, math literacy, or formative assessments into your classroom or resource room? Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook to share your thoughts!

Five Great Ideas for Teaching Math to Special Education Students

January 15, 2020/in Blog /by egossens

Empower Students to Excel
Special Education students deserve the same opportunities to showcase their academic skills as their peers. As Toni Barton wrote for Getting Smart in 2019, “… exceptional learners should be empowered to master grade-level content…While it’s important to provide remedial instruction to students who are behind, it’s just as crucial to ensure that remedial instruction does not replace standards-based grade-level instruction.”

Our Above+Beyond Learning Progression Workbooks for Multiplication and Division enables educators to take students back to the basics and quickly get them back on track. The workbook series can also be used to gently challenge students who are ready to make meaningful progression in multiplication and division. View sample pages here!

Align Curriculum
The number of resources available to educators continues to grow. But it can be difficult to know if a free lesson plan or worksheet downloaded from a content-sharing site is going to be effective. Instead of spending time sorting through unreliable content, it can be well worth the investment to pay for a trusted math curriculum. A 2019 study of several high school English Language Arts lesson plans and materials sourced online rated “…most of the materials as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using.”

Standards matter. We’ve taken the guesswork out of aligning our content with state standards and other core math programs. Click here to download our alignments!

Engage Students with Hands-On Learning
In order to build a strong foundation in math, students must first understand the concrete before they can move to representational and finally abstract thinking. A 2008 study from REL Northeast and Islands of three special education programs found a significant increase in student engagement through the use of hands-on activities.

TouchMath makes the number a manipulative, giving students the chance to physically interact with the numeral. The Standards-Based and RTI Units include worksheets and activities that deeply engage students through hands-on learning. Browse TouchMath Select to see how you can mix-and-match the right set of resources to engage your students in math!

Support Educators
Whether they work with small groups of Special Education students in a resource room or teach in a mainstreamed and inclusive classroom, educators benefit from professional learning that is customized to meet their needs. A 2018 article in Education Week recognized that “historically, many colleges of education have offered just one or two courses on special education for their general education teacher-candidates. Advocates say that’s not enough to know how to teach students with such learning disabilities as dyslexia or other conditions like autism or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.”

TouchMath understands the unique needs of educators who work with Special Education students. Our customizable professional learning seminars explore research-based approaches to helping students with special needs conquer math. Click here to learn more!

Trust the Research
Data matters. Without data, whether from formative or summative assessments, it’s tough to show student progress. In the 40 years TouchMath has been helping students build strong foundations in math, we’ve refined our resources based on what research says is effective. A recent metastudy of the decades of research conducted on TouchMath confirmed that our approach works. Visit our Research and Efficacy page to download the whitepaper!

We would love to help you implement some of these great ideas! Give us a call (855-929-0880) or email [email protected] today!