The focus for April’s session was Collaborative Approaches to Healing Math Trauma, and it proved to be a great opportunity to share ideas and approaches with math educators serving students from early elementary through college. Folded into the mix we had folks from several nonprofit organizations looking at how they might leverage the hands on work they do with students as an opportunity to support positive math experiences.
We began the session with a chance for participants to try their hands at solving Skyscraper puzzles from the Julia Robinson Math Festivals. Participants worked in groups of 2 or 3 to solve progressively harder challenges and talk through strategies to solve these sudoku like puzzles. This gave us a common starting point to talk through what the experience was like for participants, and how that might differ from the more typical they or their students may be accustomed to.
Naturally enough, attendees described some initial tension and performance anxiety, but they felt that fade as they collaborated with tablemates to talk through each puzzle. Qualities of that experience which stood out include
- The buzz of productive conversation
- The activity was easy to access
- Working with one or more partners allowed teams to approach the puzzles from multiple perspectives, with each team member seeing some aspect of the puzzle that others may have missed.
- Having physical objects to arrange as puzzle solutions encouraged visual problem solving, and sparked ideas and realizations that provided opportunities for participants to share their logic and reasoning.
This led us into discussions about this experiences differs from those students might more typically have within a math class. Across our discussion groups, participants noted several key differences:
- Compliance vs. Problem Solving– math instruction is more often compliance-focused rather than built on genuine problem solving
- Lack of Agency: Students often lack the agency to build their own thinking skills, and the teacher to “save them”
- Transactional Nature: For many, a math course is seen merely as a hurdle to graduation or an apprenticeship rather than a tool for life.
- The Safety of Disengagement: Because of the stress involved, many students find that checking out feels safer than facing negative emotions or the risk of failure
Participants also identified several core elements they wish were more prevalent in math instruction.
- Productive Struggle: There is a strong desire to see students engage in productive struggle within a culture that forgives errors and values figuring out over simply getting the right answer
- Agency and Reflection: Learning should provide students with the agency to critique and communicate while giving them the space to reflect on their own thinking
- Tactile and Creative Learning: The use of tactile materials, visual and physical models can serve as a hook to make abstract concepts more accessible
- Joy and Identity: Math should be an opportunity for students to build a mathematical identity and experience the joy in exploring mathematical ideas, collaboration, and creative application of mathematical concepts.
We reference healing math trauma in the title of the Collab Lab. That’s a phrase we’ve been using in our work with math folks over the years. The experience of too many students, caregivers, and educators have had with math education has left them with a certain level of fear when they hear the word math. What brought attendees to our session was a recognition of how common that fear is, how it impacts not only students but educators, so we spent some time to dig into that a bit and understand what they see from their perspectives:
- Generational and Institutional Trauma: Both teachers and students often carry their own math trauma, which can be exacerbated by frustrated parents at home. In a classic vicious cycle, a educator who fears teaching math leaves a student confused, the confused student asks a parent or caregiver for help, and they feel unable to do so. It allows everyone in that chain to feel a sense of failure– he teacher has failed to teach, the student has failed to learn, and the caregiver has failed to help.
- The Math Person Myth:A major hurdle is the persistent belief in the myth of math people vs. non-math people, which creates an extra layer of social status in the classroom. Somehow it becomes ok to ignore the notion of a growth mindset when it comes to math.
- Systemic Barriers: The current system often focuses on grades over life skills, and many students are effectively locked out opportunities by rigid requirements for math, and limited supports or practices that can help a student meet them
- Abstract Meaninglessness: Because math is often taught as purely abstract, it becomes difficult for students to assign meaning to it, leading to a disconnect between the subject and their real lives.
Despite the challenges, facilitators noted several promising frameworks and strategies.
- Restorative Frameworks: The CIRCL framework (Carnegie Math Pathways) in use at MATC and restorative assessment (filling gaps rather than retaking whole courses) offer a more humane way to handle remediation
- Art and Interest-Based Learning: Using art, film, fashion, or dance as a medium to teach STEM can draw students in and facilitate deeper thinking about how math is used in the real world
- Real-World Application: Successful models include exposing the math within construction and other trades, and experiential learning that connects different disciplines
- Family Engagement: Programs like Parent University and family math nights can help address the home-to-school transfer of math anxiety
- Pedagogical Shifts: that connect math to the shared experiences of teachers and students both groups to start from a position of knowing before shifting to the abstract.
Some closing thoughts
This was our 75th Collab Lab, which puts us one away from the close of 10 years of bringing educators and community partners together to explore what’s possible. The large turnout we had for the session is a clear demonstration of the passion in Milwaukee to do something more for our students and to do so together. Since our first session back in 2016 more than 800 teachers, professionals, and students have joined us at a Collab Lab to share their ideas, connect across silos, and find things to work on together. The experiments, projects, and initiatives that Collab Labs have given rise to have pulled in more than 300 additional educators and professionals looking to support the innovative work that teachers and students have taken on. Those projects have also provided opportunities for 450+ college students to lend their support as collaborators, resources, or near peer mentors. It takes a village, and seeing it grow has been an honor.
Following April’s Collab Lab We we’re heartened to see requests from educators and organizations looking for ways to join, support, and extend efforts to offer Milwaukee teachers, students, and families a much richer set of math experiences and opportunities to heal some of the math trauma they or those they work with or care for may have experienced. If you’d like to be part of that, let us know. We’re looking for additional partners for Family Math Nights and to start a Math Circles program for teachers.
None of our math efforts would be possible without the merry band we’ve come to refer to as the Milwaukee Math Collaborative, and who were there last week to share the joy they find in math: Gabriella Pinter (UWM), Leah Rosenbaum (STEAM Milwaukee), Bernie Traversari (WOSTA), and Danielle Robinson (MPS)
Thanks also to MSOE and the MSOE STEM Center for another year of hosting Collab Labs. Our final session of the year will be at UWM on May 13th. as part of their Experiential Learning Showcase.
Resources
The Skyscraper challenges we shared are drawn from the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festivals collection of puzzles and activities. We draw heavily from that collection for the activities used at Family Math Nights.
STEAM Milwaukee has a lending library of STEM materials that includes a number of math activities and resources, included the Skyscraper puzzle sets we used during the Collab Lab.
Gabriella teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in problem solving, mathematical modeling, differential equations and analysis at UWM and mentors undergraduate researchers. She has led Math Circles programs for middle and high school students since 2011, and currently supports three groups on a biweekly basis at Golda Meir and out of the MSOE STEM Center. Gabriella has been involved with Learn Deep projects since early on, with our Middle School Math and Number Talks Workgroups as well as public math events with schools and community partners.
Leah specializes in hands-on mathematics learning. She has coordinated a multi-year, multi-institution National Science Foundation grant on out-of-school data science learning and worked with the collaborating partners on the materials, professional development, and community events elements for our Family Math Nights efforts over the last two years. She has also developed hands-on math activities for in- and out-of-school learning contexts, especially for exploring math at body scale, that are currently lent to learners in the Milwaukee area through STEAM Milwaukee’s Lend-a-Lab program.
Our experiment Tuesday night: arrange for parents and their children to spend time together in discourse, while attempting to solve math-based puzzles in an after school setting. Since many parents are non-English speaking, we provided UWM student support for translation when needed.
