The Delta Issue #34

Teacher prep programs are skimping on foundational math. Here’s why it matters.

Hi everyone, Kunjan here. State lawmakers across the country are considering bills to improve math instruction this legislative session, which makes this EdWeek article about a new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) so timely. The report finds that most teacher preparation programs don’t spend nearly enough time training new teachers on how kids develop number sense and mathematical reasoning. It’s painful to see NCTQ give 7 out of 8 teacher prep programs a failing grade.

Reading this piece reminded me of my experience as a sixth grade math teacher in Durham, NC in the early 2000s. I remember getting handed a new curriculum to “get kids to explore fractions using pictures only”, but no guidance on how to teach ½ + ½ = 1. Like many teachers, I got no training and no support teaching this curriculum. So what did I do? I made my own stuff.

I was not alone, but this is hardly a strategy for success at scale. Here are my top 3 takeaways from this NCTQ study.

1. Teachers need to know the math they teach, both procedurally and conceptually.

Being able to do math and being able to teach math are two different skills. As NCTQ President Heather Peske put it, “Teachers need to know how to do more than just follow the steps in math to get the right answer. They need to know why those steps work. It’s like the difference between a basketball player and a coach. The player can learn their role and follow directions, but the coach needs to understand the bigger picture the why behind every move.”

Teacher prep programs need to make sure teachers can do the math, explain how to do the math, and teach students to do both of those things. That means grounding future teachers in conceptual understanding, not just procedural steps.

2. Gaps in teacher prep will show up in student outcomes.

When I was a teacher, I had colleagues who skipped units they didn’t know how to teach. It wasn’t common, but it did happen. If a student doesn’t build strong number sense in 3rd or 4th grade, they’re going to struggle with ratios, fractions, and equations later on. And once students fall behind in math, it’s incredibly hard to catch up.

If we look at the downward trend in NAEP scores over the last decade, we can observe that the biggest gaps for students line up with the areas NCTQ says teachers are least prepared to teach: number sense and algebraic reasoning.

3. To do math instruction right, we can’t just copy and paste literacy legislation.

If I have one piece of advice for policymakers, it’s this: Don’t just copy/paste literacy instruction. The process of learning math isn’t linear like learning to read, so we need to approach it differently and teach teachers differently, too.

Many states have adopted the LETRS professional learning program to train elementary school literacy teachers on the progression of skills kids need to read. Naturally, the success of the program is now prompting lawmakers to look for a similar analogue for math instruction. But there isn’t a math version of LETRS because math can’t be taught as a discrete set of linear skills — kids are getting number sense at the same time as they are learning operations. The conceptual understanding of 2 + 2 = 4 happens for kids at the same time as grasping what the symbol “2” means.

In order to be effective, math teachers shouldn’t get “LETRS for Math,” but instead receive the kind of training that aligns to the way kids learn math best.