06.20.16Omaha: A Guest Post by Peter D. Ford on Audibles and Flexibility in Teaching
Peter Ford is finishing his 21st year as a teacher. He’s taught at a variety of district and charter schools in Los Angeles — enough to have “at least 5 former students who claim me as ‘dad’ and 3 others as ‘grandad.’ He currently teaches 8th grade mathematics (and Algebra 1) at Century Community Charter School in Inglewood, CA, where if you check out this website his class projects include performance analysis of cars and aircraft. In other words, he likes an applied approach to math. No surprise given his undergraduate degree in Aerospace Engineering, and 10+ years experiences as a systems development and acquisition officer in the USAF. Not every math teacher can say he helped to put a spacecraft into orbit to probe the poles of the Sun or that at the last airshow he attended, the F-16 that flew over was powered by an engine he helped develop.
I’ve found many of his comments about teaching insightful and asked him if he would consider writing about it. His guest post, below, considers the approach to “audibles” that hall-of-fame quarterback Peyton Manning uses to make last second changes during the game as an analogy for teaching:
When I meet former students in public they often ask me about some of our more memorable class activities/assignments. “Did they go out on the parking lot to find the parallel lines?” “Did they do the airplane project?”
While I’m glad my former students remember these classic activities and assignments, the parts of teaching that they don’t see are in fact always changing. This year I am tutoring the child of a former student; a hilarious reminder of both my age and years as a middle school educator, but profound in what it reveals about the evolution of my pedagogy from 21 years ago, from even last year, to now. I don’t teach Jason the same way I taught his mom, Elizabeth. If my mission is students learning, growing, and prospering through mathematics, I have no choice but to adapt and grow my practices to help them achieve those goals.
Until the past two years “Omaha” was just a city in Nebraska. Thanks to future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning (disclaimer: as a Michigan alumnus I’m a Brady guy – Go Blue!) “Omaha” is now synonymous with change: seeing what the defense gives you and changing into something better to succeed.
This year’s 8th grade class has been the most challenging I’ve taught in 15 years. That a difficult class would follow a particularly successful class is some corollary of Murphy’s Law. It would be easy to blame this on their generation’s sense of complacency, entitlement, or addiction to social media, but as the adult in the room (and a former soldier) I have to first look at my own actions: what might I be doing that is contributing to their lack of progress? Part of our school mantra is being “Accountable for our Actions”; this mantra applies to teachers, too. So I’ve been coming up to the line of scrimmage all year long having to yell “Omaha!”, because my pedagogy wasn’t working.
As the year began I sought to maximize student practice time and minimize teacher talk time. The sports coach in me has always believed (and still does) that you master a craft by doing it, a lot. I was also inspired by a phrase from Sigfried Engelmann, the creator of Direct Instruction: “If the students didn’t learn it, you didn’t teach it correctly.” With each poor assessment performance I felt like the offense wasn’t moving the ball, but fortunately for me I wasn’t yanked for a new quarterback! Sure, the ‘good’ students were ‘getting it,’ but far too many of the rest weren’t. Every grade reporting period felt like half-time and we were behind. I had to make adjustments as all the great coaches do.
At the beginning of the 2nd semester I was convinced I had to go ‘old school’ and increase their practice time significantly (Omaha!); this seemed to have worked in the past, as at my school we have several T.A’s who were former students of mine at this very school who were testaments to my effort as a math teacher, as well as the former students who come by thanking me for being so tough on them in 8th grade because high school math is easier for them. Personally I think this is the only ‘customer feedback’ that keeps me employed, but that’s another discussion for another time! My ‘old school’ approach was as much a failure as the beginning of the year (Omaha!), so here I was also like a fighter pilot in dire straits: out of altitude, energy, and ideas.
I’ve learned at least as much about teaching through my independent reading as I did in my credential and Master’s program. Searching desperately for something to work, those insidiously accurate tracking algorithms employed by Amazon had a couple of ‘recommendations for you’: “Building a Better Teacher” by Elizabeth Green, and “Mathematical Mindsets” by Jo Boaller. “Better Teacher” highlighted a math education inspiration of mine, Deborah Lowenberg-Ball; her philosophy about being able to deal with student misconceptions in the classroom has always intrigued me, and I thought I was pretty good (though not formally trained) at it. Both of these books suggested a somewhat fundamental shift in what happens in my classroom; since we were in the 4th quarter and still way behind, I had no choice but to give it a shot (Omaha!).
For the last 3 weeks our classroom discussions have been more in-depth; I get excited when I get 3 different students with 3 different solutions to a problem, because they become opportunities to reveal thinking. Even when students share an obviously incorrect arithmetic mistake we engage it versus putting it down as wrong; the extended engagement in most cases helps them realize their error on their own! Learning opportunities have moved from “I-we-you” to “You (solo), We (group), Us (class)”. Yes, I’ve moved from 10-15 or more homework exercises a night to at most 8, or less. What has been most promising has been student learning: I’ve noticed a significant increase in the conceptual understanding and procedural fluency on their exit assessments-quizzes. What I’m doing now in May is not what I intended last August. More importantly I have embraced a pedagogy which I had resisted to some degree because “I didn’t have to learn math that way.” I have never been a Peyton Manning fan, but my willingness to yell ‘Omaha’ when things didn’t work have made me more like him than ever.
The 7th grade teachers keep telling us 8th grade teachers, “You’ll really like this (upcoming) class.” Oh, they did warn us about this year’s class, too! I’m sure this time next year I could write about some evolution in my pedagogy after what I consider a ‘eureka moment’ this year. That next year’s class is a ‘good’ class is no reason to back off the throttle. For every committed educator each year should be an opportunity to grow, evolve, in the spirit of the Japanese word ‘kaizen’ which means to continually improve.
“Omaha” must be a regular part of not just our vocabulary, but our mindset and practice.
