Beyond Best Practices: Using Pedagogical Judgement to Navigate Uncertainty

uh Dr. Brett Garner um at Denver University. Um she's gonna be t talking to us uh about best practice. Um Brett is a former middle school teacher and um is a self-proclaimed um what was the phrase? Professional nerd. Professional nerd who enjoys puzzles and and games and such. So, we're super excited to have her share a really kind of thoughtful and I think timely conversation about what are best practices and for whom. So, Brett, thank you so much Paul. Um, hi everyone. Um, as Paul said, my name is Brett Garner and I'm at the University of Denver. I'm an assistant professor there. Uh, and today I want to talk about going beyond best practices to use pedagogical judgment in these like really uncertain times. Um things have not been normal for a while and maybe that like is our new normal. Uh but really we're asking teachers to do a whole lot and often to do more with less. And so I want to talk with you all today about like how do you navigate that? How do you deal with that? And how do you stay true to yourself and to like who you are as a human while we're going through this weirdness. So uh just one spoiler alert to start. Um, this is not going to be a tips and tricks session. Um, there are so many people who are telling teachers what they should be doing right now. You do not need me to layer onto that. Okay. So, um, I don't have all the answers. Um, though that would be really nice. Um, I just I don't. So, um, to tell you a little bit about where I'm coming from, I'm a former middle school math teacher. I taught grades six through eight in Houston, Texas. And while I was teaching, I started to wonder, are we doing it wrong? I was in a pretty traditional set of schools in Houston. And um I was really concerned that so many people like my students, but also just like adults and friends and family that I knew could get around saying, "I'm just not a math person." Right? And like somehow it's okay to go through school, to go through like K12 and college and all of that and to come through on the other side and say, you know, not a math person. Like you can go to a restaurant and um say like, hey, could you split the bill for me? Like, can you or tell me how much to tip. I'm just not really a math person. I don't do math. That's okay, right? Like people do that. Uh, and then but if you walked into the same restaurant with the same friends and said, "Hey, could you tell me what's on the menu? I'm like just not a reading person. I don't really read ever." That would be weird, right? Uh, and so we've created a system where somehow it's okay for a lot of people to come through and say like, "I'm not a math person." To me, that says that it's not so much a problem with the people. It's not like, you know, half of people are just like not math people and they don't have some math gene or something. It's a problem with the way that we're teaching. If we're teaching in a way that is not working for our students and not helping them recognize their own mathematical strengths and skills, then that's a that's a systemic issue. That's not an individual issue. And so now I am a teacher educator at the University of Denver. I work with uh pres-ervice elementary teachers uh as well as secondary teachers. I also do research and work with a lot of uh inservice teachers both in rural and urban areas and um really in my mind in my career I've made teacher learning the key. We know a lot about how to teach math well and we know how to teach math in a way that helps kids become math people but we don't know a lot about how to help teachers do that. we don't have systems in place that support teachers continued learning and development throughout the course of a career. And so I'm going to share with you today some stuff that I've learned um from a pair of projects called project sigma which is uh featured in that book um and that stands for supporting instructional growth in mathematics. Our follow-up study is called project tow teaching amidst uncertainty. Um we named both of these in the before time. So like we weren't planning on naming projects after what could become COVID variants. We thought, oh this is like cute and maty and like sigma and towel and like like math things but also Greek letters and yeah it was cute and then now maybe they'll become variants. I don't know. I hope not. Maybe we can just stick with omccron like forever and then it'll just go away and fizzle out. Um we also named uh project how uh in the before times not thinking about um or not knowing not expecting just how uncertain everything would become um like 2020 and and after. So and of of course all of this that I'm telling you about is these are not just my ideas. I don't do this work in isolation. I work with a team of really lovely um and thoughtful uh humans and scholars and researchers and teachers um who are featured here. Um, and this work is funded by the National Science Foundation. All right. Um, so back to the main topic. What are some best practices for teaching elementary math? Like when you think of the phrase best practices, what sort of stuff comes to mind? As you think about that, I want you to turn and talk to your neighbors about what kinds of best practices uh you have in mind. Take another 30 seconds or so to wrap up your conversations. Y'all are such good students. Okay, so we only needed 15 seconds. That's fine. Um, so I want to hear from you all. What are some of the best practices that come to mind for teaching math? What are some of the things you were talking about? Oh, wait. Sorry. We've got a We've got a microphone for our Zoom friends. It It's not going to It doesn't sound weird in here. It just helps them hear better. Okay, that Okay, good. I feel better about that one. Um we were discussing the idea of um student uh students processing mathematics and not just being fast at things and um honoring their time and what they bring to that process. Absolutely. For sure. What else? There's some other best practices we said over here that we um or Sherry says she starts every day with you can do this. You're smart. You can do this. So the positive reinforcement, the positive energy that you bring in at your small group or your whole group or whatever, like yeah, that's not starting right in with math, but you got to start your brain. Yeah. So, well, and you have to feel confident, right? And like help students know that they can do it and you believe in them. Yeah, I can share some ideas from the online group. So from the online group, you know, making connections, student centered lessons that are engaging and allow students to interact with the math and different ways to get the answer. Small group instruction were some of the ideas we were generating. Totally. I think I saw a hand in the back. Did I? I saw a hand up here with John. So yeah. Um, I don't know. I didn't really talk about it with you guys, but anything that's um anything that's like culturally responsive, anything that accounts for and considers your students and and their own cultural practices. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Students need to see themselves reflected in your classroom. They also need windows into other people's lives and to understand and appreciate other people um in your classroom as well. And like all of these are great things that we want to do. I'm not saying that like none of none of these are bad ideas. These are all right answers, right? But it's a little more complicated than just what's the best practice because we have to decide what is best for our students on this day uh in this moment in this interaction. And so we might say like okay a best practice is give students time to think deeply. we need to give them time to like really grapple with the concepts of mathematics so that it's not about speed and accuracy really want to get into it um and let them engage in rich tasks and productively struggle. But we also know that we can't give them too much time because if we give them too much time then then they might uh start to get frustrated and like be a little unproductively struggling um and then uh you know they get frustrated and give up or they might just like wander into some non-mathematical activity which isn't always a bad thing, right? like whomst among us has not um been talk like you're supposed to talk about one thing and then the conversation like uh wanders off into some other territory that's totally fine. But if students think that they have like infinite time to work on something then they're not really trying to get anything done and then it's just yeah we'll hang out in this unmathematical area for maybe a little too long. But we also like we got to give them time but not too much time. But then we also have to think about uh covering all the material and getting through the curriculum or the pacing guide. Uh maybe staying on pace with your colleagues. Uh keeping up with um whatever district assessments are coming down the down the pipeline. So we also have to like think about the coverage like in a longterm sense. So, we have a little bit of room to like decide how much time to spend, but we don't have like all day or all year. As another example, um we know that it's best practice to let students productively struggle. Like there should be some grappling, some like figuring stuff out. Um and they should be able to like figure it out for themselves because we know that they can do it and we know that they're mathematicians and they need to like experience that uh problem solving process. But um we don't want them to struggle too much. We have to give them some supports and scaffolds, right? So things stay in their zone of proximal development and all of that. Like we want to help them make sure that they actually can do it and so it doesn't become an unproductive struggle. But we also can't proceduralize everything and just say, "Oh, well here are the five steps to solving this problem and if you just do these five steps, like it'll all work." Because then they don't actually get to do the struggle part. And so there's a like teaching is complicated. Um we have all of these or there are plenty of best practices that give like conflicting advice. And so it's not just following a set of tips and tricks, but really thinking like what is good for whom, when, and why. There some choices in teaching that are always going to be wrong, right? like uh being mean to kids, belittling kids, refusing to use kids like correct names uh or like learn how to pronounce them. Those are those are wrong pretty much always. But there are very few choices that are always going to be right in every moment every time. And sometimes the best practice rhetoric ends up feeling kind of like clickbait, like oh here's this one weird trick. Uh or if you just uh stop like just avoid the number one worst carb then or like whatever the carb analog is for teachers, right? If you just avoid the the one worst carb, you'll be a great teacher. Um or there's this, you know, big secret that your principles don't want you to know. Uh and if you just do this secret, then the kids will learn and everything will be great. uh and ends up being like a sort of clickbait or like listical sort of thing that you might see on Buzzfeed of like, oh, if you can just do these five or 10 or 85 things, then you'll be a great teacher. That's not really how it works. I don't think that we can boil teaching down like I don't think we can boil good teaching down to a set of discrete practices that are just like well if you check off all these boxes you're an amazing teacher. Teaching depends on interactions between a complex set of humans between all of like the human children in your room every day and like who you are and how you all show up to the classroom every day. um all of the strengths and personalities and ideas and concerns and anxieties, all of the stuff that you bring to the room every day. Teaching is an interaction across all of that. It's complicated and it requires professional and pedagogical judgment to do it well. It cannot be boiled down to a dis to a set of discrete practices or steps. On the flip side of that, like the other uh like the kind of darker side of the clickbait version of best practices is that we get this baggage of the binary. And a lot of teachers um I know myself included, like I consider myself a recovering perfectionist. A lot of teachers were per perfectionist, right? We want to do what's right for the kids. We want to do the best we can um every day. And like as a teacher, I can go home at night and think, "Oh man, I really should have followed up on what that student said or I have a much better answer for that question now." Um, like when I'm falling asleep at night than I did in the moment. Um, I can remember every like negative teaching evaluation comment that I've gotten. I don't remember, and that's like, you know, a few. I don't remember all of the um really great like positive ones. They're like, "Oh, this class was wonderful." I remember every negative one, right? And like I see some nods like teachers are often perfectionists. We want to do the best that we can. And uh if we frame teaching practices as either good or bad, like there are good practices and bad practices, then the implication of that is that teachers are also good or bad. Like there are good teachers and there are bad teachers. And I want to like push us away from this binary view of teaching. And to elaborate on that a little bit more, uh a binary view of teaching uh is a very evaluative stance. Good practices, bad practices. Good teachers, bad teachers. I want to push us towards a more expansive view of teaching where it's an interpretive stance on what good teaching is. It's not just like what's good or bad, but what goals does this practice support? What goals are not supported? In the moment, you have to decide like am I going to follow up on that student's question? Am I going to give a few more minutes um to work together? Am I going to move on? Am I going to like return to this idea tomorrow or am I going to like just wrap it up and tell them the punch line at the end of the math block and then move on to something else? We have to make all of those decisions. And we had to think about like what goals are we are being supported and what goals are not being supported. To elaborate on this a bit more, um the binary view of teaching would say that uh good teaching can be broken down into like specific practices or curriculum um or other activities that will result in student learning. an expansive view that would say that well actually research suggests that some practices are generally better than others. Like they're generally productive for student learning, but teachers have to exercise professional and pedagogical judgment to figure out how to apply those to your own classroom uh and to your students. Binary view of teaching would say that good teaching is about the individual about your skills and knowledge and expertise and practices. But good teaching is relational, right? you can be a really great teacher uh for this class like at this time point and then if you go to another school across town or go to another grade level um or just get a different mix of humans um in the room it can feel really different and you might not feel like a good teacher because good teaching is relational. It's about how the teachers uh like your skills and knowledge, but also how you're responding to your students who may be more or less receptive to actually learning. Uh and so it's not about like good or bad, but it's about relating to the humans that you're with. Binary view of teaching would also say that good teachers always have good lessons. The flip side of course being that if you have a bad lesson, you must be a bad teacher. But lessons aren't interactional again, right? And as teachers, we design experiences and some of it might go the way that we want and sometimes it might not. And if things don't go the way that you wanted, you don't get to all of the goals that you wanted to achieve. That doesn't make you a bad teacher. It makes you human. Okay. So now what what do we do? Well, I want to tell you um the story of Lzette McLaclin, who it's a student name for one of the teachers in our study, is featured in the book. Um I want to tell you the story of of her learning. And I picked her in particular because she really illustrates um the problems around dealing with the baggage of the binary. If I were to ask like what's a good teacher, Lette would check off basically every box on that checklist. She is an experienced teacher. She's teaching uh high school math uh at a school that we call for MA. Um she's really thoughtful, really caring, like really loves her students, knows them, and respects them, has great relationships with them, and it's just like a really happy happy class. She also has a really strong commitment to letting students do the mathematical thinking. So, she has a really hard time telling students like, "Yes, that's right. Here's what you do next." She wants to get them to figure it out and get them to say it themselves. So, in a typical class with Lzette, um, she'll have students collaborating in small groups. They're working on rich tasks. Um, and Lzette will quietly circulate, you know, checking in as necessary. I've learned so many great eavesdropping strategies from her, like, you know, when you're walking over by a group and kind of like listening in, but not looking directly at them because you don't want them to be like, "Oh, no, she's noticed me." um but like kind of listening in and she'll intervene uh and give some scaffolds and supports as necessary. Um but she's always helping students find the answer themselves. And overall there's just this like really happy buzz of mathematical thinking, you know, and like the kids are working and they're talking about math, but they're also like joking and having fun with each other and they like being there and you like being there. It just like feels really good. Like the vibes are just right. That's Lette's class most days. But uh what happens when things change? So in the second year of our study, um Lette's class suddenly got much bigger. She went from about 25 students um to 41 students on the roster with 40 desks in the room, right? Always a good feeling. Um so uh she's got 11 groups now instead of six. and she's still like walking around, but it's no more like quiet observation and circulation. Um, she's going from group to group to group and she doesn't really have time to just like stop and listen. So there with so many more students, there's just less of her to go around. She's not stressed by this. She's not like frantically running around the room. It's just that she finishes talking with one group and then somebody else has a question. And so she'll go over there and then go to the next group and the next group and students are waiting a long time um between like getting help and feedback and support from her. And so that happy buzz of mathematical thinking now has this like darker undercurrent of uh frustration that's simmering as like kids are are having to wait longer. She hasn't changed her practice, but the class context has changed. She's still giving them rich tasks. She's still letting them work in groups. She's still uh focusing on letting students figure things out and not telling them procedures. Like, she's still doing the same stuff that she was before, but they're just not working as well in this new context because there are so many more kids in the room. And so that uh brought us to think about like well how can we help her navigate this and negotiate this and like figure out what to do differently. She in that in that moment she felt like she was a bad teacher and she said that she was like I am a bad teacher. I have done a bad job. I was like no no no that's not what happened. You're not a bad teacher. It's just that like things aren't fitting the context here. So um I want to introduce this idea of pedagogical judgment uh which is a different way to think about good teaching that pushes us more towards that expansive view of like what is this good for and why and how and away from that binary view of like good teaching bad teaching. Pedagogical judgment has three parts. The first part is action like what are teachers what do teachers do? We do all sorts of things. We give tests. We plan lessons. Um we respond to students. We decide like when we're going to go small group, whole group, uh when we're going to do direct instruction, um or like elicit students responses, have them share out. Like we decide all of that stuff. We do a ton of things. But then there's also like underneath those actions there reasons. There's pedagogical reason for why we do this. So, um maybe uh we're going to like uh really focus on like visual representations of fractions because I know that next year that's going to be really helpful uh for what they're doing in the next year or the next unit or whatever. Maybe we're focusing on um having students work collaboratively in groups because I know that that's a part of good teaching and that's what I think is part of good teaching. Maybe we're following some administrative requirements that um I need students to work independently for at least 20 minutes so that I can do some sort of like individual assessments with each kid or um I need to do uh like I need to make sure that I have XYZ grades uh in the grade book because that's what my principal is expecting. So there are all sorts of like reasons that we'll do these things and then most importantly there's the ped pedagogical responsibility the like core commitments that we are beholden to that we are obligated to follow. Some of that is personal like our sense of ethics and morals um our sense of justice uh our need to keep kids safe in the room. Some of it is logistics, right? Like, well, I gotta give the kids uh something to do independently so that I can uh pull them out to like do whatever individual assessment or I need to um get these uh um assignments out so that like I can send them home for parents or whatever like there are logistical things that we have to deal with. And then there's also the legal compliance, right? Like all of the uh legal things that we have to do as teachers. So we have like these core responsibilities that um should be driving uh all the rest of our actions and our reasoning. So I want you all to now discuss this in small groups uh and think about like just one example of arranging students in groups. We want to do group work in the class. What are some reasons that you might do that? And what sorts of pedagogical commitments or responsibilities does that reflect or might that reflect? Go ahead and talk amongst yourselves. I love like the internal teacher timer of like knowing exactly when 30 seconds has passed. Um, all right. Now, I'd love to hear some of your um examples like why why would you put students in groups? We said, "Hold on, I'll get the mic." We said, and we know that this is the more reason we don't like to think about, but because our administrator said that's what they want to see when they come and observe a lesson. They want to see us having the students work in groups and when we get evaluated, that's what we're going to be evaluated on. So, Yep. And that reflects our commitment to following the expectations that our administrators set for us. And that's legit. That is a that's a real thing that happens. Why else? Another reason to put students in groups um is to promote thinking on rich math tasks. And that would reflect a commitment to um there's that word again. Randomization of groups to support thinking in the classroom. Totally. Yeah. We want kids to think about math. That's great. Could you comment on the randomization idea? Yeah, that's another great layer of grouping. We have a fantastic math team at our district and we're doing a book study, the title of which is the orange book. Um, mathematical. There we go. Thinking classrooms. Um, and I can't say her last name either. Lilia Doll. Lilyad Doll. Yeah, Peter. Yeah, Peter. Lily Doll. Um and so one of the practices um that his research shows is that a randomized group is more likely to be doing thinking in a classroom than a homogeneous group or a what we think is a planned group. I'll mix the high kids with the middle kids, the middle kids with the low kids. And the research shows that there is a slower time to respond um less less commitment to being vulnerable um in a group that is not randomized. A randomized group produces better results. Well, and if you think about it, a random group, anyone can have smart ideas, but in a planned group, like a stratified group where you put together like a high kid, a medium kid, and a low kid, the kids know who they are. We try to be sneaky about it, right? Like, oh, I'm just going to like put this group together and this is just a random group. But the kids know, they know if they're the high kid, the medium kid, or the low kid. and then they will play into that role in the group. Or if we do like uh homogeneous groups and we have like a high group, medium group, low group, they also know uh where they are in that hierarchy. But if it's random, then we don't have a hierarchy and anyone can be the smart kid. Anyone can be a high kid. Yeah. Some things that uh some ideas we generated online were um ideas like um group work uh helps build confidence and peer relationships. Um offers u different differentiation did I pronounce that right? Uh build deeper understanding of material, build confidence and being able to explain it to others. Um it provides opportunity and is essential for students to talk through the problems and see different ways of thinking. But there is a need for individual accountability as well. Mhm. And so there are so many reasons that we might do any particular pedagogical action. Turn this off maybe. No. Okay. Uh okay, cool. So, um, one reason we might put students groups is that so they can collaborate, so they can, you know, engage in rich tests and learn how to like gain the confidence piece, all of that good stuff that y'all were saying. And that might reflect a responsibility that like collaboration is key for student sensemaking, that working together, learning from each other, those are important skills. Part of that might be mathematical, right? That like we're going to learn things more deeply when we talk about it with each other. Part of that might also be more social and like developmental that uh kids become like uh better people, better citizens and like members of a community when they're able to collaborate with one another and when they learn how to work with people who are different from them. We might also um arrange students in groups so that kids can help each other, right? more or less like independent work, but so that uh kids can turn to one to somebody else to like check their answers or to get an explanation. And that might free up your time as the teacher to like target specific students or to take care of some other tasks in the classroom um as students can like depend on one another. That's another um reason that we might arrange students in groups. And the logistic stuff is non-trivial, right? Um, it might be that that's what the admin expects. It might also be that it's easier to move around the room or easy to pass out materials. Um, you know, we can just like keep a bunch of uh pencils and uh erasers and calculators and markers or whatever in bins on students desks and then you don't have to like worry about passing them out. Those logistics matter. Um, and that frees up your time to uh spend more time on instruction and less time on passing stuff out or it frees up your time to spend more time teaching and less time talking with your principal about what they expect you to do. Right? So like those those logistics are re are real. There are two big ideas that uh I want to pull out of this. One is this concept that any action can have a lot of different reasons and those reasons matter. Two is that teachers are constantly balancing a bunch of different and maybe competing responsibilities. So like back to group work, maybe we think that like collaboration is key for student sensemaking, but maybe it's hard to come up with a way to hold individual students accountable for that work. And so we also want to hold students accountable uh for individual like products, but it's harder to get at that with group work. That's not like an insurmountable conflict, but those might be two things that you're trying to balance. Or maybe uh the admin wants to see collaboration in the room, but this group of students like the personalities, the dynamics, like maturity, like it's just not jelling. It's not working. the vibes are off and they don't know how to collaborate together yet. And so that is getting in the way of some other goals for learning and development uh and teaching. And so as teachers, we're constantly balancing all of these different competing things. And I think that's true now, maybe more than ever. And so we have to like grapple with that and figure out what is it that we are going to hold ourselves accountable. What do we want to stay true to? What do we need to do as teachers for ourselves and for our students? And so I want you to think turn back to your small groups again um and discuss like what are your core commitments and your pedagogical responsibilities. Who are you as a teacher? because this really gets at the heart of teaching. I want you to talk about this one first, but then where this is going to go, just so you know, so you know where we're headed, uh, I'm going to ask like what pedagogical actions support or conflict with those responsibilities and to really think about like how you can stay true to your goals and commitments. Okay, but first turn and talk amongst yourselves chatting about this first question. All right. Now, I want to hear from you all like what are some of the things that you're grappling with? What are some of the like your core commitments? Uh and what actions are supporting that or maybe conflicting with or just like what were you all talking about? I can hear snippets. Um, so we brought up a lot, but every time we would bring up a core commitment, something that we noticed together is it's hard to bring up core commitments and pedagogical responsibilities without also bringing up all the things that conflict with those commitments. Um and we said that the act of being a good teacher um is when you kind of reconcile with that where you try to figure out how do I take what I know to be best practice? How do I take what I know to be my commitments? How do I fulfill those while also meeting these demands and these demands? And so that was just the big thing is when we started talking about the core commitments, we immediately got into the second question because it's really hard to talk about one without also bringing up the other. Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of what makes teaching hard, especially now when there are so many people telling teachers what to do uh and they're saying completely different things in most cases. So um it's really about figuring out what do you care about? What is most important? You are like you have pedagogical expertise. You know your students. You know them far better than I do. Uh and far better than probably anybody else. So it's like up to teachers to figure out what they need and to make those hard choices. What else are y'all talking about? No. Um so one of the things that um that Hank was saying is that he values bringing the core uh commitment is uh making the the learning of the tests relevant to students lives so that they can see themselves. Did I get that right? That they can see themselves in the math. And then um that made me think of I know there's a one of the um conflicts is our particular curriculum. And I was thinking about at the fifth grade level there's a particular uh task later in the year where it has the students um they have to you know have this business and it gives the business as a record store. we don't have really records anymore and so you right so it and and then so could you change that absolutely but then what are the um what are the conflicts and you might get administrative conflict you you with communication that could be yeah eliminated but also time because all those materials for the record store have already been created by the curricular materials and you would have to somehow recreate all that with whatever business or entity that if you had your students choose lose something. So time becomes a commit a constraint too. Mhm. Absolutely. Yeah. And you have to like part of our pedagogical commitments is like is not burning out and not spending all day every day working. We can't do that. Yeah. I can share some from the online group. Um and I think some follows from the themes from the previous groups. Uh, one one reoccurring theme was this idea of fun and engaging fun lessons, fun and safe place to try new things um and discourse and conversation with their students. But then there's this conflict of um trying to fit so much in that, you know, can we dig deep enough with the concept, right? Um or feeling the need to be scripted rather than interactive and exploratory. um also kind of create these um conflicts as well. Um and then also kind of in these pedagogies like working in small groups is the conflict of um the small groups not working out or the students not knowing how to lead or participate or engage in the way that we may have kind of envisioned or imagined. Yeah. And for any of these dilemmas there are there's not one right answer. someone in the uh secondary group said on the way out um he was like you know I gave one piece of feedback I wish you would have told us the answers I like I don't have the answers there's no like uh answer key in the back of the book on how to teach uh yes yeah for any like best practice your mileage may vary absolutely and it's constantly depending on like uh who you are, who your kids are, what you care about, what else you're being asked to do and like trying to figure out where is there some give and take. How do you negotiate those things? I think a lot of the teachers that I work with right now feel like they're kind of like going crazy. Um like they're being pulled in so many different directions and being asked to do so many different things with students who are also stressed out and like the students are like the kids are not okay, the teachers are not okay. We've been through a lot these last few years. And so just trying to deal with all of that while also teaching and also helping kids like be okay and like grow and develop as humans even in these weird pandemic times that we're living in. Uh it's really hard and like yeah it is. And I think the only way to get through it is to really like think about what do we care most about? What are our non-negotiables? What are our core commitments as teachers? And how do we stay true to that even amidst all the like chaos that's happening around us? What other like thoughts or concerns or like questions do y'all have? Go for it. So when I was in my undergraduate, I've been teaching, this is my fourth year now. And when I was in my undergraduate, I was told a lot, you know, use your professional judgment. Use your professional judgment. And I said, what professional judgment? I said, I've had exactly zero years of teaching experience. Um, I guess my question would be to those new teachers and people who are currently studying in their undergraduate, what advice do you have to them when it comes to using their professional judgment and their pedagogical judgment in the classroom? because they don't have the years of experience and all the mistakes that everyone else has made to learn from. So what would you recommend? So uh I would recommend thinking about like the strengths and the knowledge and expertise that you do bring to the classroom. My uh I teach a lot of uh pres-ervice teachers. They're student teaching right now. You know, it's February. They've been in their classroom since August. They know way more about what is happening in schools right now than I do just like from being there every day or three times a week. Um, they know a lot more about their kids and like where their kids are, what kind of number sense they have, uh, what kind of strategies they use, what kind of stuff they like, um, how they think, what they're interested in, what's fun or funny to them. They know so much more just by hanging out in the classroom three times a week for I don't know six months, how however long it's been. Um they know way more than I do about that. They also know about um their own experiences in the classroom as students. Many of them at the beginning of the year tell me that they uh you know in third grade Miss So and so gave them mad minutes about times tables and they liked math before that like in first and second grade and then in third grade they had the mad minutes and then they were like oh I'm just not a math person anymore. I had so much anxiety from um doing those mad minutes and that's how I learned that I wasn't fast enough, wasn't accurate enough. studied at night with my parents, but then we were crying over the dinner table like refreshing flashcards on multiplication tables. That's a valuable experience to know that they don't want to replicate that. They don't want to uh like pass that those negative experiences on to their students. And so they know from that experience like I I want to help students become math people. I want to help them like math or at least I don't want to like make them feel as bad as I felt, right? And those experiences matter. Or some of them had a really great teacher who like helped inspire them and encouraged them to um like plan their own business or like or do something really fun and exciting and they can replicate those things too. We always had to take that with a grain of salt, right? Like just by virtue of being teachers, we're a little bit weird. we are not like necessarily representative of the children in our rooms. Um, but we can think about and reflect on what are those experiences that are and are not supportive of student learning. You know, you know, a couple thoughts is I I think for like early career teachers, I think in every any generation of teacher, there's some type of extrinsic piece to it, right? like um so even in the early 90s when I was teaching my administrator came and observed me and had this checklist that they filled out right and and they have we always go through these iterations until I feel like in the teaching profession we grow to a sense of autonomy and I think what I appreciate about this talk I I kind of to paraphrase it's like mindsets for teachers right because it's this space to say you know what um it's not binary it's not right or wrong It's um it's kind of finding reclaiming that kind of autonomy and space to make decisions. Um and and so, you know, for me as I kind of think about it, it's um I kind of really liked the kind of the frameworks and the questions because it's not about a right answer, but it's about a reframing and kind of finding being true to yourself. Exactly. We also have to play the long game. tell this to my uh pre-ervice and like early career teachers all the time. You have to play the long game. If you want to become like a really good teacher, it's going to take time to develop that expertise. You're not going to have it all figured out in your first year or your second year or your 10th year. Uh and so if we're not playing the long game and thinking about, all right, I can change some things right now, but I can't change everything right now. That takes a lot of the pressure off of any individual teacher to like have it all figured out today this year for these students. You're not going to break your kids if you uh do some things that you don't like wholly agree with um or like don't wholly uh reflect your pedagogical commitments. You can change some things now and like keep figuring out other stuff to get better and better over time. And I think that's part of how how we live with Oh, wrong way. That's part of how we live with those actions that we have to uh follow through with to like meet some sort of institutional requirement that maybe doesn't align with what we care most about. But that's if that's not a fight you can fight right now, then don't. Maybe that's a fight for later. But you have to figure out how do we deal with it now? Like for Lette, I'm all right. I'll wrap it up with this for Lette. She had 40 students. Like she had too many kids in the room. Too like objectively too many children in an AP calculus class. Too much. Um she that was not a thing that she could deal with in that moment. Right. Then she could go talk to the administrators about like changing the policies for how they schedule classes, but that wasn't going to fix the kids that were coming in her room tomorrow. And so we have to think of like that's not a fight to fight right now. the like too many kids in the room. What is a fight to fight is like how do I deal with the fact that I have too many kids in the room? What strategies can I use to like keep them thinking mathematically but also support them uh like and stay sane as just one hum like one teacher with too many kids that like that's how we have to think about it. All right, thank you all so much. This was wonderful to come talk with you. Um, that's time. Yeah. Thanks, [Applause]