By Matt Kitchen, posted April 11, 2016 –

I was really bad at teaching math my first year. I am not saying this to endear myself to you or to provide some kind of ascendency story that will blow you away. It is simply a fact. I started out by student teaching in an urban middle school. My teachers and principals were very impressed and said since I did so well there, then I would do great anywhere. So I gathered my lessons and classroom management plan and headed to an urban middle school. I was going to knock it out of the park. 

My first year teaching was by far one of the most frustrating years of my life. I began to second-guess my career choice. My saving grace was a mentor teacher who did her best to show me the path to success. I will never forget the most valuable piece of advice I ever got from her.

It was February, and I was in the doldrums. I couldn't get the students to listen, do work, or pass a test. I was clueless and failing. Most likely sick of my complaining and knowing that there was nothing she could do to actually fix my situation, she offered this:

Forget everything you did this year, and look to next year. Do your best the rest of this year, but stop getting frustrated about failing and begin planning for next year. What are you going to do to make next year better?

And so I began planning.

Although the transition from the first year to the second year revolved entirely around improving classroom management, I have held true to this advice every year since. I always spend time reflecting on the current year and thinking about what I can improve on for next year.

So every year around this time, I focus on one key area of my math instruction to improve. It requires a lot of honest self-reflection and recognizing that I have many areas that can still improve. It is through this process that I have been able to grow my instruction, improve my students’ test scores, and increase my professional sense of self-worth.

This has been my path of improvement so far:

Year 1: I worked on a classroom management plan that would actually work in my difficult situation and the steps to carry it out from the first day of the new school year.

Year 2: I could manage the classroom, but I needed to focus more on becoming a master of my content. I read every blog and book I could on seventh-grade math concepts and tried to understand them well enough to teach any level of learner.

Year 3: Now that I could manage a class and knew the content really well, I focused on teaching mathematics conceptually. It wasn't enough to teach my students how to solve a problem, I wanted to make sure they understood why a problem worked. My students didn't just memorize "adding opposites" as a way to solve (–4) – (–7), they were able to explain why the answer is 3. This was extremely important to me because I felt like so many of my students were acting like robots or machines as they went through the motions of solving without actually trying to understand why they were performing a certain operation or skill.

Year 4: This was the first time I felt comfortable tackling group work in my middle school math class. I am going to write a post about this next week, so I will leave out the details for now.

Year 5: That year was based on becoming familiar with the Common Core. I also continued to work a lot on groupings, and I experimented a lot during this time.

Year 6: I began to use rich tasks to teach math. I worked really hard to get my students out of traditional textbooks and into working through complex rich tasks. Although there were many days of frustration this year, I worked at it and also came away with some of my most rewarding days of teaching. Sure, I had lessons that flopped, but the majority of my lessons got my students thinking about math like never before. I grew by leaps and bounds. I began training teachers in my district on implementing similar tasks in their classroom the following year.

Year 7: This was really a continuation of year 6, using inquiry-based math tasks, but I tried to take less of a role and answer fewer questions. I wanted to find and work with more tasks that involved less direct instruction from me. 

Year 8: Year 7's focus on inquiry brought me to the point at which I realized I needed to work on my questioning techniques. You know that thing where you answer a question with a question? It can have a major impact when it is a strategic question. I really thought those would come to me a lot faster than they did.

Year 9: This year! I am teaching science along with math this year. I have continued to work on questioning techniques, and I have thrown in an assortment of 3 act math tasks, but I have mostly tried to keep my head above water in science this year.

The list above doesn’t do justice to what I have done, but at the same time I really don't want to set myself up as someone who has it all figured out. If anything, I want to look like someone who is really trying to figure it out and intentionally trying to get better each year.

So right now I implore you to find something you would like to improve. Remember, you will get the best results if you focus on one area for the entire next year. Make it your theme, come back to it every time you plan a lesson or unit. Start thinking about it now before you even start planning for next year. Get it to the forefront of your brain. What needs to be better? 

Matt Kitchen, matt@makemathmore.com, is a math teacher in Ohio. He creates lessons for his real-life math lesson company www.MakeMathMore.com and tweets @mattkitchen.