The Era of Resource Abundance and What We Can Do About It

In March 2010, Dan Meyer turned heads when he spoke about how desperately math classrooms need a makeover. You can watch his insightful and profound TED talk here. He spoke about how textbooks were “robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them” and the dire need for teachers to change the educational landscape in which textbooks are used. Since his revolutionary talk, and with the aid of other like-minded individuals and the Common Core State Standards, teachers across the nation started adapting the way they teach to include more engaging strategies that focus on problem posing, rather than just solving a problem. Almost eight years later, we now face a new issue: the abundance of resources.

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the menu is pages long and has so many different choices that you literally can’t decide what to have? That’s how I feel with the current state of math education. There are just so many good options for resources that I constantly feel myself overwhelmed trying to stay abreast of the latest and greatest, while also not forgetting the ones I’ve learned.

Instructional routines, resources, and strategies over the past few years have become widely popularized as a result of the Internet and the easy access it provides. Examples include (but not limited to), Routines for Reasoning, Three-Act Tasks, Notice/Wonder, Estimation 180, Number Talks, Open Middle, Splat!, Numberless Word Problems, Desmos, Geogebra, Cube Conversations, Which One Doesn’t Belong, Exploding Dots, Clothesline Math, 101 Qs, What if Math, and many more. Moreover, many of these routines have inspired others to contribute their versions (which are all incredible!), adding to the already massive amount of resources available — see alternative websites for resources or routines mentioned above: Three Act (Graham Fletcher), Three Act (Jon Orr), Three Act (Dan Ehlert), Three Act (Kristen Acosta), Three Act (Catherine Castillo), Three Act (Mike Wiernicki), Three Act (Robert Kaplinsky), Three Act (Kyle Pearce), Three Act (Kendra Lomax), Three Act (Andrew Stadel), Clothesline Math (Chris Shore), and many more!

As a result of this fast-paced, technology-driven world, instructional materials are being developed at lightning speed (with instant availability) and the number of resources one can sort through to create a solid lesson plan is endless. This abundance of resources has many teachers (myself included) feeling overwhelmed, both with excitement and anxiety. Do you sometimes find yourself so overwhelmed that you resort to old teaching practices, or the traditional textbook, because there is just not enough time in the day to research, plan, implement, reflect, revise, and collaborate? I have certainly met some teachers who feel that way. Other teachers I know have decided to avoid these trendy implementations altogether just to prevent themselves from becoming overwhelmed.

As an educator at the higher education level, I often think about how theory and practice intersect. In theory, this idea is fabulous: find any vetted resource and try it… have choice and freedom in your own classroom to make math meaningful and fun! In practice, some teachers have found the resources transformative, while others haven’t heard of them or are too swamped to make meaning of them.

There are several assumptions that I feel have truly gone unaddressed:

· Assumption 1: Teachers know about and how to find these sites.

In my experience as a professional development provider, I am always amazed by how many teachers do not know about some of these very prominent resources, especially considering some of the resources have been around for a while. But, this reminds me of the very assumption that I think we are all making — if a teacher is not on social media, does not receive funding to go to national conferences, uses a traditional textbook, or works in a district that provides mainly in-house professional development, then how would anyone know these exist? We need a solution that broadcasts these wonderful routines and practices to a larger body of people.

· Assumption 2: Teachers know how to supplement their district-chosen curriculum.

As a former elementary educator, I realize the difficulty in being a generalist (a teacher who must teach science, social studies, literacy, and mathematics). In addition to the struggles of having to become experts in multiple content areas, many teachers are asked to follow a textbook as their curriculum, leaving little wiggle room for creativity and more importantly, time and know-how to supplement the main resource.

· Assumption 3: Teachers know how and when to use these tools as part of an appropriate learning progression of mathematics.

Teaching mathematics is no easy feat. Teaching mathematics so that the skills build on foundational understanding and hold long-standing retention is a whole other task! Teachers need to be well versed in learning trajectories and understand how to differentiate their instruction to meet the needs of all learners. As these resources become widely available, what lacks is the appropriate trajectory for which each activity falls. While some are more concrete and others abstract, many teachers may need guidance as to which routines to implement before another. Also, content-wise, some tasks are better suited to come before or after others given the increase in cognitive demand or content progression. Without a solid understanding, teachers may accidentally use these resources without thought toward where they fit within the way people learn mathematics.

· Assumption 4: Teachers know how to use these to differentiate, not just use them as a whole-group tool.

Teachers face the pressure every day to differentiate their instruction to meet the needs of all learners, but this can be quite challenging. Finding the perfect balance when one has upwards of 30 students can result sometimes in using these Open Educational Resources (OER) as a blanket resource that fits all needs. Don’t get me wrong — some of these resources are inherently differentiated, offering low-floor, high-ceiling opportunities. But, in my experience, I have also seen teachers use Three Act tasks, for example, as consistent whole-group lessons, working solely in the abstract phase of the Concrete-Representational-Abstract (CRA) learning progression and choosing them based on grade-level standard, when some of their students require modifications.

With these assumptions in place, and given my current understanding of this issue, which I like to call “The Era of Resource Abundance,” I hope one day soon, a collaborative is built where one OER is the main host for all these resources. This would centralize all routines, activities, and tasks, to one location, making it easier for teachers to find the resources that best fit their classroom needs. It is my hope that this “house of resources” would also be organized in such a way where it could be searchable by content standard (Common Core, TEKS, and all cross-walks in between) and mathematical practice. An added bonus would be the functionality of organizing all the resources in an appropriate learning trajectory so that when teachers search “addition,” for example, the resource or routine would be organized by problem-structure types, the CRA approach, or any other identified trajectory, structure, or organization.

The bottom line? There are amazing resources available that many teachers don’t know about and there is currently no structure in place to organize them in a teacher-friendly way. I would love to work with someone to help get a development in place so that we can assist teachers in finding the resources that make their math classrooms meaningful, fun, and engaging. Until an organizational system is developed, I ask that educators comment below and leave other resources they use so that, at the very least, this blog could become a beginning “house of resources.”