In the U.S., according to Sarama, 78 percent of adults cannot explain how to calculate interest on a loan, 71 percent cannot calculate miles per gallon, and 58 percent cannot calculate a 10 percent tip on a lunch bill. So as the US continues to fall behind, educators have begun looking for solutions. Sarama, along with her team, set out to find an answer on the importance of math to developing children and if there’s a way to teach without wearing out the children’s drive to learn. In order to begin this journey, Sarama set learning trajectories.
“We wanted to set three parts to this experiment making a goal, covering developmental progression, and instructional activities,” Sarama said. “We wanted a system based on progression of levels of thinking. The goal is where I want my kids to go.”
Sarama believed supporting a child’s mathematical skills is just like supporting their growth.
“When they are infants you are holding their head, looking for that control,” Sarama said. “Eventually they begin to try to stand, you don’t push them down, we all focus on supporting that skill.”
Once the base was laid out for the project, implementation on a trial basis came next. The order was to begin with small groups, then grow into a single classroom, and end in implementation upon multiple classrooms.
“At this point, we had constructed a building. We had all the pieces and the goals set up for us, we knew we wanted to improve math and that is when we made ‘Building Blocks’.”
Building Blocks relied heavily on teacher cooperation. Sarama counted on those in the classroom to understand not only what and why they were teaching a certain way, but that it was to only make things better for everyone.
“We really worked to make sure there was a shared communication so we didn’t have a teacher come up and say ‘that’s all great but you have no idea what other stressors I have in my life’,” Sarama said. “In education teachers have so many pressures for innovation so we wanted to lessen it by communicating about all the great work they were doing.”
After getting teachers on board, Sarama explained how the curriculum would work. It functioned as a developmental learning process in which students’ work would evolve based off of where they were individually.
“Kids come to school with a large informal knowledge base so as soon as you turn on something real mathy they turn off,” Sarama said. “I wanted teachers to look at my curriculum and see where a kid is and where they can push them.”
The program relied heavily on observational methods and the teacher’s interactions with their students. This took form in classroom visits all the way to taking the learning into an easily applicable environment.
“We situated it in a grocery store because that seemed to be a universal context for kids,” Sarama said. “So, we would say can you count these 10 bananas and then pay with money. It isn’t play-based but it is playful.”
Sarama’s biggest worry was sustaining this over a period of time. But, reflecting on the results six years after the original project Sarama was able to see that teachers demonstrated sustained and increasing levels of fidelity.
“Teachers change the perception of what kids can do,” Sarama said. “Teachers changed their way of thinking to a developmental model and that changed for them in the long term. New superintendent comes in, fine, new principal comes, fine, but they will never teach math differently because they are now interested in how children think. You can’t unlearn that.”
Overall, the program created lasting effects intended to help both the teachers and the students. In the hope to continue this positive effect Sarama reflects on the project and the future.
“I am very proud of the work we did and going back and seeing it had an impact was affirming to know we did make a change,” Sarama said. “So, moving forward I want to build newer programming accessible to everyone. The end goal is not to get our name out or prove what we can do, it is to prove what the kids can do.”
The MFJS Reporter -- Winter 2020 T-R 