Discover the BEST Way to Teach for Maximum Pattern Recognition Results Today: S2 E3

Speaker 1 0:00
We talk about the resources, I'm super excited. I'm like, Hey, listen, I'm going to bring back as much as I can to the team, but I want to know more to be able to better do that. So I'm excited. You're sweet, you're

Speaker 2 0:10
so kind. Today is the initial launch for this school year. You've not missed anything at all. Tier one interventions is not sequential. Any standalone module is good on its own. Welcome everyone. This is tier one interventions podcast. I am one of your hosts, John and Lee Zupancic, math specialist, and my co host is here, co author, partner in crime, all of those things. CHERI dotterer, an occupational therapist and neuroscience expert. Our topic today is pattern recognition, and talk about how this affects the learning of our students in schools. Good

Cheri Dotterer 0:54
morning, everybody. I'm Cheri. For those of you who have not met me, I am an Occupational Therapist. I come to you with 32 plus years of neuro, anatomy, neuroscience, kinesiology background and focusing a lot on sensory processing disorder, ADHD and how it impacts writing skills and generally found me several years back when we both were initiating writing a book, and I finished mine a little bit before she finished her book. But I have written, and this is the bad, my bad, working copy, handwriting, brain, body, disconnect. It's what people have said to me is is like a Bible for dysgraphia.

Speaker 2 1:43
Sherry and I are gonna have a conversation back and forth. We're gonna make some points to help you understand pattern recognition and how much this impacts the learning or lack of learning, for our students, you can become better at pattern recognition in two ways. Number one, you're born with it. There is an innate inborn just like we talk about number sense. Number Sense is an innate inborn intuitive understanding of the size of numbers. And some of us have a strong number sense. Some of us have a weaker number sense, and there is something innate in us when we're born. The same thing is true for pattern recognition. However, there's a continuum of levels, so not everyone is born with the same aptitude for number sense or pattern recognition. Both of these work the same way in learning, number sense and pattern recognition can be learned, but cannot be explicitly taught. Sometimes, when we think, oh my gosh, I taught that to kids. I've, I've told them, I've, I've shown them, I've done this, I've done that, and they're still not getting it. That's why we want you listening to this today, because there are ways that we can improve pattern recognition, and it is only through experiences and very deliberate and intentional delivery of those experiences. It's about the facilitation and delivery, if you have, and I'm just going to bring this out there right now. I wasn't going to, I just now thought of this, but if you have a math textbook, and it seems very good with conceptual, intuitive focusing on number sense and patterns, and kids aren't picking up on it, it's because of the way we're delivering the content, or it's because of the way the textbooks are telling us to deliver the content, we have to be very cautious and deliver the content in an opposite way, of explicit and direct and provide experiences that kids can figure out on their own. And that's really the model of tier one interventions. Is to gage student perspective and to teach to their perspective. Everyone has a

Unknown Speaker 4:02
schema.

Cheri Dotterer 4:05
A schema

Speaker 2 4:07
is created through our experiences. When kids are at school and we are trying to connect to what we think are their experiences and we haven't extracted their perspective of experience. We are not making connections and associations for them. The only way that we can improve memory and retention of content, by the way that we teach, is to connect to a student's personal schema, and their schema is their perspective based on their experience, not the experience that I assume that they have. We know that pattern recognition is a struggle for many of our students that have learning disabilities. Cheri, talk to us about your perspective on pattern recognition. One. What it means from your perspective point of view, what it means from your medical field and your neuroscience background.

Cheri Dotterer 5:09
When I'm doing an assessment on students, a lot of what I am doing is pattern recognition, because visuals are the foundation of being able to interpret one's life. Now we have to combine that with auditory that I know, but if the visual is not present, the auditory will take over, and then things like echolalia will impact one's life. Think about a typical kid with learning disabilities, one they might be struggling to identify what is in front of them. Can they understand that it's an A? Can they understand that it's a five? Do they understand that it's a parentheses? What about this? What do they know about that? Is it something that is intuitive? Is it something that confuses them? The diagonal, it could be representing a fraction. It could be representing specifically a diagonal. It could be representing multiple different things in life. Sherry, I

Speaker 2 6:27
love this. And just to point out, what Sherry and I call this is a stimulus to stimulate thinking in the classroom, a stimulus has to be as naked as possible. What I mean by that is we remove the noise. The noise is anything that gets in the way or becomes a barrier to learning, noise like words, noise like questions, that prompt answer, getting and solving. Kids that play school, they can handle all that noise, the words, the questions, the structure, but the way Sherry just presented, this is a perfect example of a stimulus that is going to allow to open up student schema and perspective. They may say, That's my skateboard rant. They have perspective, and we have to hear and listen to that and then use responsive teaching to be able to respond to their perspective and align it with what I know that they need to be taught.

Cheri Dotterer 7:31
Sometimes their perspective takes me off guard. I'm just saying that. No, very true. Yeah. What are you talking about? Yeah, give me. Get Joe. Don't give me any Pokemon references, because I won't get them.

Unknown Speaker 7:42
There you go.

Cheri Dotterer 7:44
But kids will. Kids will give you Dungeons and Dragons. They will give you Fortnite they will give you those video games Angry Birds. That was years ago, but I think Angry Birds is still around. But Angry Birds did use a lot of diagonals and

Speaker 2 8:05
projection parabolic sherry. Gosh, you make a good point. These kids are going to give you what we think are off the wall things. However, how do we respond to that? That's what I mean by responsive teaching. The number one way we need to respond to that is to celebrate their thinking, to celebrate their thinking. We don't want to offshoot it, we don't want to dismiss it. We don't want to disregard it. That is the worst thing we can do, because now you've created a bigger barrier to learning, access to you. Great point, Sherry, start

Cheri Dotterer 8:38
with Angry Birds. Hopefully you know a little bit about Angry Birds that you can take where they are and bring them to where you are. As Joni and I were talking a lot about pattern recognition, gosh, it's been like two years that we've been really delving into what pattern recognition is. We have discovered that there's three stages to pattern recognition. The first stage is understanding forms. I just put up a diagonal. The diagonal is a form. I write the word topology. There. It is just another word for form. Topology is actually a branch of mathematics. Who knew, right? It's or you take Mr. Incredible and you stretch him, but he's still Mr. Incredible. You twist him around, Gumby. Oh gosh, did that take me? Does anybody remember? I know gummy you take Gumby and you twist him around, he's the first version of Mr. Incredible. But looking at forms, think about size, shape, color and constancy. Constancy is. The same shape in different directions.

Speaker 2 10:03
To make this mathematical connection we talk about, yes, topology is a complete branch of mathematics. I want to bring another connection there, which is transformations, reflections, rotations, dilations. Dilations is when you scale, make things bigger or smaller similarly, proportionally, seventh grade standards, constant and proportionality. The reason I bring those out there is those are not just important for mathematics. There's a reason those are in our math standards, and oftentimes as math teachers, especially secondary math teachers, we think those are just a check off for our standard we as secondary math teachers do not understand the neuroscience behind why we work on those skills. We may teach transformations, give a quiz on it and a test on it. Understand Okay, these kids get it. These kids don't. But we don't have the best instructional delivery on how to help give kids experiences on how to get it because when those shapes change size, we know if the line segments are larger, similar by scale, the Angle degrees stay the same. Mathematics is the language and the set of rules based on the neuroscience of what Sherry just described,

Cheri Dotterer 11:34
not only that, but mathematics and those words that we just talked about, transformation, there's life skills involved. It's not just teaching isolated mathematics. You're teaching a foundation to life skills, and that's what impact is all about. We use an acronym called Impact, which is inclusion, metacognition, perseverance, adaptability, confidence and transcendence. When we're looking at things like transformation, we have to take all six of those components together to create a change in our life skill so that we can move forward. So mathematics is a minute piece, yes, of that transition of life as a math

Speaker 2 12:30
teacher. My background is a secondary mathematics teacher. I am now a math coach consultant, and as as Sherry's talking about these other life skills. My perspective of teaching mathematics is I use mathematics standards as the vehicle to teach thinking, reasoning, habits of mind, practices, decision making, problem solving. I use mathematics to teach life. That's the first perspective I think everybody needs to understand. As you're listening to the tier one interventions podcast, and for those of you that are a member of tier one interventions, we have to understand that there is a mindset, a belief and a philosophy of how we utilize mathematics if we're going to teach mathematics in this way.

Cheri Dotterer 13:27
We hadn't talked about a diagonal, but think about this shape. This shape is the connections of the two most easiest pencil strokes to form so they're connected, but the vertical line and the horizontal line are the easiest pencil strokes to create, and then we just close the box. How many things do we use? Life Skills wise, with a square, we teach breathing exercises to kids with a square start at the top left, go down, go across, go up and over. We are teaching as we're going down, breathe in, hold it, Breathe out. Breathe in, hold it, breathe out. The square isn't just a geometric shape. It can get connected to life skills. They use squares to make buildings. So architecture is involved. There's

Speaker 2 14:34
a bigger mathematical concept that is much more of I don't want to say a common sense, but something that is so important in logistical businesses delivery businesses is, how can we make and package our products, or make something more square, because it's much more cost effective for. Because if I create something in more of a square, it's closest to a circle, but still a polygon. I know I'm losing some of you, but what I want you to understand about what we're doing in tier one interventions is we are magnifying the most essential and most important mathematics to help us do life better. When you are fencing in your backyard, I don't want to do a one foot by 350 foot fencing. I'm going to need a ton of fence to do that, and I'm going to get the least amount of area. But if I make it as much square like as possible, I'm going to maximize my area with less fencing. I know what we're talking about is sounding like all these random pieces, but I like this today, because we don't think about all of these associations and connections and how important it is to teach these math skills in this perspective. So go ahead, Cheri, because I think I know exactly what you're going to do next. It's another point. Do

Cheri Dotterer 16:02
point during Saturday meth jonily about the square tilted 45 degrees. Kids don't know that is still a square,

Speaker 2 16:19
even if they see it tilted right in front of them, even if

Cheri Dotterer 16:23
they see it tilted right in front of them, they cannot identify that is still a square. And there's also a whole lot of other mathematics that John Lee brought into the square that is tilted 45 degrees. But for now, think on that thought, one of the easier to write is the circle. However, the circle is much more complex mathematically. Look at the dichotomy I often talk about literacy and the a capital A because of the diagonals is the most difficult to write, whereas the A is the first cell that's coming out of a baby's mouth. Circle is one of the more easy lines to create, particularly but is much more complex mathematically. If you see this dichotomy that's happening all around us, how about this? Maybe I don't have quite have my numbers lined up, right? I was not trying to be perfect here. But what are what do I have in front of you? Somebody, tell me. Tell me more. What is it? O'clock, a clock perfect. The threes at where the three typically goes. For an analog clock, the six is where the six goes. This you're not going to see as often because of the way the hemispheres are made in our brain. However, how many of you have seen

Speaker 2 18:04
this? This is a good connection and an assessment for me, for kids that lack a number sense, when I have kids or I give them a circle, and I have them write the numbers of the clock, whether I do this at a third grade level or a 10th grade level, seventh grade level, I watch for which numbers they put first, second and third, and where they place those numbers, and that gives me an indication of their mathematical number sense. It's an assessment that I use frequently as one of my evidence pieces to see if they need instructional experiences to increase their schema on the clock and the placement of those numbers, because if they do, they're going to struggle with percents, fraction area, angles. They're going to struggle with all of those pieces later on,

Cheri Dotterer 18:58
neurologically. This tells me a whole lot about the person's brain. The 12 is at midline, the 11 is at midline, and all the numbers are around to the left. Did anybody have anatomy? I have enough anatomy in in their history, in their science classes, to tell me what happens to your central nervous system when it compares to your peripheral nervous system. No. Amy's saying no, no to Sarah, the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body. The right side of your brain controls the left side of your body. This is written down the left side. Down the left side, that will be the right brain. This is down the right side. That would be your left brain. The left brain, the parietal lobe in is mostly where that is coming from. I see brain syndrome as a result of a neurological injury. There's more potentially going on with that student that you probably didn't even think about. To pull this

Speaker 2 20:23
back to pattern recognition and moving in to launching our math task for today, I do want to say that pattern recognition, compared to all other mental abilities and capabilities, pattern recognition has the highest and strongest correlation to general IQ, general cognitive ability, because in general IQ tests, cognitive ability tests, much of what they're assessing is pattern recognition. Analyzing how this child's brain operates is essential for great instruction. And having said that, when we are thinking about pattern recognition, oftentimes in mathematics, we use patterns to teach the mathematics, which leaves a lot of kids out. Think about kids that say, Oh, I'm good at math, or I'm not good at math, and we're like, yeah, you're not good yet. But some of them never get good because we don't deliver it, right. But those kids that have this natural knack for patterns in mathematics, they're able to then make associations and connections and access our grade level content much easier, much quicker than the kids that don't

Cheri Dotterer 21:40
join us for the next session of tier one interventions to hear more about pattern recognition before you go listen to what we're offering for Christmas this year. It's going to be fun.

Speaker 2 21:57
All right. Cherie, give us an unveiling of what you have been working so hard on and what we have to offer people that's just fun. Yes,

Unknown Speaker 22:10
this came totally out of

Cheri Dotterer 22:13
left field and totally not in my thought process until I got something on Facebook one night that said, why don't you do this? And I'm like, but I can't. There's nothing we have to offer. We do. The first module that we recorded was called the pizza problem. What I've done is I've taken the pizza problem and I've turned it into one page, quick start guides that you can just take the ideas and I'm working on all of them. Okay, that's not it. That's not everything. I've also had to incorporate some ideas for writing. There's some ideas for writing, and on the back of that, there is a checklist on what to look for when you've got kids who have writing struggle, where the core issues might be. That's

Speaker 3 23:15
not all. For Christmas. We have the infomercial

Speaker 2 23:19
like going on, I'm loving it. I'm loving it.

Unknown Speaker 23:24
But that's not all. We

Cheri Dotterer 23:25
have some presents for you. Inside this little package is a little gift for you. We have gifts like this for you. Everybody needs stickers, right? One of them says, Be kind. Where are they? Here. They are I am brilliant. So this goes along with, why do short pencils help our kids? If the kiddo you gave a kiddo a pencil that says, I am brilliant, who's struggling, what does that tell them? Locker problem, magnets. We found this amazing game. It has all of these colored stickers that are made out of squares. And there's a game that goes with it. We give you one copy, and we tell you how to find some for the rest of your classroom, the teacher survival kit, but you can use this bag for whatever you want. Plus, just for the holidays, we got some socks for you because you always want to call a warm up by the fire, right? And I'm wearing them along with a bangle. So what is this? This is a buy one, get one, buy one gift, one offer for you.

Speaker 2 24:48
Premise is, teachers are going through a lot right now. We're struggling. Sarah, you had the question of, what are the best adaptable resources? So we've combined. That question for each of the tasks, like, what are the best adaptable resources for each of the tasks? We have a quick start guide. So it's all based on the tasks, but it's also based on teachers need to just take care of themselves. There's a combination of this, and it's called 3d 3d the three disabilities, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, and it's relief in 3d so that we can get some relief for our struggling students, and then just fun relief for us, like good fun gift for us, but in but this is like the What is this whole thing. But what Sherry has right now is and take it away Sherry, because you've got this. Like, how would you launch this, not only for yourself, but for someone else? Here's just a special packaging. So, yeah, tell us about this sherry.

Cheri Dotterer 25:57
You How many other seventh grade teachers, and I don't know if you guys do a gift exchange, but your Secret Santa gift could be right here right now, and it could have stuff for your fellow teachers as well as something for you to put to the side. I talk about the pizza problem, we talk about the fuzzy socks, the jewelry, and then we also have on our brand new store. This is brand new. You guys are the first people to see it. There are two books. The other thing is, we have a new fax texting service. This is our text number. It's right down here. And I will be asking each one of you to send me a text that says, yes, please text me tier one. Interventions, information, I know we're coming to the very end. This is after a lot of you have hung up today, but use that phone number that's on that link. Text me, yes, I want tier one, interventions, reminders via text message, so that I can add you to the list, and we can remind you that way as well.

Speaker 2 27:12
We have a lot in store, a lot coming up, a lot to unveil. It's going to be an amazing year, not only with the tier one, but also with all of these additional things that we will have to offer and some of the things we come out with, you guys will be gifted, some of that for being tier one members, have a great day. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai