Mastery Math Method That Makes Learning Stick

Jonily: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, it's Cheri Dotterer here at Tier One Interventions podcast.

I'm here today with Jonily Zupancic and we are in class today with a live group of ladies and gentlemen who are learning about the Mastery Math method. So I'm gonna let Jonily talk and if there's any intervention that I wanna add to the puzzle, we will do but for now, I'm signing it all over to Jonily and let us learn a little bit about mathematics.

Girl. Y'all, this is Jay-Z. I'm Jonily Zupancic, I'm your math specialist, your main Mathineer. I if you are listening to this podcast or you're watching this podcast on YouTube I want to give a disclaimer and a warning. This is level two. You're listening in on a level two version of Mastery Math method.

Mastery Math Method is strengthening our tier one core general classroom. We cannot have in our schools effective interventions and effective [00:01:00] tier two and tier three without the strongest core. So if you're listening to this, that's the mindset that I want you to have. You should be listening to this.

If you are a general classroom teacher, a special ed teacher, a parent, a school board member, a superintendent, a curriculum director, a principal, every stakeholder should be involved in the qualities of a strong tier one general classroom environment and the experiences that students are going to have.

Hey everyone. This episode was taken from a class that we did on an evening event, so listen in and hear what we had to say that night. I.

Welcome everyone to this evening's masterclass.

One of the questions that Jonily wanted me to ask before we got too far into this tonight was [00:02:00] do your students remember the math lessons that you taught in school?

Do your students remember? So I know that you're not teaching math, the OTs in the room, but do the students come to you? In your pullout sessions and remember the math that they were supposed to be doing in the classroom. So just keep that thought in your head. Be as we get started. Jonily, can you share a little bit about yourself?

Absolutely. Welcome everyone. Miss Natalie. Today was my first day with kids. So look at that. You too, Amy. Okay. So we're in it, we're in it to win it. 25, 26 has started. So it's just a hot mess right now. [00:03:00] In a great way. So who am I? Sometimes I just don't need introduction. I'm Jay-Z, John Ali Zupan, and I am a math teacher, instructional coach, founder of Mine's on math Mathineer maker, speaker, author, entrepreneur.

And with all of those things, my passion is and has been for the past 25 years to figure out why the math learning is not sticking with our students, why students have so many deficits and how can we trigger what I like to call sticky math. I began teaching as a secondary math teacher, taught seventh and eighth grade for a number of years, but then began studying early childhood and how the brain develops and learns because by the time I would get kids when they were 12, 13, 14 years old the big question was, why don't they [00:04:00] remember things that have been happening for the past eight years in mathematics?

And what I started to realize is our instructional practices are the key factor in the memory and retention of students. So I began studying neuroscience and teaching the way that the brain learns. I founded Mines on Math in 20 2011, and I'm gonna skip a lot of my journey because you just do not care about the rest of it.

At this point. It'll come up later. But now I currently teach this year I have a new partner school. So I am actually teaching Algebra two and Algebra one this year at the high school. In addition to that, I am partnering every year I partner with certain teachers' classrooms and I'm partnering with grades 2, 3, 4, 8.

And then I have my own Algebra one and algebra two, but then our certified [00:05:00] coaches are fully implementing in grade one and grade six. So we have examples of all of those grade levels in real time with real people teaching real kids. So that's all I'll share right now. Oh, for this. Cheri's got my book.

Look at that. You look good and green. So I did publish the book Making Mathineers, which is all about creating experiential, contextual, conceptual experiences for students so that math does become sticky for them.

And I am Cheri Dotterer. I'm an occupational therapist. I retired as of June, so I will not be seeing kids this year. I am bridging the gap to something new that I have been working on for the past several years, and I must say that it is [00:06:00] finally seeing the light of day, starting to sprinkle its way out there.

You might known me as Dotterer Educational Consulting, where I have been Consulting with math teachers and occupational therapist and disre dyslexia therapist on what is this thing about disabilities in general and how does it work in the brain.

So that whole neuroscience piece is one of my key areas. And I wrote handwriting, brain Body Disconnect back in 2019. And that book really was what is. Handwriting, what makes it so that kids can't engage in, in writing skills and how do we bridge that gap to writing words, sentences, paragraphs, et [00:07:00] cetera.

And how, and my, one of the things that I was working, trying to figure out is how can I help those kids beyond just letter formation and what are some of the strategies and the tools? And that brings me to like, how did we meet? We met in 2018 while we were both writing our books. And Jonily was like, you've got something there with the neuroscience and understanding the gaps in learning.

I'm going, I really need to understand how the gaps in math are related to what I'm doing as an occupational therapist. And so we've been working together since 2018. Kirk, I know you are out there. I know you're out there. The book will come. The book will come. We've been writing a book for the past couple years and our friend Kirk is bugging us to get [00:08:00] it finished.

So he probably will see this later on. That's why I had to add that little piece to it. So let's get moving a little bit. So why doesn't learning stick. Jonily, what do you have to add to that? I think just, I want you to think about this right now. Think about and you don't have to respond to it, but just think about in your head, why doesn't learning stick?

It was a question that I began asking in 1999 when I began teaching and I was teaching really amazing lessons and giving kids assessments and asking questions, and they just weren't getting it. So for me, I knew very early on that there was a disconnect between the way that we're delivering and facilitating instruction and the outcome of student learning.

So there are many reasons why learning [00:09:00] doesn't stick, and that's really what we're gonna be jumping into tonight.

So take a look at that screen. Take a moment to read that. The problem with making learning stick a lack of high quality instruction, if you leave with nothing else tonight, it is the fact that research shows the number one factor in student achievement is the quality of the teacher. Really what we're gonna dive into tonight is what is good?

Great quality of teaching, because that can be somewhat subjective. However, research also shows through effect size if you're statistically minded through certain effect sizes in [00:10:00] research, that there are certain facilitation and instructional strategies that make learning stick that oftentimes in mathematics more times than not all the time, in typical traditional mathematics, we are doing the opposite of what the research says makes learning stick.

I just wanna really stick this again. Research shows that the greatest impact on student achievement is the quality of the teacher. And a lot of times we probably don't question that, but the biggest question is what do we mean by quality of the teacher? And that is, again, subjective in our minds, but based on the research, it's not subjective.

We have data to show what the qualities are that are needed to make learning stick for students. But this is a retraining of the [00:11:00] brain in education that the adult brain in education, because the way we were taught. Especially for us teachers. We became teachers many times because the way that we were taught is the way that worked for us.

And so we became teachers because we enjoyed the way we were being taught. In most cases, there are some anomalies. So what we need to do, especially as math teachers, is rethink the way that we were taught, and that we are a very few percentage. Those of us that got math the way that we were taught, we're a very small percentage of that outcome.

So the way that we think about typical traditional mathematics is not good quality instruction. Ouch. I know I'm gonna step on some toes tonight. So what we need to really analyze [00:12:00] and learn is what high quality instruction looks like because the quality of the teacher is the only impact on student achievement.

So as I reflect on that as an occupational therapist, my thought is the collaboration between OT and the teacher is also a barrier to that quality if we are not as occupational therapist on board with the way that the instruction is being delivered. And we don't understand it ourselves, there's a gap there that makes the gap, especially in special education even bigger.

And that's a great point, Cheri and to extend on your point as well, if you look at what occupational therapists do to retrain the brain and body of students to support success in any subject [00:13:00] of learning, what we do in typical traditional mathematics is really the opposite of what occupational therapists do.

So this collaboration and educators learning from the medical field about what truly does help grow, shape and adapt the human brain and body, we can learn that from our occupational therapists who are these neuroscience experts that we can then parallel to instruction in the general classroom, whether it be math or something else.

Fantastic. So the first thing that we're gonna share a little bit about is one of John Ali's classes that she had in second grade. Jonily. Can you tell us a little bit about that second grade class? I can and I'm actually gonna make a connection here because me being the math person, I can [00:14:00] auditor, like for auditory, I'm talking your listening, your hearing.

I can tell. I can share stories by sharing stories, learning sticks better. But if we take it to the occupational therapy side, where I'm gonna really point out this collaboration between myself and Cheri when I share these stories, Cheri's brain with her expertise says, but you need pictures and colors.

Okay? So what we're gonna be sharing on these next few slides is a result of that collaboration. And I wanna point that out as an other agenda piece because what you are going to see as far as our personal, my personal research you're going to be learning it through the collaboration of the neuroscience and the content piece.[00:15:00]

So I'm gonna share some stories and just know that Cheri put together these slides so that they were user friendly so that you can connect with the stories. And this is important to understand the purpose behind the design of our teaching and the delivery of our teaching, which is what we're asking educators to do in the classroom, is to be much more deliberate and intentional based on what the research says should be done with designing lessons and delivering those lessons.

And Cheri, we're modeling for that, that for you right now. I wanted to just point that out before we do this. So in so it, over the past 20 years after I started to. Really figure out what the secret sauce is of making math learning stick. We began to test this out in many different classrooms, urban, rural, big schools, small schools, public, private, homeschool.

And I'm gonna share just a [00:16:00] few of the results of our work, which is really exciting. And we have more projects that are happening as we speak. So one example is a second grade group of kiddos that I had with a partner teacher. And at the beginning of the school year, they came into second grade. And every single day for the first few weeks, they had the math model that Cheri and I teach on.

And at the beginning of the school year, we got pretty typical results and we get results based on colors. Whatever assessments you give you probably get the same kind of feedback. Red is the most struggling all the way clockwise to green, which is high achieving. So we had typical results at the beginning of the second grade year, but after six, really, I'm gonna say about three weeks, but we gave an, oh, I did here just interrupting you.

All I did was just lay it [00:17:00] out in a different format just so that you could see it. On the bell curve where those markers come in to play. So keep going to, you know what, this is good, Cheri, I don't wanna roll past this. Go back to that previous slide. And when you're looking at this, and then if you skip ahead to the next slide, Cheri's been very intentional about where those numbers lie.

So the assessment that we gave to these second graders produces a percentile ranking, not a percent diff, very different than a percent a percentile ranking. So if you see the arrow right up the middle of that curve, right at the peak of that curve, 50th percentile is spot on average. Just like you take kids to the doctor they're in the 50th percentile for height for peers of their age.

That means half the kids are taller, half the [00:18:00] kids are shorter, so they're right in the middle. 50th percentile is average. 40th to 60th. 40th to 60th is an average range. So we've got a lot of give here and really our critical students in mathematics. We're not looking at critical levels until they're lower than that 20th percentile.

So oftentimes we're putting kids in intervention groups that are average based on the assessments we're giving, but either a, because we're interpreting the results, like maybe they're, maybe they're 42nd percentile. You know what, that's at the bottom of average, so that's not a critical score.

And then we're like but what we're seeing in the classroom, they're also not showing understanding. But again, that's the result of an instruction. So [00:19:00] are the kids really not able to perform or are they not able to connect with the instruction? So when you're looking at this bell curve situation, we're talking about percentiles and I wanna make sure we all understand what's happening there.

So Jonily, tell 'em a little bit about what happened and what happened to the red Oh my god. And the yellow sections in your interventions. And so let me explain this. Our mastery math method is called tier one interventions. So none of these kids had any small group intervention during this three to six week time period.

Okay. We gave another assessment at the end of six weeks into the school year for the second grade class. But they only had three weeks of this model every single day. And then it was like one or two days a week after. And then we gave the assessment again. [00:20:00] And what I wanna point out here is this was all tier one regular general core classroom instruction.

These kids had no pullout, no small group other than good differentiation in the tier one classroom. So when it says six weeks of intervention, that was our model tier one intervention, which is the mastery math method. And so I wanna make sure we're very clear that this was not pull out or small group intervention.

So after this method of instruction at six weeks, zero of these second graders were red and yellow. None of them. That's profound. They all fell in that blue bar on the bell curve. Or higher. Or higher.[00:21:00]

So what happened in third grade? So third grade, this is this is actually really cool because. This group of kids actually had some interaction with the method since kindergarten. I was typically able to get in their classroom each year, once or twice a week. So not real intense. And in this third grade group, and as a matter of fact, this group is now starting eighth grade.

So we actually followed them all the way to seventh grade. But in third grade, when they took the standardized test again with percentile rankings, okay, they took the standardized test, the TERRANOVA test, if you're familiar with percentile rankings for math content, but also cognitive ability, where when you're looking at this bell curve cognitive ability iq, the average is 100, the [00:22:00] range is 90 to one 10 is where I like that range to be.

So 100 is spot on average. And we had kids on the bell curve, like cognitive ability wise, IQ wise, they're total bell curve kids. They were all over the place. However, after this model for three years, once or twice a week since kindergarten, whoops. Sorry, that one on the ma. Nope, you're fine on the math content percentiles.

Every kid of that cohort that had been in this model since kindergarten, again, once or twice a week, not extremely intense, but very focused on this collection of kids. 100% of these kids were at the 70th percentile and higher. No [00:23:00] student, no third grade student taking that math content assessment was below the 70th percentile.

I don't think you understand. If you cover up to the left of that green, we literally broke the bell curve. All of our kids were distributed to the right side of that green line. So let me just interject here. How does occupational therapy get involved? Because what I was doing on the back end outside the classroom was teaching Jonily Neuro based in the intervention strategies that the entire classroom did.

For example, one of the strategies that we, that a lot of typical dyslexia teachers do is they have [00:24:00] kids air, right? So they have them write with one hand in the air. What it's not doing is it's not translating to both sides of the brain. It's only translating to the dominant side of the brain, which is opposite of whatever time they're writing.

But that leaves a gap if they're right-handed. They're only going to think logically on what that air writing is doing. If they're left-handed, they're only gonna think creatively what that writing is doing. What we need to do is we need to get both sides of the brain connected to what the hand is doing.

And so one of the strategies that I've taught Jonily outside the classroom with our collaboration was, if before you have the kids actually sit down to write and do their mathematics, we take their hands, we interlace them together, that they're away from you. If you do it like this, you defeat the [00:25:00] purpose.

The idea is to get their arms in a position to write, and then we do the air writing with whatever it is that they're going to air write. So for mathematics, their air writing, the numbers that they need to think about writing on paper later. So for example, one of this numbers is the number eight.

So let's do this all together. Put your hands out in front of you, put one hand behind the other and cla your hands. Bring it up over your head, try and do it as with a straight arm. Write the number eight. I'm gonna write it, but it's gonna look backwards to you. You're gonna come down, you're gonna give that, do it again.

And this time, think through all the body movements that are happening in your back, in your butt, in your shoulders, in your arms, in your head, [00:26:00] on your legs. Especially if you're like me and you're standing. One of the things that this does is it alerts every single muscle in your body. Oh, it's time to work.

It's time to do some cognitive thinking because I need to start writing. So whether writing is writing letters, writing numbers, writing equations, writing sentences, it doesn't matter. Writing is writing. So one of the strategies that, and how we've interacted was this interlaced bilateral integration. And one of the, and one of the, one of the results is that these kids by third grade were increasing the percentile.

They were breaking the bell curve.

And we also have [00:27:00] results of kids who didn't have any of this. Because the question then becomes, oh my gosh, then what do we do with, our older students that haven't had any of this? Is it a lost cause? No, it's not a lost cause because another one of our examples is a group of sixth graders.

Now, this sixth grade group was deliberately, intentionally put together this cohort and there was an intense focus on the mastery math method on this method of instruction. I actually personally collaborated with the teacher of record in the sixth grade class, trained her prior, and then was with her in the classroom many days of the week.

And we did this project together. So in this sixth grade, with this sixth grade cohort, this group of kids came from three different elementary schools. So they had no exposure at all to this method [00:28:00] of this cohort. At the end of year math test in fifth grade, 20 pers 27% percent, not percentile.

Okay. So this is an actual percent, 27% of this cohort. Past the math end of year assessment for our state. So that's bad. Just 27% of the, that's what the purple is representing. Okay.

However, this sixth grade year of a very intense implementation of this model, I was alongside the actual teacher coaching her along the way. So I implemented and she implemented both 60% of this group passed. Now that's percent passing achieved. So [00:29:00] 60% passed and it's noteworthy to say 92% of these students showed growth as per our state standard growth measure.

I would like to pause and get any feedback and takeaway from you and the audience, because we went through second grade, third grade, and now sixth grade, and I got some wows and some interesting, can anybody either ask questions or give us comments about what your takeaway is from this moment in time?

So I am at a little bit of a loss because I'm seeing the results and like breaking the bell curve was definitely a wow moment for me. [00:30:00] But I'm I don't know what the mastery math method exactly is. So now you really have me curious, and if you hold on later on tonight, we're gonna share a little bit about what that method is.

Love. Yeah, I love your comment because Cheri and I have both been trained, we're occupation, occupational therapists and educators by trade, and we have this business together and, you have to learn about business and marketing and all of that. And so your comment says, we've done exactly what we're supposed to do right now.

I'm curious, right? I'm curious about what it is, right? Angie says, I love the idea of air writing with the two hands connecting the left and right side of the brain. Angie, your o, OT or parent, I can't remember. I'd have to go back through Angie, occupational therapist. Yes, occupational therapist.

Sorry, I'm also working, so I'm just [00:31:00] trying to do both at the same time. But yeah, it's quite all right. Thank you. I couldn't remember for sure, so thank you. I'm glad I taught you as an OT a little something tonight too. Loved it. All right. And I emphasize that I brought out one more slide. It just said, it reminds us that it was 92% from 27 to 92.

Blows my mind every time that I hear this. Jonily, we're gonna, the next slide is about seventh grade and then and I've had seventh grade twice, but I think it was eighth grade. But you're gonna have to, what you're gonna have to explain, I'm gonna make an executive decision to skip over the seventh and eighth grade because I think Got it.

I've made the point. I think let's dive into Got it. What re I love this slide. I love this slide because what I'm thinking now, and just based on your responses and your takeaways, and again, because Cheri said, okay, let's pause a minute. Let's get your responses, let's get your takeaways. [00:32:00] We, as a high quality instructor know that responsive teaching is one of those high quality aspects.

So Cheri and I are and are very intentional about. Getting your perspective and your feedback. And once we do that, now I want you to think about this because this is one of the strategies that we're gonna teach in the Mastery Math method, is to gain the student perspective and based on the student perspective, adjust your teaching.

Again, we've just modeled that again, I don't want you to miss these subtle moves that we're making just based on the responses, based on who's in the room, based on the audience, based on what we think is best at that time. So what we've just done is another high quality teaching practice,

Cedric: "Thanks so much for joining us for this session of the Mastery Math Method. If what you’ve heard tonight has sparked your curiosity, [00:33:00] don’t wait—this is the time to explore how these strategies can transform math outcomes for your students.

📞 Call Cheri for details on how to join the Mastery Math Method at this link: tidycal.com/cheridotterer/letsgrabcoffee

.

Let’s grab a coffee and talk about how you can bring these results into your own classroom or district."

  Until then, remember. every student deserves the chance to see themselves as a mathematician. And as Cheri and Jonily say, Go Be Awesome! Go Be Brilliant! For you were put here for such a time as this.