Why Learning Doesn’t Stick (and How Brian Proved It Wrong)

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.

however, . When you're coming to something like this, we want you to have some immediate takeaways. So the key to high quality instruction and the components of the mastery math method are pre-planning, planning, presenting, and post-planning. And we're gonna talk about the first three of those tonight.

And the one thing that I wanna [00:02:00] emphasize is oftentimes as educators, we plan and present well, planning of lessons is an art. And I feel like we've lost that art in schools because the planning of lessons has become oh, what's your lesson plan tomorrow? It's chapter five, lesson three problems dah.

That's not planning. So not only is our planning poor, but we all together skip pre-planning. You may not have ever heard of pre-planning, and that is because you haven't heard of the Mastery Math Method. So we're going to point out each one of you each one of these steps to complete the Mastery Math method to get these results and then the components under each of these steps.

And I think this is where OT excels is in the pre-planning. Because if you look at the learning pyramid, which is not on the slide deck, but if you look at the learning pyramid, [00:03:00] when you get, you have all of these components, neurologically that are happening and you're almost up at the tip of the triangle before you get to academics.

So OT is where you can pull this pre-planning and you can collaborate here to help your students get the essentials to their academics. So if you're not working on those core developmental pieces to the body, learning's not gonna happen. And another comment on essentials is, I like this quote.

It's my quote. I don't know that anybody else ever says it. It's if everything is important, nothing is important. So prior to the actual planning, what we're calling pre-planning is really identifying all of those [00:04:00] essentials, essential content, essential non-content, everything can't be important. And too often in schools, everything has the same equivalent importance.

So we're not focusing on the power strategies and the essentials, those umbrella things, academic and non-academic first. So if everything is important when we look, nothing is important. Yeah. So when we look at pre-planning, we need to, as I'm sharing a little bit about like the learning pyramid, the sensory and sensory is separate from motor.

We have a sensory system and our goes up to our brain. OTs know this when it's in the brain and the feedback comes back down, that's when motor happens. There's a process that happens in between, which we often [00:05:00] forget, and that is linking it to memory and the cognitive functions in between, which we have in the third row.

But it's essential. These things need to happen before academics occur in the pre-planning process. Because as educators, none of this is a part of our planning, let alone a part of our pre-planning. And so we, without these components, we're already starting at a lower quality of instruction.

Theresa, I think. Yeah. Theresa, did you have a co a comment or you're muted though. I know that, and then Cheri can go along with this too. In school as OTs, we used to have to break down tasks into like incremental steps. What did you do this? That's where the pre-planning is. But that's how minute we used to have to be like, what I mean, like even from [00:06:00] getting up bending of the knees, like I, I know it's really tedious in a way, but that's almost what you need to do to think about the pre-planning steps because if a child like, and I'm looking at it as a special needs child, can't do some of these things, then you've gotta put that into your whole genre of what you're doing with them.

So it, in a way, for those kids, they need those parts. But it's those minute things that maybe a regular teacher wouldn't think that, but that the OTs do. And that's basically what I itemized in handwriting. Brain body disconnect is all those little itty bitty pieces that you have to think about before academics begins.

And then academic is on this pre-planning slide because that is non-existent. And unless you can give me an example of someone that's doing excellent pre-planning academically and specifically math, academics. So pre-planning and math, academics, [00:07:00] once we get to the academic pre-planning piece as an educator, involves things like, how do I incorporate these multisensory, multi motor cognitive triggering lessons in my classroom?

How do I set up my classroom? What is my arrangement? Where are kids gonna have an opportunity to stand or flexible seating? All of these things need to be thought about as the academic teacher, but also what are some of those specific content pieces that are gaps at every level that don't often get addressed because we're too hyper-focused on our exact standards and they are numbers, number sense.

It's like at the secondary level when secondary teachers it's the learning to read and reading to learn. And by the time you're at the secondary level, teachers haven't been [00:08:00] trained for to, to, for the learning to read piece. Teachers haven't been trained for the learning to math piece.

We just expect kids to come in at the secondary level and no number, and they don't. Johns Hopkins University did a research study, it was published in 2011. One of their results was our number sense doesn't peak until we're 30 years old. And so if that's the case, and I always say this as well, at the secondary level, improving number sense is not intervention.

It's regular instruction. It's regular instruction. And then in the ma in the mastery math method, you learn about all of our F words. The four of them are, we want kids to, to be very fluent in facts, fractions, functions, and factors. The thing is, in this pre-planning, all four of those are essential from preschool through high school.[00:09:00]

Those pre-planning essentials, content essentials, power concepts do not change from one grade level to the next. So then what we do in the mastery math method is we attach every single standard from preschool through high school and mathematics to one of those four F categories. And then finally, shape is about how do we get kids to improve number sense by seeing numbers as shape.

It's that visual, a picture is worth a thousand words. And then how are we incorporating logic into what we do? And we're able to do this and teach all of our standards in half the time that we. Get through our standards and typical traditional instruction. But pre-planning is the reason why we're able to do this.

Pre-planning is the first step and the most important step in powerful quality teaching.

So I'd like to stop here and talk about Brian. Brian was one of Jonily's [00:10:00] students, not mine, but Brian ended up being one of the characters in the book that we are writing. And Brian Ha is currently in our book in seventh grade, and the teacher says, turn to page 2 64, but where is Brian's brain Anywhere?

But on page 2 64, he is thinking about that girl across the room. He is thinking about math. What are you thinking? He is. He's worried about what's going on outside, anything but focused on mathematics. Jonily, what do you have to add about Brian? This is really cool about Brian. Brian is in the Making math Iners book.

So in the book that Cheri and I will publish, the sequel to both of our books Brian's story will carry through. But here's an interesting fact that I don't think is gonna be in any of the books, but the research outcome that I talked about, those sixth [00:11:00] grade students that went from 27% to 60% passing 92% growth.

Brian was actually in that cohort of kids. Brian was on an IEP. Brian was actually labeled at that time, 'cause it was number of years ago, ed. Sometimes the label is SBH severe behavior. So he had a lot of behavior issues coming into that. We had to work through those. And Brian was one that went from never passing the math assessment to finally at that end of the sixth grade, he was one of them that passed and it was remarkable.

And Brian is a, really cool character. It's based on a real kid. His name wasn't Brian, but it's based on the actual real kid. And what we were able to do with Brian, score wise, behavior wise, emotional, we can actually address through our plea pre-planning in the regular general tier one classroom.

With the mastery math method, Brian was able to get all of his needs met, [00:12:00] academic and non-academic without being pulled out for additional intervention. One of the strategies that we used in with, we can use with somebody like Brian, the whole classroom gets up and does interlaced bilateral integration before they actually work on their academics.

One of the things that happens with that is it alerts the core. Your core is one of the things that's gonna make or break learning. Believe it or not. It has, doesn't have to do with the brain, it has to do with the core. It has to do with is your trunk ready to stabilize the rest of your body so that it can actually work?

And by doing some of these activities, Brian started re-engaging and you'll notice that what, you'll be able to read that when you finally get the book. But one of the things that we found that [00:13:00] supports this is. Glacial es Estrada supposedly said this was, we couldn't confirm that he actually said this, but if a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.

And this one's attributed to Ben Franklin. We could not confirm that he said this, but te tell me and I forget, teach me. And I remember, involve me and I learn. But the way Jonily and I like to say it is teach the brains way. Watch learning, stay, teach the brains way. Watch learning, stay. And embracing the regular core general tier one classroom obviously is not gonna eliminate the need for tier two and tier three, but it's going to drastically reduce the necessity for tier two and tier [00:14:00] three pull out intervention.

And this is not one of my quotes, but I'm gonna say it because if you're in the dyslexia world, you know this necessary for some beneficial for all. And as we move into this planning stage, we need to think about that as we're actually planning our lessons. So the pre-planning isn't about planning day to day lessons, it's the pre-planning is about.

Planning and setting up the climate, the culture, the flavor, the experiences, the brand of your classroom, the functionality of your classroom. Being more intentional about that feel of the classroom. That's going to happen day to day, but then planning is really okay. Now I'm gonna plan next week's lesson.

I have the pre-planning in mind, but now I'm actually gonna plan the details. Now we're gonna turn really to mathematics because this is very different from [00:15:00] mathematics. When we are planning our math lessons every single day, we begin with what we call a stimulus. A stimulus is anything that's gonna stimulate mathematical thinking.

We avoid starting class with something that promotes answer, getting or question answering, answer, getting or solving. When we start class with answer, getting and solving right, then we have kids who can, kids who can't. Everybody in the middle, we've set up. An emotional rollercoaster for kids and a great need to differentiate in our classroom.

But if we start with a stimulus, which is stimulating mathematical thinking in which we're promoting, thinking, reasoning, and sense making, we level the playing field at the beginning of each of our classes, and then we can start to mind that gap as we go and as we [00:16:00] scaffold and extend. So we start every day with a stimulus.

Now stimulus can be academic or non-academic, but the core of the mastery math method is launching class with a stimulus that's going to promote thinking, reasoning, and sense making and not answer, getting and solving. There's plenty of time for answer, getting and solving. And a stimulus could be a number, an equation, a symbol.

It could be a picture, a video, a situation, a story, a stimulus. Again, anything that's gonna promote thinking, reasoning, and sense making the stimulus is not going to have a question or a prompt that is going to. Elicit or trigger answer, getting or solving. Now there's different types of stimulus and we're gonna share these components of the planning.

Remember, planning is no problem. Angie. Love you. We'll see you soon. The planning is very different and discreet from the pre-planning and in the mastery math method. We go into much more detail about [00:17:00] what those differences are. But now the planning is what you think of as typical planning, but not typical math planning.

'cause like I said before, the chapter five, section three is not a good planning. What's the word? It's not a good planning structure. So we're gonna try to increase memory. So by doing that with a stimulus, we're going to effectively have that standard in the background, but yet we're going to trigger it from a different approach.

So one of those true, one of the stimuli that Jonily will often put up on the board, even in kindergarten, is an eight with a line and a 12, eight over 12. And they'll, and she'll just sit back and say, okay, kids, tell me about that. And you're going. That's an eight. That's a [00:18:00] 12. But that's a line.

And you'd be surprised what the kids will come back to you and say, especially from kindergarten on, now you get up to ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, you put eight over 12 up there, you're gonna get a totally different response. But yet it's gonna create conversation. It's gonna stimulate thinking.

And to go back to one of our points earlier that we did to all of you so that we could respond with our teaching with responsive teaching is the point of a stimulus is to assess so formative assessment, but also to gain the student perspective so that we can shift our teaching and be responsive teaching and match our standards.

Because we're always focused on teaching the standards to the exact perspective that the students are giving us, not the perspective where we think [00:19:00] they should be, but where they actually are. We must meet them exactly where they are and we don't know where they are unless we extract that from their brain by using a stimulus, using my favorite three words.

Tell me about prompts, thinking, reasoning, and sense making, but not answer. Getting and solving, kids are gonna automatically answer, get and solve. Through that thinking reasoning and sense making process. But we're promoting thinking, reasoning, and sense making. So I mentioned eight over 12, and we think about Brian, you heard what we said about him a little bit ago, a little while ago when we put up the eight, the line and the 12.

Where's Brian? He is so far away from fractions, even in seventh grade, that he, we have no connection. But through the mastery math method, he was able to overcome that [00:20:00] and improve his score tremendously.

So when we think about the planning, learning is deeper and more durable when it's effortful learning. That's learning that's easy is like writing in sand here today and gone tomorrow and sand writing in sand isn't that easy anyway, but that's beside the point. There's a difference between being smart and doing smart things.

If you don't know who Simon Sinek is, oh, you need to find out who Simon Sinek is. He's amazing. Watch his. But then again, we have ours teach the Brain Learning. Learning. Say. Say it with me. Come on, Amy. Come on, Theresa. Teach the brain, teach the brains way. Watch learning, learning stay.[00:21:00]

So why doesn't learning stick? All right. Share us a little bit about preventing girl. This is where the quality. This is where we make or break with the quality of the teacher when we're actually delivering. First of all, if we're more intentional about pre-planning and planning, then the presenting is much more effective.

But if our, if we don't even pre-plan, and if our planning is very typical, traditional, then our delivery presenting is all about delivery of the content. It's our delivery that's creating the deficits and gaps. Remember, research shows the number one factor in student achievement is the quality of the teacher.

I'm laughing hysterically in the background because I am thinking about the day I was substitute teaching in third grade, ah, and I was supposed to be teaching a three by five array, and I had no idea what I was [00:22:00] doing. And I have no idea what I wrote on the board. I just said, forget this, your teacher will teach you tomorrow.

It was the first time I saw an array. The way that they were describing it, I wasn't taught it like that. I had no understanding of what was going on. Perspective? Perspective, absolutely. Absolutely. And it reminds me of those, we sometimes as educators get blasted on Facebook by, parents that don't understand this new perspective and the neuroscience of teaching.

Why can't we just do it the way we did it? If you look at if you survey adults today, the number of adults that struggle with mathematics or don't like mathematics or can't do basic math procedures is a result of that typical traditional instruction. So perspective. So with presenting, one of the things that we focus on in mastery math method is [00:23:00] pattern recognition, counting, even in high school, counting in high school memory activation and praise.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard Jonas Lee say, brilliant, when the kid got it totally wrong. Because what is the praise? Praising brilliant. Remember so not remember because I haven't told you this yet. It's the beginning of the school year. So if you're watching this recording at any time of the year.

It's the beginning of the school year. It's August. Today was day one with students, and the way that I introduce myself is I say to students, I'm not your math teacher. I'm not even your math coach. I am your thinking coach. What we're doing in here really has nothing to do with the mathematics. It's all about brain strengthening.

I am your personal trainer for thinking we are [00:24:00] activating and molding and exercising the mind. We just happen to be using math as the vehicle for that. Research also shows that mathematics is one of the things that does strengthen the brain. Not sitting and hearing about mathematics in a typical, traditional instructional way.

That's not what they're talking about when they say, okay, if someone needs some cognitive triggering, they want to improve their cognition, then do math. What that means is do math, like the skills we teach in the mastery math method. So when they say do math, it's not necessarily typical traditional mathematics.

So when I say all of that and when Cheri uses the example, I've heard Jonily say, brilliant, when the student was completely inaccurate. I'm not responding with brilliant for their answer. Getting and solving. I'm [00:25:00] responding brilliant with the way they articulated their thinking and there's a difference.

So Jonily, set yourself up as a instructional coach coming in to Mr. Graber's classroom teaching seventh grade, and Mr. Grappner is Brian's teacher. One of the things that happened is he almost fell off of his chair when you started teaching, and Brian was the first one who got the answer. Tell us about that.

As an instructional coach, one of my roles is to go into other teachers' classrooms, sometimes with kids I've never met until the day I walk in and teach them. But part of my role as an instructional coach is to go in and teach a lesson to someone else's kids. Because oftentimes when we as [00:26:00] educators go to professional development, especially math, pd the math teachers are sitting there and they're learning.

And the one thing we think in our head is, okay, that's great what you're sharing as a presenter, but my kids, but in my classroom, but with my kids, there's always those. Yeah. But yeah. But yeah. But so one of the things I like to do after I do a professional development session is offer to come into a teacher's classroom and teach a lesson to their kids.

Oftentimes kids that I've never met, and typically within the first eight to 12 minutes, kids become much more engaged than they've ever been. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a novelty with someone new coming in. I get that. But after doing this or going into Mr. Garner's room eight or nine or 10 times during the school year, there is a different response when Mrs.

Zupan, it comes to teach than when Mr. Grappner teaches every day. And I'm not trying to make Mr. Grappner or any of you all who are like Mr. Grappner feel bad. That's not what we're [00:27:00] doing. But we are trying to improve our teaching. Increase our level of complexity and also increase our quality of instruction so that we can make math stick.

The way that Mr. Rettner does it, just based on his data that he gets every year shows ineffectiveness. Now you could say what has nothing to do with Mr. Grappner? Because he always gets the special needs students or the at-risk students dah. So then what we do is give those same students to a different teacher in the mastery math method, and they get skyrocketing results.

So regardless of what you say, teachers like Mr. Grappner in changing their instruction will get different results and outcomes, quality of the teacher. So in me being an instructional coach going in Mr. Grappner then gets frustrated when he [00:28:00] watches the engagement of my facilitation of instruction and my responsive teaching and these strategies that we teach in the Mastery Math method.

And as he's watching that, I think it's like Christie said earlier, okay I'm bought in, I'm sold like Mr. Gruner's. Okay I get it. How do I do it? How do Jonily, I'm watching you do it, but I still, I come back tomorrow and I can't do it. So what are the steps and the script and the stimulus and the tasks and your subtle teacher moves that you use to encourage this engagement and memory?

And of course, that's the mastery math method. Also changing the environment. So occupational therapist in the room, you're probably getting so academically drained. You don't even wanna hear it. But seventh grade, how many of us have students in seventh grade? Probably [00:29:00] not many. One of the things that I did when I was talking with the teachers in middle school was change the lighting.

We talk about that all the time. Walked by Mr. Gaffer's room. He's wearing, doing those fluorescent lights again. All I had to do is put a smile in his window. Next thing I know, the fluorescents are coming off and the floor lamps are going on. All I needed to do was smile. He just needed the visual reminder from me.

Little things like that, teaching about those environmental constraints that bother the kids with this special needs make a difference in their academic achievement. And it's not that delivery at the PD that makes the difference. It's that. Frequent. Hi, how are you? How are [00:30:00] you doing? It's that interaction and that collaboration that makes a world of difference.

Now, OTs are going well, I have no time for that. Our caseloads have skyrocketed so hard in the last 10 years. OTs don't have time for it. But think about if we b flipped education on its head and we were affecting tier one more than we do already. By giving them these strategies like interlaced, bilateral integration, using floor lamps, not fluorescent lights, those kind of ideas intermittently throughout the school year, reminding them our caseloads will go down, special education will have the people in it that need to be in it, not the kids who are there because of [00:31:00] lack of instruction.

And that's the one that bites me the most is kids that are in ot that the only reason they're really truly there is because of the lack of the quality of the teacher.

So curriculum is not a delivery system. It is not the roadmap for a tour bus filled with passive students. Instead, a curriculum is the journey itself, the lived experience of the students creating meaning, and that the human brain is not designed to sit and receive information. Sorry, Theresa. It is designed to explore, manipulate, experience and process in order to learn one more and then you can go teaching the brains way.

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, don’t wait—this is the time to explore how these strategies can transform math outcomes for your [00:32:00] 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.