Trying To Master Instruction Without Losing the Student

We started off working on the lesson internalization. That was the plan. Align the objective, tighten the checks for understanding, make sure the questioning matched the standard.

Then the teacher asked me how to reach a student who never joined in. I asked him to tell me about the kid, not the data, not the behavior, just who he was.

He told me the student’s mother had been deported a few weeks ago.

We can stop right there.

Because what else does that child have to think about? Why would ratios or percentages matter when his world just got torn in half?

I told him, when that baby walks into your classroom, make sure it is the one place he feels safe. Math has never been a place of belonging for the vast majority of our kids.

Crystal Watson says it best, “Young people don’t hate math. They hate feeling like it’s outside their possibilities.”

Make his space in this room different. What's good for him, is good for all kids.

The teacher sat quiet for a moment and said he had never thought of math that way, as a safe place. He started to connect how he could identify with that same feeling.

Teacher efficacy has many layers that constructs its outcome. It grows in moments like this, where accountability and connection work together instead of against each other. That balance is where belief begins. Belief in our kids and in ourselves. If we are not good, they are not good..

Later that week, the internalization the team submitted was full of student questioning to include students in the learning. Real-life connections to the math and the one word that engages: why. I did not have to ask to know the purpose in this shift. Those questions were written for that one student who was yearning for his mother, but they spoke to every name on his roster. What started as a policy task turned into something living. I have to also note that while building in more powerful, purposeful questioning had been my push for this team, I saw how I can move in my coaching to make it real.

The real shift did not happen in the plan. It happened in the heart.