When Teachers Review Each Other Instead of the System

You hear teachers remind kids of what they should have learned last year. Ninth grade teachers question what eighth grade teachers did. Sixth grade teachers wonder what students spent the year doing in fifth grade. The pattern stays the same. We blame instead of communicate because it's easier to do than deal with the real issue.

Recent I sat with a group of elementary teachers and we dug into long division. They showed me two strategies they use. One was new to me and relied on modeling the grouping. One teacher drew circles to represent the groups while another used a skip count rhythm, and I leaned in to learn more. I asked why this model felt right for their students, when they used it, and how students responded.

I also asked what happens if the dividend is a decimal, and they told me the strategy only works with whole numbers. That moment helped me see part of the disconnect students carry with them into the next grade, where division feels strong in one class and weak in the next because students learned it through one model while the following teacher expects to see another.

I think of that as a strategy recognition gap across grade bands, the space where a model feels valid in one room and almost invisible in the room next door.

In that same moment, I shared a partial model and the standard algorithm for the same problem, then changed the numbers to add one tenth at the end so we could see another way the work might look. Those approaches sat outside their comfort zone and they had not spent much time with them, which raised a question for me: How important is it for us, as mathematics educators, to understand multiple entry points into a concept, including those that sit in the grades below/above us?

How often do we ask students how they learned content and skills from the previous year? Yes, you are likely to get a response about how they did not learn a skill at all, yet experiences like this remind me it is more likely they learned it in a way that looks different from how we teach it within our four walls.

Both sides work hard and both sides teach, yet the disconnect sits in the silence between us.

A few truths hit me.

• Students lose out when we talk about each other instead of to each other.

• Instruction suffers when we assume the previous grade used our strategy.

• Alignment does not appear on its own. We build it.

• Blame feels easier than conversation.

When teachers review each other instead of the systems, blame starts to sound like feedback and the real problem stays untouched.

Imagine if we opened a community of community. A space where grade bands talk. A space where strategies are shared. A space where we understand the math kids bring with them instead of guessing. When teachers stop reviewing each other and start reviewing the system around us, the conversation starts to sound different.

We serve students better when we serve each other.