“I taught it but they still don’t get it!”
Sound familiar? You’re not alone! Millions of teachers every year run to their teacher BFFs to vent about the very same thing! With so much curriculum to fit in a year, it can feel so disheartening to come back the day after you’ve taught a great lesson only for your students to look at you with blank stares and no clue where to start. Here are my top tips for stopping this cycle!
Find the real starting point for your students!
Understanding 6th-grade math doesn’t start on the first day of 6th grade. Math concepts build on the years of math skills that come before it. I like to compare it to building a house. No matter how much I want to, I can’t just start at the roof. It doesn’t matter if I’m behind schedule and should have been on the roof part by now or if my neighbor, who started building around the same time as me, is building their roof, I can’t just jump ahead in the building process. Where do I have start instead? The foundation! Once the foundation is strong, I can move on to the walls, electrical, plumbing, and all that makes a great first floor. And then? The second floor! The attic! And finally, the roof, after I’ve built all the great stuff for it to stand on. If your students have cracks or holes in their math foundation, your awesome lessons just won’t stick. Instead, use pretests to help figure out what prerequisite skills your students are missing and work those in to the start of you unit or lessons.
They did get it…but they forgot!
If you aren’t utilizing a daily warm-up to activate your students’ prior knowledge before you jump into your lesson – you are missing out on a valuable tool! Part of why students forget math concepts is that we teach important skills, and then move on to the next thing. Using warm-ups is a quick routine that gets students using math they’ve learned to solve problems, which strengthens the neural connections in their brains that make it easier to recall the strategies the next time they need it! For example, after your 7th graders learn integer operations, they should do simple integer problems every single day to help reinforce those skills and make them automatic!
Catch it early!
Don’t wait for the unit test to find out that your students really didn’t get how to distribute expressions or simplify fractions. Use exit tickets at the end of every single lesson to catch it early. These can be as simple as projecting a problem for students to solve on sticky notes the last three minutes before class ends or as planned out as printed-out exit tickets. For math, I recommend using some kind of paper, so you can see student work and find where their errors are. Did they have a brain burp and mess up a math fact? Do they have a true misconception that requires correcting? Digital exit tickets don’t always allow me to see their thinking, which makes it harder to figure out how to address it! I also use exit tickets to help my students take ownership of their own learning – see my blog post about that here!
Bonus Tip: Teach it differently!
If you’ve taught it, and they didn’t get it, teaching it again using the same strategy but with different numbers is not going to magically make it make sense. Instead, find other strategies that you can use to give your kids their “Aha Moments”. Can you chunk large processes and use verbal or visual cues? Can you model the process using manipulatives? A graphic organizer that will help guide them? Scaffolds you can put in place? Be creative and learn from other teachers!
What do you do when students just don’t get it? Let me know in the comments!
