A Locomotive Approach to Elementary Math Staffing

October 3, 2020

Upon entering the teaching profession, individuals commonly typecast themselves and others according to grade levels.

I love the little ones!  I’m such a first-grade teacher.

I wouldn’t mind teaching fourth graders, but NO higher!  I don’t want to deal with attitudes.

Administrators do the same when they interview teaching candidates, often matching gender and personality types with age groups.

She seems nurturing.  I think she’d do well in kindergarten.

Our middle school needs more male teachers.

Academic considerations receive far less attention.

Excellent teachers normally remain in their position, regardless of the learning outcomes in preceding and/or succeeding grades.  This is partially due to instructor preference.  When teachers enjoy and feel successful working with a specific age group, they are understandably wary of moving to a different grade level.  Most fourth-grade teachers would opt to continue delivering the same content even if it means that every school year a big part of their job is spent addressing concepts that their students were supposed to have learned and mastered in previous grades.  The struggle becomes comfortable to the teacher even if the ceiling is lowered on what they and their students can accomplish.

Administrators tend to maintain a mentality of Not tinkering with situations that are working well.  Their attention focuses on greater school challenges and, not wanting to fall out of an exemplar teacher’s favor, they never consider restructuring their staff to shift average achievement to good, or good achievements to great.  Although understandable, this cautious approach impedes math learning across the school.

If an administration is the conductor of its elementary math program, then the first-grade teacher is the curriculum’s locomotive.  Once directed, they set a procession in motion, ultimately determining how far its chain will reach and how fast it will get there.  A weak locomotive delays arrival and an ineffective first grade teacher limits their students’ mathematical journey. More than any other subject, math learning is built on previously mastered foundations.

Small school administrators with low faculty and student turnover have the unique opportunity to revolutionize their school’s math staffing, strategically assigning their most skilled instructor to teach first grade, the next strongest to teach second, and so on (1).  Instructional quality diminishes with each passing grade, but students’ collective foundational understanding strengthens, allowing them access to mathematical levels they otherwise wouldn’t reach.

Receiving a group of students who have conceptually and computationally mastered Place Value to 100 and Adding within 20, allows a second-grade instructor to more easily reach success teaching the addition algorithm.  Students who are proficient with third and fourth grade fractions content are less reliant on exemplary instruction to learn fifth grade fraction topics, because the concepts leading up to it have already been learned.  A pyramid’s pinnacle is its easiest level to build, and the foundationally strong math student is the simplest to teach.

The forward-thinking administrator respects, but still questions traditional practices, hanging question marks on that which has long been taken for granted.  They value teachers’ professional comfort but understand that it is easier to help a content master adapt to a new age group, than training an age level expert to master content.  In the hiring process, they seek lifelong learners, screening out candidates who might gravitate towards complacency.  All the while, they openly share:

A willingness to teach any grade for the betterment of the institution is a tenant of working in the school.

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(1) One alternative is assigning the school’s best math teacher to the highest grade and having them work as a program coordinator.  By teaching the end of the curriculum’s story, they better understand its longitudinal coherence.  This allows them to support and train each of their colleagues.  In this scenario, a similar inverse relationship between content complexity and teacher skill is implemented.  The second-best math teacher is assigned to first grade, the third strongest teaches second, etc.