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When I became principal of Bicentennial Elementary School in the 2015–2016 school year, one thing I noticed right away was that our students were scoring better in reading than they were in math. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is the reverse of what you typically see.

After poring over NWEA math assessment results, performing classroom observations and walkthroughs, and discussing it all with our teachers, I found that our students had trouble making sense of math problems and explaining their thinking. That’s a common weakness, and one I decided we needed to address right away.

We started with the obvious solutions. We revamped our math block and increased its length from 60 to 90 minutes. We put more focus on professional learning and held some professional development opportunities for teachers. We also looked for supplemental online programs that could help and hit on one, ST Math, that took an uncommon approach to math concepts, focusing on solving spatial-temporal puzzles rather than using the academic language of math.

Here are three ways we helped our students understand and explain their own mathematical thinking better.

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