Math: Elementary Teachers & Math Analysis

Toplines

Elementary educators are highly active in digital communities, in particular in closed Facebook groups and on Instagram. However, they are less likely than secondary educators to self-identify as math-specific specialists – unsurprising due to the expectations and practical needs for K-5 teachers to serve as generalists within their classrooms, covering math, reading, science, and other subject areas. 

This analysis found that K-5 general educators are roughly twice as likely to discuss teaching reading in digital spaces than teaching math. 

Among elementary educators who do self-identify as math teachers, the most prevalent discussion topic in digital communities is sharing and searching for resources that support identifying high-quality math materials to use with younger grades.

Trends: Self-Identification 

  • Elementary educators are looking for professional development that equips teachers to teach math at all levels and supports educators – regardless of grade level – to perceive themselves as math-capable.
    • The Hechinger Report from Sept. 23 reports that: “Experts said when future elementary teachers express math anxiety to their college advisors, they’re often encouraged into teaching younger grades. The idea is they would do “less harm” there, because standardized testing typically starts around 3rd grade.”
    • This AP article includes examples of elementary educators sharing how their own math anxieties impacted which grade they opted to teach, and how they often feel unequipped to teach math. 
    • Many teaching elementary grade levels focus on developing themselves as generalists from their education prep programs onward:
      • “Most elementary educators I know get a generalist certification. Then, when they get a job, they’re told what they are going to teach.” (link)
    • Educators who view themselves as “math people” may self-select for teaching at the middle or high school level:
      • “Most educators who love mathematics and want to teach gravitate towards middle or high school rather than primary instruction. This leaves elementary schools with a literacy-centric teacher population” (link)

Elementary educators are less likely to self-identify as content experts in the digital space.

Elementary educators are much more likely than secondary educators to identify with their school or district in the digital space.

Conversation Volume and Sentiment

To inform reporting on trends within the elementary educator community, we reviewed conversations occurring within self-identified elementary math educators and generalist elementary educators on “X” in the past 30 days (Aug. 14 – Sept. 12). General elementary educators in our random sample outnumber math-specific elementary educators by 338.55% (364 compared to 83).

Keyword search gathered from a group of 364 general elementary educators and 83 math-specific elementary educators between 8/14-9/12

While general elementary teachers engaged frequently in conversations centered on “life skills,” “books,” “families,” and “support,” elementary teachers who self-identified as math educators engaged more often in practice-centered conversations that included keywords like “strategies,” “small groups,” and “grade levels.” To better understand how general elementary educators feel about math, we compared conversations within that sample group concerning math and reading. Analyzing posts from 364 general elementary educators, there were roughly 155 mentions of math by 60 users.

Sentiment analysis of 364 general elementary educators discussing math on “X”

Looking at posts from the same sample group and searching for “reading” as a keyword, there were 288 mentions by 81 “X” users.  

Sentiment analysis of 364 general elementary educators discussing reading on “X”

We identified a higher volume of conversations that mentioned reading than math within the same sample group of generalist elementary educators. Both topics have almost identical sentiment scores.

Resources

Supports Elementary Math Educators Need

  • Educators are looking for tools and strategies to identify high-quality math materials to use with younger grades.
    • “Looking for a rubric/checklist to assess free elementary #math resource sites – anyone have something they use and are willing to share?” (link)

Resources Elementary Math Educators Are Using

  • Educators on Twitter are sharing that they use and value @eureka_math, @zearned, @GreatMindsEd, @IllustrateMath, and FlipGrid.

Practice Discussions of Teaching Math in Elementary School

  • Elementary math educators use station rotations to create multiple entry points into a math topic for students and invite them to practice hands-on learning with multiple modalities. 
    • “Work stations have quickly become a favorite activity in our day. It is great to see how engaged they are with hands-on math.” (link)
    • “Our math centers these past few weeks have focused on place value and addition and subtraction review. They have consisted of partner games, math games on the Chromebooks, independent activities and small group work with me.” (link)
  • Elementary math educators rely on strategies like “wait time” to honor all students’ learning processes. Many elementary math teachers note that wait time ensures all students work through a problem instead of celebrating quick finishers and discouraging others, which is especially important for building math self-belief at a young age.
    • “Wait time is important in math, a lot of Ss stop working out problems if other Ss quickly share an answer, even if that answer is not always correct or a new or efficient or creative strategy. So engagement often requires all Ss to get time to reason, get unstuck.” (link)
    • “For me Math Talk is huge but like anything you must establish some norms to be followed, especially respecting thinking time and allowing all students the opportunity to think, reason and respond in a safe, nonjudgmental learning environment.” (link)
    • “ Manipulatives being used to develop conceptual understanding.” (link)
    • “I love seeing math manipulatives in our upper elementary classrooms. Great way to build conceptual understanding as students move through C-R-A, making sense of the mathematics.” (link) Elementary math educators leverage manipulatives to support their students’ conceptual math understanding. Educators also note that manipulatives are supportive scaffolding for problem-solving in younger grade levels.
    • “Last week we learned all about shapes. On Friday students were able to rotate through shape stations to create basic shapes with popsicle sticks, geoboards, trace mats, and play-doh mats!” (link)
  • Charts and visuals are supportive at the elementary level, particularly for students learning to read or new language-learning students. These visuals also serve as a good reference point for students as they build fluency and recall skills in the math classroom.
    • “The goal: for my students to see and feel the relationship among place values. We now have our Great Wall of Base 10-Unit to reference the rest of the year!” (link)
    • “Math is moving in Mrs. Fuentes’s Math classroom! Visuals abound and help to structure students for success.” (link)
    • “Ms. Surana used student-friendly language to create anchor charts. Also, it’s a delight to see the word wall connecting vocabularies with visuals to support our language learners.” (link)
  • Elementary educators use small group and partner work to boost student engagement as well as the quality and volume of math talk they hear in their classrooms. Leveraging these peer groups allows elementary educators to provide low-stakes opportunities for students to practice sharing their critical thinking and reasoning, and develop comfortability with expressing their thinking using math vocabulary.
    • “Group work is the best kind of work in fourth grade math.” (link)
    • “I’d like to try @howie_hua‘s strategy of letting the kids talk about the test with a partner but without a pencil for a few minutes first. > I tried, and all but one student said that it helped them. Students had also worked with random pairs on a review packet the day before. They had to explain their thinking ‘using math language’.” (link)
    • “By engaging students in rich math tasks that Ss work on in partners and/or small groups & problem strings where Ss’ strategies drive the learning. Also having lots of group work gets students’ ideas being verbalized and shared, ready to be captured and highlighted.” (link)

Elementary Education Chats

  • Elementary-specific chats and hashtags include the following:
    • #ElemMathChat
    • #ElemChat
    • #Kinderchat
    • #EarlyEd
    • #1stChat 
    • #2ndChat
    • #ECE
    • #FirstGrade
    • #SecondGrade
    • #ThirdGrade
    • #FourthGrade
    • #EarlyLang
  • These chats have no grade level specified, but strong elementary educator participation:
    • #TXed chat
    • #EdChat
    • #K12
    • #TeacherTwitter
    • #tlap
    • #MSMathChat
    • #LangChat

Outside of chats, which do tend to focus on specific topics or grades, there is very little volume of conversation that is elementary-specific at all, and even less volume of math and elementary-specific conversations. Conversations focused on elementary math topics occur in individual asks (such as statuses we source for community engagement questions) or in threads among educators and their own followers.

By platform:

Elementary Educators on Facebook

On Facebook, teachers join math-specific groups to seek out resources and join in on relevant conversations with their fellow math educators. Teachers may utilize Facebook’s search feature tool to maximize their time and research specific topics or seek out resources in a particular area of practice. For example, an upper elementary math teacher might try inputting a broad search query such as “mixed numbers and decimals” in any number of math Facebook groups they frequent – to see what resources or conversations appear over the span of several years. Some Facebook groups that educators are turning to in this space are: “Math Teacher Resources,” “Upper Elementary Math Teachers,” “Math Teachers Professional Learning Network,” and “Elementary Math (K-5th Grade).”

Elementary Educators on Instagram

  • Teacher-creators often turn to Instagram to promote their content and standards-aligned resources for purchase. Elementary math teachers (who are not content creators or influencers) also turn to Instagram to seek out these types of resources from fellow teacher-creators or teacher-influencers offering easily implementable activities or resources at free or low price points. 
    • @mathteacherlove offers to direct message a link to their resource originally shared here, after fellow educators comment with interest. 
    • Here, @yourteacherbestie captures an efficiency-maximizing resource applicable for 2nd and 3rd grades, and provides a link in her Instagram bio for the resource to purchase.
    • Here, @willteachfortacos shares a gamified worksheet used to support a unit of geometry instruction. Once educators comment with interest in the resource, she sends it over via DM.
  • On Instagram, elementary math teachers also commonly re-share resources, activities, or new concepts they’ve implemented that were either inspired by or purchased from another educator. Typically, credit is given to the original author directly in the post description for visibility and to promote the work of a fellow teacher.