New Year? New Books!

It’s official! I will spend 2015 writing about my approach to combining math and dance in the Math in Your Feet™ program! Meaning in the Making: Embodied Mathematics in the Classroom will be published by Heinemann in 2016.

Meaning in the Making is for any K-6 classroom teacher, music or P.E. specialist, or home educator interested in understanding how and why to bring dance or movement into their math teaching. The book describes, analyzes and illustrates the learning that happens at the intersection of math and dance in the Math in Your Feet program and usefully extends these methods to help bring the moving body into any math classroom in a meaningful way.

The book (in print and e-versions) will include links and QR codes that take readers directly from descriptions of students engaged in various aspects of their math/dance making to video clips of the work referenced in the text. These video clips are part of a larger online book companion website that will house even more resources for facilitating Math in Your Feet with your students.

In the long term, I hopes to create an online learning and peer support community for teachers and parents learning to facilitate math/dance and moving scale math work with their own students.

Also, my book, Socks are Like Pants, Cats are Like Dogs, co-authored with Gordon Hamilton of Math Pickle will be published in 2015! This book, for young children (up to about grade 3), their siblings, and their adults, explores the concepts of numerical and categorical variables through games, puzzles and making. A project of Natural Math and Delta Stream Media.

Sign up here to know when both books become available for purchase!

Teacher Workshops for Everyone!

Come and dance with me!

I've got a couple Math in Your Feet and Math by Design teacher workshops coming up...

Thursday, April 10, 2014
Clowes Memorial Hall, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN (within driving range from IL, KY, MI and OH!)
Three hours of dig-in, hands-on experience with the the core Math in Your Feet lessons. $30 workshop fee. Participants leave with a comprehensive workshop packet, a link to the classroom materials packet, and new understanding of how you can make math and dance at the same time. More info on the workshop here: http://bit.ly/1ackB7h

June 16-18, 2014
Union College, Barbourville, KY (located in SE Kentucky and within driving range of IN, OH, TN, WV, NC, VA and maybe even GA or SC)
Three days of learning how to integrate math and the arts! Four teaching artists will provide a range of math/art combinations for use in the classroom.  I will be providing a comprehensive program that includes three hours of teacher workshops (as described above) with an additional three hours of work with kids. After your workshop with me, you then get a chance to observe and assist me in the student workshops so you can see how it all plays out with real live kids. Awesome.

There are three separate tracks for primary, intermediate, and middle/high school teachers.  Intermediate teachers will focus primarily on the Math in Your Feet program. Primary teachers will experience the full three-hour Math in Your Feet teacher workshop but observe how I adapt those ideas for younger students; I will also incorporate some Math by Design activities during the student workshop.  Middle and high school teachers will experience and then assist with the Math by Design program.

More info on the Union College summer art/math integration institute will be available in early February.  If you are interested, sign up to receive an e-mail update from me when details become available.

Sneak Peek: My Harvard Workshops

Oh, so excited!  In August I will be attending a Harvard Graduate School of Education professional education program called The Arts and Passion-Driven Learning (focusing on arts integration) on a very generous grant.  It's being led by Steve Seidel and members of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble.  Today I got to pick my workshops, and I thought I'd share which ones I chose.

After looking at the entire selection of arts experience and classroom practice workshops, I decided to go with experiences that can potentially deepen or extend the inquiry in which I've been engaged over the last year or more. Specifically:

Computer Programming as an Expressive and Reflective Medium
Karen Brennan, Assistant Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

What is evoked when you think about mediums for expression – music, text, video? What about computation? In this session, we will explore how code (the instructions that computers follow) can serve as an expressive and reflective medium by engaging in hands-on design activities with interactive media. Using the Scratch programming language, we will create interactive, reflective scrapbooks that document our experiences in the “Arts and Passion-Driven Learning” Institute. No prior experience with designing interactive media is required. Participants are expected to bring their own laptops; please do not bring tablets(iPad, Android, etc.).

I have been reading Seymour Papert's work all winter and spring.  His LOGO program and, by extension, MIT's online visual programming environment Scratch, has had me thinking deeply about constructivism / constructionism and the meaning and purpose of education.  I am also quite interested in how his work and thinking can help frame, support and strengthen the ways we think about and provide arts education.  A pencil and paper kind of gal, I will probably not be very good at Scratch but it will be a great challenge to be out of my comfort zone.

Traditions of the Middle East
Shane Shanahan, Silk Road Ensemble (percussion), Kevork Mourad, Silk Road Ensemble (visual art), Allison Trombley, teaching artist and former Silk Road Project Education Coordinator

How do Middle Eastern traditions in visual art and music mirror and complement one another? What can we learn about a culture through its art forms? Visual artist Kevork Mourad and percussionist Shane Shanahan lead participants through a hands-on exploration of the relationship between art and music. In this workshop, participants will work with both visual art and percussion as they consider the central theme of the connections between these expressive art forms.

I am very interested in this one because of the specific cultural context and the exploration of relationships/connections between two different art forms. I'm also hoping that Islamic (geometric) art will be included (hint, hint).  Can't wait.

Powerful Partnerships: Teaching Artists and Classroom Teachers Working Together
Elise Gallinot, Program Director, KID smART

The classroom teacher/teaching artist relationship is a deep and powerful tool for student learning, but what are the key features of successful partnerships? In this workshop we will explore some approaches to the co-teaching relationship, focusing on structuring planning and post-lesson reflection meetings for mutual empowerment and deeper understanding. We will discuss setting goals to help us discover and develop deeper ways to work together as colleagues and examine and develop tools and strategies to guide the co-teaching relationship. Throughout the workshop, we will focus on the following questions:

• What are the features of successful teaching artist/ classroom teacher partnerships?
• What tools do we need to make sure partnerships are vital and focused?
• How can we work together to assess quality integration focused on student learning?

I am hoping this workshop will give me some new insights into building, maintaining and deepening relationships with teachers, something that is still a work in progress for me since my time in schools is always so brief.  I generally do not co-teach Math in Your Feet but, more and more, I am meeting teachers with whom I would like to collaborate more deeply.  I also think this workshop may also be helpful in my quest to refine the way I present and frame my professional learning experiences for teachers.

At the date of this post I will be experiencing all this in a little more than three week's time.  I'm sure it will be incredible on a lot of levels and I plan to share and process my learning in this space.

Teachers in Motion! (Video)

I was in Kansas last week working with 38 physical education teachers (both elementary and middle school).  Yes, I know it was massive, but it was a lot of fun!  The mostly hands-on, active morning was full of the core Math in Your Feet lessons: creating patterns and rhythm in our feet using my Jump Patterns tool and then combining and transforming those patterns. 

PE teachers are used to organizing moving bodies (their own and those of their students) but they are not as familiar with math curriculum, especially in relation to movement work.  It was gratifying to see them open up to the experience of both a new movement/art form and the idea of math outside the context of a textbook or a checkbook.  This program is truly mathematical 'activity'!

Here is a quick video clip of some of the the teachers' creative work.  Just like the kids do, they paired up to work through the Jump Patterns movement variables until they had created a four-beat pattern they could repeat, dance in unison (congruently) with their partner and, most importantly, be happy about.

It's a little hard to hear but the teacher in orange is saying "We combined and we reflected...alternating the reflection... [I think that's what she said -- I didn't hear her at the time either, and I guess I was expecting that the two folks on the inside would be the original pattern, and the two on the outside would reflect that pattern.  That's why I was sort of confused on tape!]  Here's what they did -- remember it's two individual four beat patterns that have been combined to make eight beats:



What was also surprising and interesting about this pattern is that the second four beats could not be reflected because it already was a reflection and congruent at the same time.  Regardless, the team wanted to make it different somehow, so that's why when the original pattern jumps forward, the 'reflection' jumps back.  After I turned off the camera we had a good laugh about how they had used the math to inform their creative work but, ultimately, it's a choreographic process and you absolutely have to stay true to the dance aesthetic as well.

That, and sometimes ignoring your students (as long as they're working on something) produces the most wonderful results!

p.s. And, if you want more  footage, it might be a while, but I have finally (!) accessed footage of students in Math in Your Feet that I've been collecting for the last couple years.  A short video summary of the program and a longer curriculum guide with an accompanying video is in the works.  It's a massive project, but I am super excited about finally being able to share the program this way.  In the meantime you can read about the program in detail by going here.

p.p.s.  We've been have a whole bunch of fun over at the Math in Your Feet Facebook page.  Why not join us?

To Each its Own: Targeting My Professional Development Workshops

In the last couple months I've had whole bunches of fun presenting professional development workshops in a variety of settings, to a variety of people.  Let's see...math teachers from all over the U.S., PE teachers from across Indiana, classroom teachers from Indianapolis, fellow Teaching Artists from a variety of disciplines, and arts education administrators from Young Audiences affiliates from around the country. 

Each session bore the title 'Math in Your Feet' and was a combination of big picture information and hands-on experience, but that is where the similarity ended and my job got really interesting!

For the classroom teachers I started by focusing on the challenges of using movement in a classroom setting.  As they started to move and experiment with foot-based percussive patterns they became more comfortable and sure in their own movement.  This approach usually leads to a greater willingness to embrace, sometimes for the first time, the possibility of leading their own students in movement-based learning.  To some extent I am also encouraging them to have fun with math, many for the first time.  I consider the 'doing and making' of percussive dance patterns in this program the same as the 'doing and making' of math so, in every teacher workshop I do, I walk them step by step through the intersection where math and dance meet.  We're so used to focusing on the symbolic, static realm of mathematics that we don't always recognize when we see math happening in front of our eyes.  It helps to have a guide.

For the self-identified math teachers at the NCTM annual meeting I also started with a message of 'anyone can lead movement in the classroom and here are some tools' but then quickly moved toward 'here is an opportunity for your students to represent their math understanding in a new way within the kinesthetic realm'.  I also drew their attention to the fact that the processes of solving a problem in both math and dance (choreography) are often similar -- question, understand what tools it might take to answer the question, experiment with ideas, use your resources, find an answer that seems to work, evaluate and then ask more questions. 

The group of 80 or so PE teachers was a new one for me simply because there was not one bit of trepidation or reluctance to get up and move!  Not all of them were comfortable with the idea of dance, at least initially, but they were definitely game.  I was only with them for about an hour, and I couldn't go very deep, so I stuck with active modeling of the bridge between my particular brand of movement with an academic content area.  If I had had more time with them, I would have focused on the  process for moving the dance to the page -- speaking the words that describe aspects of our movement as we move, writing those words down, turning these words into symbols, and graphing foot positions on a coordinate grid.  I did the point that Math in Your Feet can be a collaboration between classroom and specials teachers, just like it is when I lead my residency.  The concrete movement and math activities can be done in PE or music class which then build the bridge to the formal, written, symbolic realm of math back in the regular classroom.

At their conference the arts education administrators were focusing on how to add the A in arts to STEM topics (STEM to STEAM).  I gave a general overview of the program and laid out my process for building the program and integrating the dance with the math.  The most important issue for me is that when you are thinking about integrating any art form with another content area you really need to be honest with yourself and ask 'is it a good fit?'  If the answer is no then it is not worth forcing the issue.  If you think 'maybe' then do a little more work to explore the connections.  In the end, though, the connections need to be more than skin deep.  Just because we count our beats in this program doesn't mean I consider that a good example of what math and dance have in common.  I also gave a similar account of how I combined math and dance to my fellow Teaching Artists.

My favorite moments while teaching teachers are when they ask me questions that show me they are imagining how they will do this work with their own students.  It's similar to house hunting, I suppose.  The minute you start imagining where you're going to put your furniture the realtor knows you might really be serious!  I love hearing all the different ways engaged and caring education professionals imagine tailoring my ideas for their own particular learning environments.