Anchoring Learning in the Math Classroom

Imagine pouring your heart into your lesson, seeing your students do well on the cool down, only to return the following day and realize no one remembers anything. Is there anything more frustrating? Likely not, especially from a teacher’s perspective. You might ask yourself, “what happened?” What changed between the cool down yesterday and the blank stares today? 

In typical teacher form, let’s start with an essential question: 

How can we cement learning so that concepts aren’t here today and gone tomorrow?

Anchor charts are much more than decoration, they are powerful tools that support students in making sense of what they’ve learned and retaining that newly acquired information. When used effectively, anchor charts can help organize information, anchor learning, and create a visual reference for key concepts and problem-solving strategies. 

Have you noticed how math seems to be the punchline of every academic joke? Whether in movies or on social media, people are making connections with strangers because of a shared dislike for mathematics. Parents are complaining about homework and people, everywhere, are describing themselves as “not a math person.” During the last HIVE conference, Deborah Peart talked about “math being optional” for many people. It’s a curious thing when you think about it. How can a subject that is literally in all we do be hated so much? 

Perhaps I’m biased, but I think it’s because we aren’t anchoring student learning. 

An anchor is something that provides stability, support, or serves as a foundation. An anchor chart is a visual tool created to support instruction and student understanding, helping to "anchor" key concepts by making them easily accessible as a reference.

A few years ago, schema could be heard in education conversations all over the world. I actually haven’t heard it in a while, however, it is very relevant to today’s essential question.

www.structural-learning.com

“Schema is a mental structure to help us understand how things work. It has to do with how we organize knowledge. As we take in new information, we connect it to other things we know, believe, or have experienced. And those connections form a sort of structure in the brain.”                        

- Julie Stern, Education Week, October 2019

I don’t want to inundate you with education jargon. I do, however, want to paint a full picture of impact. The truth of the matter is that students need help organizing information. We provide that help by teaching concepts in a way that highlights connections. In doing so, students see that mathematical ideas don’t exist on an island. Instead they are very much interwoven and interconnected. 

As a math coach, I get to see lots of classrooms over the course of a single week. I’ve even been fortunate enough to see classrooms across the country. In having this opportunity, I’ve noticed that in middle school especially, many of us expect students to know how to organize their thinking without providing the structures. Students need multiple opportunities to make connections. One of those opportunities is through the lesson itself. The other is through the consolidation of the thinking in the synthesis, and another is through the use of anchor charts.

Have you ever heard of The Forgetting Curve? Hermann Ebbinghaus, a researcher who studied memory, used data collected during his research to relate time and retention. On this graph, it can be noted that there is a 40% drop within only 20 minutes. In an effort to slow this process down, Ebbinghaus discovered that revisiting newly learned information interrupts forgetting.

Graph: The Spacing Effect. How to Improve Learning and Maximize Retention ( Sept. 22, 2021)

Let’s think back to that awesome lesson you just finished, the one where students performed so well on their cool down and you were feeling all the joys of progress. Now imagine, having created an anchor chart with students. One that emphasized the connections of the day or the connections to previous skills, or even one that highlighted specific vocabulary discussed. When students arrive the next day, you call their attention to the anchor chart and ask them to stop and jot down notices and wonders. Finally, you call the whole group together and you ask students to recall yesterday’s lesson. Can you imagine the number of students who now have their hands in the air ready to share?

Users of Open Up Resources are fortunate because the curriculum tells a story. Just like icing on a cake connects the layers and enhances an already positive experience, the story, its consistent characters, and our anchoring should help the students see the interconnectedness of the various math concepts.  Now that we’ve recalled The Forgetting Curve, the need for this mapping and organizing of ideas should feel even more critical to a lesson and/or unit.

Check out Open Up Resources most recent professional learning event on anchoring learning here (passcode: x5UV!$R!).  During this professional learning event, Open Up Resources Math Community coaches share how they create anchor charts with students and provide examples that you can recreate in your own classrooms.

Let’s revisit the essential question that got us here:

How can we cement learning so that concepts aren’t here today and gone tomorrow?

The short answer is anchor charts. Sure, they don’t solve every problem in the math classroom but they surely make a lot of problems much easier to understand.

As seen on openuresources.org