Family Math Night - Making it 'Count'

More Than Numbers 

Strengthening Connections Through Learning at Family Math Night

Katie McDougall, Lower School Division Director

We are a school that loves to celebrate. We love joyful community gatherings: Thanksgiving Chapel, musicals, May Day… Last week, on Thursday evening, over 150 students and parents, from PreK through middle school, came to campus for a celebration as joyful as any other I have seen at Episcopal Day School: Family Math Night!

At Episcopal Day, we steadfastly believe that our math program should create thinkers, not calculators. It was our pleasure to share with our families some of the ways we bring that belief to life. Each activity was facilitated by one of our Episcopal Day faculty with “mild,” “medium,” and “spicy” options to demonstrate that most problem solving tasks rely on the same foundational skills of mathematical thinking. Parents and students problem-solved alongside one another in tasks that required complex reasoning, talking in real time about their thinking. We saw cheers and high fives as children and adults worked together to find a solution. We saw students from all grades engaging joyfully with teachers from across the school. We heard questions like, “what was your strategy?” and “how do you know your answer works?” We saw deep thinking, confidence, and genuine enthusiasm for math.

The most lovely thing about math night was that the engaging, problem-solving focus that was shared with our community is genuinely reflective of the kind of thinking students do in our math program during the school day. For example, Charles House students explored non-standard measurement to build foundational spatial reasoning skills. Mr. Sinclair shared Ken Ken puzzles that he does with his seventh and eighth grade students. Mrs. Wallace’s “Splat” puzzles are used in multiple grades in lower school. What a joy for our parent/guardian community to be able to see the deep thinking their children do at school every day! 

Episcopal Day School’s approach to math is collaborative, differentiated, engaging, and thinking-focused. Our students spend their math lessons exploring multiple solution strategies to a single problem, and we regularly ask them to communicate with one another about their mathematical thinking. When students work together, they are often grouped with peers who think and process information differently than they do, in order to expand their thinking and repertoire of strategies. Our faculty create learning experiences that, like the activities at Family Math Night, have a “low floor” and are accessible to all students, but a “high ceiling,” so that students can apply their knowledge in deeper and more complex ways as their content mastery increases. Rather than rote memorization and lots of repetition, our math program uses interesting, real life problems and takes a spiral approach to revisit content frequently throughout the year to ensure true mastery of grade level standards.

We are fortunate to be teaching in an era when advancing neuroscience research provides so much insight into the science of learning. As a field, we know more now as educators than we ever have before about how developing brains learn and grow. Our Academic Leadership Team does incredible work to ensure our instructional approaches are reflective of the best research in the field, and our teachers are eager and dedicated to their own growth and learning. Ultimately, this thinking-focused approach is what allows us to meet each student where they are and be certain they are prepared for the next level.  Far from the experience many of us had in our own math education, our approach emphasizes process over output. It fosters the kind of inquiry and critical thinking skills that are foundational to long-term success in mathematics. And our program honors many types of thinkers. As we saw at Family Math Night, at Episcopal Day School, math is for everyone.