Skills & Strategies #1 - Give Your Brain Time

The Challenge

​Many students do math very quickly.  For some, a quick pace might be appropriate if they are cognitively engaged and monitoring their thinking at this speed.  However, for most students, doing math too quickly means rushing through problems without fully engaging their minds, impulsively writing down answers before they have thought them through, and completing problems on autopilot without taking thought as to what they are really doing.  Speedy math often leads to under-learning the material, creating sloppy and often illegible work, and of course, making preventable mistakes.

What's Happening

Students have different internal experiences and thoughts that can lead them to do math too quickly. I encourage you to think about your specific students and what their reasons might be.  Here are some of the things that might be going on inside your students' heads and bodies:

• The faster I do this, the faster I can be done!
• Smart kids do math quickly, so I should do math quickly too – that makes me smart, right?
• My hand impulsively goes faster than my brain can think and I can’t slow it down (this may be especially challenging for students with executive-functioning-related difficulties, such as students with ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorder).
• I’m anxious about doing this math, and this speed matches the pace of my nervous energy.
• This is how fast the teacher did the problem in class, so that is the speed I need to go.

The Skill To Build

​The best way to help a struggling math student is to help them to develop skills to address their difficulties.  In the case of the speedy math student, the skill we want to teach is:

Give your brain time -- it needs it to think clearly when you do math.

Or, as I say lovingly to my students once they understand the skill we are trying to build:

​SLOW DOWN!!!

Teaching Strategies

• Teach students to stop and think before they begin a problem.  Some students will need to be invited to put down their pencil so that they are not tempted to write before they are ready.  Some students will need guidance on what to think about as they begin to solve a problem (more on this in a future blog!).
• Teach students to say their thinking aloud as they solve math problems, and allow their words to guide the pace of their problem solving.  This may be talking at a conversational voice if the student is alone or working one-on-one with a teacher, or whispering or talking softly if the student is in a classroom setting.  Some of my students have arranged with their teachers to take their tests in a corner of the room where they can talk aloud without drawing attention to themselves or disturbing other students.
• Help students to get centered before they begin doing math.  This might be explicitly inviting students to take a minute to breathe or guiding students through a short mindfulness practice, or using your own energy, voice, and teaching environment to guide students into a calm, focused space (both physically and mentally) to do math.
• Teach students appropriate expectations for doing math.  Many students have learned that they should be able to solve math problems quickly and easily in order to be good at math.  Students need to learn that solving math problems takes time (depending on the person and the type and level of the problem, it can take math thinkers hours, days, or even years to solve a problem!), and that being fast at math does not equal being good at math and vice versa (ala the symmetric property :) ).

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