Meet Ty Johnson, a coach with Partners in School in Pennsylvania, whose primary focus is supporting teachers and leaders across five schools.

Opening Routines as a Strategy

One of the goals of our coaching program is to support equity and culturally responsive practices for students who have historically been excluded.  We identified “Opening Routines” as a practice that promotes critical thinking and makes math content accessible to all students. 

Opening Math Routines is an opportunity to provide access to the day’s content and encourage students to talk by creating a Sense of Belonging. The goal is to boost engagement and create an environment where students can take risks.

In order to support my coaching work around this practice, I created a workspace on Opening Routines using the Learner Variability Navigator (LVN). This workspace highlights research-based strategies that can support the facilitation of opening routines and also allows me to identify factors that are important to consider when addressing learner variability within this practice. One factor that has really influenced my coaching work is Sense of Belonging. This factor gave me a new lens as a coach to consider how this might show up for different students in different classrooms.  

In the Classroom

One teacher I worked with is in their first-year of teaching at a K-8 Title I public school with 200 neighborhood students. The student population is predominantly African American with 25 percent receiving special education services.

After observing this teacher’s class, I noticed not all students were engaged in discussion during opening routines. Specifically there were six students with learning disabilities and most of the English Language Learners who were not participating in the opening math routines discussion and activity. I immediately considered the Sense of Belonging factor.

I wondered how comfortable and welcomed these students felt and what we might be able to do to make them feel like they had the access and supports to participate.

I also considered Stereotype Threat.  As 8th graders, these students are very aware of how their peers perceive them and are often afraid of making mistakes in front of a large group. 

With this in mind, I chose to support the teacher to focus on a strategy like think-pair-share.  I felt this strategy would allow the students time to process what is being asked in a lower stakes environment with just one peer versus the whole class. The teacher was already implementing surface level “turn and talks”, but by helping her understand the importance of belonging, providing “think time” for students and carefully partnering students with a peer, she was able to implement the strategy more effectively.

I considered a few other factors when planning instruction for these students. Working memory was something noted in many of the students’ IEP goals and can also be a challenge for multilingual students who are trans-languaging and learning new vocabulary.  Another strategy we implemented to support the conversation was ensuring there were visuals or “anchor charts” with key vocabulary, formulas and concepts. I also worked with the teacher to prompt the students to use these charts during their think-pair-share.  

During a subsequent observation, I could see students referencing the anchor chart as they began to engage more during the think-pair-share or subsequent whole group discussion. We also shared that the purpose of the think-pair-share was to give everyone time to think and share their ideas before presenting their ideas with the whole class. 

Being transparent about “the why” behind this was helpful not only with the teacher, but also her students.