I have been a educator for over fifteen years. I began as a middle school math and science teacher and eventually enjoyed eight years as a math teacher specialist (a teacher who supports other math teachers). However, at the end of the 2017-2018 school year I made a very challenging decision and filed paperwork to take a leave of absence from Downey Unified School District, where I’ve worked for the last 13 years.
I am fortunate that I will continue to work in math education and already have plans to work regularly with schools, teachers, and students. However, this change will give me more time to develop other ideas in education that I’ve wanted to explore.
I felt like writing a blog post would be a good opportunity for me to pause and reflect on these last eight years. As with all of what I write, I share my thoughts partly because I hope it will help others and partly as a way to process my own experiences. So, here is what I have learned from being a math teacher specialist…
It’s really about relationships. Relationships are the glue of society. Without them, significant progress rarely happens. It’s similar to the adage that students don’t learn from teachers they don’t like. Teachers don’t learn from colleagues they don’t like. We have to listen to each other and build trust. Teachers have a lot on their plates. Whether it’s a first-year high school teacher who’s expected to spend 15 hours a week coaching a team, a 5th year teacher who still doesn’t have tenure and is afraid of trying something new that might make her look bad, or a veteran teacher who is dealing with dire family situations outside of her control, these are situations that matter.
I naively thought I could just meet a teacher and tell him or her what to do. In retrospect, I realize that this would be like a doctor meeting a new patient and immediately prescribing a treatment plan. It’s critical for the doctor to listen to her patient and establish trust. It took me years to realize this and years more to establish those relationships. I believe that it is usually worth taking the time to build relationships. This is the equivalent to taking time to build a superhighway versus a single lane road. It might take more time up front to build but it will result in significantly more information being able to transfer between the two people in the long run.
From the perspective of the teachers you work with, you represent the entity that made these decisions that affect their livelihood and are often asked to explain or defend the policy. It’s hard to tow the company line when you think that their concerns are perfectly valid. From the perspective of the administrators you work for, you are the ambassador that will ensure that the policy is implemented. This is also hard to do when you don’t agree with what you have to do.
I did not enjoy those experiences.
- Too many incoherent district initiatives that dilute attention and resources
- Not enough substitutes are available to cover all the teachers who’d need to attend the training.
- Not enough money to pay for everyone to participate in the training.
- Teachers who have experienced such inconsistency with previous policies that it feels wiser to wait out this new initiative.
Basically, I came into this job clueless about how hard it was to actually implement what we had hoped and planned for.
In reality though, it’s impossible to completely eliminate losing touch with what teachers actually experience. For example, while I taught many lessons, it’s been years since I taught the same group of students a multi-week unit, graded piles of papers, or dealt with parents who were concerned about new instructional methods. I tried to keep this in mind when I reflected on my experiences.
You are always welcome in my classroom if you ever want to flex your teacher muscles so they don’t atrophy.
I look forward to seeing where the road takes you!
Thanks Claire. I appreciate that and will keep it in mind.
As a former math coach, I experienced the same frustrations with my district. They hired me a few years back and had no idea what to do with me. I also realized that there weren’t many district admin who were comfortable in math.
However, since being placed back in the classroom and becoming the math intervention coordinator at one school, our math scores improved by 10%. It also helped that I had a principal who supported me and trusted me.
Long story short, I am still a math coach to many at my school and at many at conferences. You can take the title away, but the coach in me lives on.
Good luck in your year off. See you in Seattle.
Kristen Acosta
Thanks Kristen. Navigating the waters of working as a TOSA are not without their challenges. It’s both comforting and concerning that my experiences are so similar to that of other TOSAs. See you soon.
I can feel in myself the same struggles you have faced. The first year at a new school is always the most difficult. Once you have taken that time to build relationships with your teachers, most will seek you out, even those that have challenged you.
I am fortunate to coach in a large district with an amazing district math team. I meet with all elementary math coaches one day each month and in smaller area math coach PLCs for three hours monthly. Our district continues to build our skills (content and pedagogy), and we work together to solve problems of practice. I am also involved with many online PLCs to keep current and to build relationships with other mathematics educators.
Advocating for yourself creates opportunities. Seeking out others in my same role has made me less lonely and more sure of the decisions I make when working with others.
Thank you for sharing. I value your honest conversations with the rest of the world as we all try to better ourselves.
Thanks for adding to the conversation Barbara. I’m happy that you are part of an amazing team. I believe that to be crucial for success and well being. Thanks also for the kind words. I try to be as transparent as possible.
Totally feeling all these things too in the new role I started this year as specialist & curriculum coordinator at a new school. There are so many things I love about working with teachers AND students, but also all these other pieces you describe perfectly articulate my current feelings. Best of luck! There are many educators who appreciate your work and look up to you!
Thanks Meg. I think that many people in similar roles feel these but either can’t articulate them or choose not to. It can leave you wondering if you’re the only one who feels that way, which is not a great feeling. I appreciate you saying that at the end.
Thank you for writing this. As for myself, while not a math coach, I have been tasked with mentoring a new teacher. I am ‘smart’ enough to realize I shouldn’t scare him away by bombarding him with what I know, but not smart enough to know it’s all about relationships. Now I know where to start.
Congrats Ivy. Yes, it took me longer than I wished it did to realize that I should have been focusing on relationships more.
This post has so much truth. It feels as though you took my feelings and out words to them. Being in year 3 I am finally seeing the fruits of my relationship labors so I can grow with even more educators. Thank you for this real and necessary reflection.
Put is apparently out for my phone’s autocorrect. 🙂
Thanks Lauren. It’s been really surprising to me how many people have shared your sentiment. It’s a hard job to understand until you’ve been there. I appreciate your kind words.
This post is quite insightful. I can relate to many of your challenges. My district has given me a great deal of responsibility as a teacher leader for math and science, while keeping me in the classroom as a math teacher. It is certainly a double-edged sword. I still get to do what I love – teach! I also retain the credibility with my peers by continuing in the trenches, and get to work out some of the kinks myself through implementation. I enjoy the responsibility of helping guide math curriculum and instruction, and hopefully pushing it towards better math experiences for all. However, teaching is already a more-than-full-time job, and so is being a curriculum specialist/teacher leader. I find that both jobs suffer (as do I and my family). I share this to illustrate that there’s no perfect world in this role – though I could live with doing a little less of both jobs…
Thanks for sharing your experience Matt. I’ve always seen those split-time roles as not being 50%/50% but rather 75%/75% because you can’t get around the extra work that comes with it. I can certainly empathize. Good luck!
So much resonated with me as I’m reading this blog post. I’m a math coach at my district, and recently I have been feeling very much stuck in the middle between the teachers I support and the district initiatives I represent. I appreciate your opening with everything being about relationships and the need to build trust with teachers. I think this will be my takeaway as I try to un-stick myself from being in the middle and focus on building the personal relationships with people by listening first.
Believe me, I feel ya Felicia. It’s hard to know what it’s like to be a TOSA until you’re in that role. Some things are wonderful and other parts are really tough. I’ve never regretted focusing on relationships and hope you feel the same way.
Reading this keeps affirming the vision I need to have as a first year instructional specialist. I am thankful you have laid out the challenges out of our controls like policies we had no input on. One question I am curious about is why did you leave the classroom? Personally I feel I need to test my impact of driving a different classroom culture I personally created with my students and am curious to hear about yours. Thank you for all your insight!
Wendy, when I left the classroom, there was a 3-year math and science partnership grant my school district won. So, I was under the impression that I would have three years to learn so many things and then go back to the classroom and try it out.
At the end of the three years, I was ready to go back. I even had my school and schedule assigned to me. Then Common Core money came flooding in and they decided to keep me AND hire another specialist (and eventually many more).
So, it was always meant to be temporary, but eventually it wasn’t.
Great summary of some of the most important issues in coaching teachers. I spent 13 years as a math teacher and 25 years working with math teachers and each of your main bullets spoke to me especially during my 17 years at Stevens Tech – CIESE (Hoboken, NJ) where I was the mathematics projects manager. Our goal was to help math teachers integrate technology into their teaching. We followed the SAMR model (See clime.org – my last CLIME blog) and I’m sharing some examples of lessons we did during my CIESE years at http://dmcpress.org/cm/v2.1. It brings a smile to my face knowing that you are out there doing this impossible, but deeply rewarding work.
Thanks Ihor, and thanks for all you’ve done with CLIME over the years.
Thanks, Robert. I appreciate that. I leave it now to younger math educators like yourself to lead the charge in improving math education!
Best wishes,
Ihor
Do math specialist typically make more than teachers?
I can’t speak for all districts but I can say that in Downey Unified, where I worked, teacher specialists were on the exact same pay scale as teachers because they were considered teachers. The only difference we received was a $50 a month stipend for gas when traveling from school site to school site.
Thanks for re-posting this Robert. Last year was my first year as a STEM ToSA (Teacher on Special Assignment) and I quickly fell through all the same reflections as above… quick to want to implement (yet appreciative of those who slow me down to see different perspectives), realizing how little I know (which can be scary and exciting at the same time), and the new isolation of feeling “in the middle”… not connected to any one site, yet searching for colleagues/partners to reflect and share with so I’m not on an island.
The emphasis on building relationships and trust is so important. With distance learning, I’m finding teachers a bit more hesitant to let others into their virtual classrooms, but also a shared space of knowing that no one has the answers right now so it’s okay to try new things. Finding that balance in building trust, being a support/listening ear, yet also being brave and asking for permission to join classrooms in order to test out ideas so they’re not just theory, but revised w/ practice. If a teacher is not yet ready to be “observed” by having me in the whole class Zoom, I often ask if they’d put me in a breakout room with some students they’d like to get to know better as mathematicians. This way I get the face-to-face time (virtually) with students, and they get to hear another adult’s observations about the students’ strengths/strategies/possible misconceptions.
Lastly- your comment on “sharpening the saw” really hit home. Hence- why I’m here reading this blog post and participating in the Empowered Problem Solving course. Staying fresh and building my own knowledge and skills around math instruction. Thank you!
Thanks Alisha. Doing this job during a pandemic is a whole new challenge that I never experienced. I’m glad to see that my own experiences still resonate with you and am happy that you made time for your own professional growth.
I love when these emails come from your blog. It’s like you anticipate what I need to hear. I just started a new role as a TOSA after being one in a previous district. So much of what you said is resonating in this repeat experience. I’m looking forward to knowing better and doing better this time around. Thanks for you amazing insight, as usual!
Hey friend! Miss ya. Glad this worked out well for you. Congrats on the new position and I hope we get to hang out again soon.
It’s funny how a great blog lands just when you need it! Thank you!! So much of what you say resonated with me….Relationships. Trust. Collaboration. The most fun part of my job is being in the trenches with teachers…..and it IS the part that buys you the most cred. As leaders, we must never forget how hard classroom teachers work!! I love my job and love reading all the comments here, knowing there are so many who have the same joys and challenges as I do.
Well said, Kate.