How Long Should You Teach a Topic in Math Class?
If you’ve ever taught a lesson for a week straight, then had all the students fail the test on it, this post is for you.
How long to teach a new topic in math is a struggle for many teachers, especially newer teachers. The goal is to get all the students in your class to master the material in the shortest amount of time, so that you can continue onto other topics. The reality of it is that some students will understand it quickly, some will get the basics of it, most will forget it, and a small portion will not understand it or just don’t care.
Of course, it depends on the group of students you are teaching and their basic skills when they enter the classroom. If you have a particularly strong group of students with great number sense, most topics are easier to cover since you do not need to spend so much time on basic arithmetic and fluency; you can dive into using the new procedures and concepts no problem.
However, you also run into the issue of teaching the new concept on one day, moving onto other material, then when the Unit Assessment comes having a large majority of the students score poorly on the material due to a lack of remembering. It’s like taking a long road trip and then when you arrive at the end, realizing you forgot all of your luggage.
I haven’t even mentioned the most difficult part of introducing new topics: time constraints. Most curriculums are mapped out day to day or lesson to lesson. If student’s don’t pick up the topic in a specific amount of time, well too bad for them! Maybe they can relearn it on that one review day you have some time for before the big test, otherwise we’re moving on.
As teachers, we always want the best for our students. We want to see them ALL master the material and perform well on exams, especially state tests and college entrance exams. Today, I have some tips that have worked best for me when teaching new material and hope that I can impart some strategies to make new topics stick better.
1) Planning for the Long Term
The most important part of teaching is being prepared. I am not talking about the 40 page per day lesson plans that your admin is forcing you to do. I mean creating an outline for the year. Taking your year long calendar and placing in the lessons you would like to teach on each day helps tremendously with planning. Even if you go over the amount of days for a topic, you can add in flex days throughout the year if you need to spend some extra time reviewing or extended time on a lesson.
2) Make Fluency and Recall Practice a Daily Routine
For students to remember previous topics, recall and fluency practice needs to occur daily. For my class, we utilize Gimkit as our Do Now which gives an infinite amount of multiple choice questions for students to answer about previous topics or definitions. You could also make it as simple as two to three questions on a piece of paper or the board as students enter. Provide students with some “buy in” in order for them to take it seriously, either through competition or personal tracking.
3) Give weekly or biweekly quizzes
The testing effect is a well studied and documented cognitive phenomenon that all teachers should try to take advantage of. When we test students through low stakes quizzes on a consistent manner, they retain the knowledge for longer. Although it can take some time away from teaching, it gives helpful information on if students are mastering skills over the course of weeks, rather than waiting until the unit exam.
4) Two Day Reviews at Most
Students do not need a full week to prepare for an exam. Two days is sufficient enough to practice the material and be ready to take the exam. All students may not be ready for the exam, and that is okay. If we stick waiting forever for all students to catch up, then realistically we would never finish all the topics we needed.
5) Give Targeted Homework with Instant Feedback
Student’s homework should reflect the type of problems that you do in class. Stretch problems have their place in the curriculum, but majority of the homework should be similar to what was covered in class. It should also provide either an answer key or instant feedback through an online program. Learning requires constant feedback in order to be successful. A student could complete the homework and do it entirely incorrectly, which means they wasted their time. They could also just utilize A.I. and plagiarize all of the work, which is also a waste of time. Format your homework in a low stakes manner letting the students know that it is practice for them and that they prove their knowledge through the weekly quizzes.
6) Break Your Lessons into Bite Sized Chunks
If you want to teach students basic right triangle trigonometry, you are not going to conquer it in a day, let alone a week. Break the topics into bite sized chunks that you know that they can master day to day, then incorporate fluency practice with it. Especially the foundational skills that they need to memorize and be fluent at in order to do more complex problems.
7) Know When It’s Time to Move On
At some point, you just have to move on. You may have a class of 30 students and only 10 have mastered the skill, and that’s okay. There are plenty of online resources that they can do on their own if they self motivate themselves. We only have about an hour a day with our students and education is a two way street. Students have to be accepting of the learning and motivated to succeed. We cannot pry their brains open and dump the knowledge in. If they are struggling, they need to take an initiative to learn the material and master it themselves.
8) Offer Tutoring for Support
One of the most successful routes that I find with struggling scholars is after school tutoring. In a smaller setting, there are minimal distractions and more focused time on learning the specific skills they need. In a class of 30, we cannot attend all the students learning needs. If you can, find time to support them or direct them towards online resources that they can use to help themselves.
9) Prioritize the Most Important Standards
Not all standards are tested equally. Prioritize the most important standards and ensure students master those first. In New Jersey, the standards are broken down into priority and secondary. The secondary standards can just be icing on the cake as you finish a unit, or given to the more gifted and motivated students as additional work. They do not need to master everything to succeed, and its unrealistic to think that way. Give them the tools to succeed first, then the tools to excel when they are ready.
10) A Reteach Does Not Need to Take an Entire Period
Reteaching topics is great, but it doesn’t need to take an entire class period. I have done multiple reteaches in a single period and assigned practice on the topics as homework and had great results. In majority of my experience, students know how to do the skill as soon as they are prompted with the information first. This shows me that it is a memory issue rather than an understanding issue.
Always Remember…
Just because you choose to move on, doesn’t mean you gave up on the students. It means that you need to move onto more learning. Learning is not a linear path, there are ups and downs with every new topic that the students learn. Education is a two way street, the students need to care as much as you do in order to master the material.