NTL Reflections 2025 Elizabeth Smith
Cultivating Confidence: My Role in Nurturing Flexible Math
My name is Elizabeth Smith and I am a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT) in Adolescent and Young Adulthood Math. I teach at Walter Payton College Prep High School. I chose to teach math for a variety of reasons: I felt grateful for my college professors who exposed me to the exploratory nature and beauty of mathematics, and who believed in me as a math learner; I was also concerned about the national trend showing many people in this country having a strong fear of, and distaste for, math and I wanted to be part of changing that mindset. I also wanted to work specifically with adolescents because I, as a first-generation college student in my family, knew how challenging and confusing it had felt to navigate this process by myself when I was in high school. I believed becoming a high school math teacher would enable me to not only create positive classroom learning experiences with math, but also support future generations to feel inspired and capable to attend college and possibly even pursue a career in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). Naturally, I knew some of my students would opt out of this career option due to having other interests, but I learned from my students early in my teaching career that many didn’t opt into STEM careers due to having a lack of confidence and skills in math and/or science. I didn’t want that to be a barrier for my students. Instead I wanted to increase the chances that my students knew of STEM options and had the confidence and capabilities to pursue them. Despite doing my best as a math teacher, I always wondered in the back of my mind: “Is what I’m doing in my classroom really increasing students’ opportunities to learn and enjoy math?” I knew that increasing my students’ confidence and skills with math had the potential to open more doors to college and then possibly to careers in STEM, but I still wondered: “Am I really preparing my students for success in the 21st century landscape, which demands strong STEM skills; and am I also preparing them, not just to learn mathematics, but to feel confident solving problems using different strategies, to communicate clearly, and to collaborate effectively?”
To help me answer these questions and provide me the validation I needed, I decided to start my National Board Certification (NBC) journey with the Chicago Teachers Union’s Nurturing Teacher Leadership (NTL) program. I believed this professional development could help improve my teaching practice which would ensure I was preparing my students for college and for careers in a more technologically advanced world. I also hoped the written commentaries, data analyses, and reflections I would have to do for my National Board portfolio would build my capacity to communicate more effectively about what I do (and why) when designing and delivering lessons so I could share what I learned with other educators.
As a National Board Certified Teacher, I can now confidently say that I learned much more than I expected about the teaching of mathematics due to CTU’s NTL program. I learned how to provide verbal feedback that promotes deeper mathematical thinking, such as inviting students to solve problems using various strategies, like reasoning with graphs or equations; build upon others’ strategies; and analyze the viability and efficiency of different methods, such as using the substitution or elimination method for solving systems of linear equations. I also learned how to effectively differentiate my lessons which increased achievement for all students, not only for my Multilingual Learners and students with IEPs. For example, because I was more intentional about grounding problems in real world contexts, some of which could be sketched to help students visualize the scenario, and because I provided students with a menu of contexts from which to choose and create mathematical models with their peers, my students learned to create visualizations to model scenarios involving geometric shapes, and then apply their knowledge of quadratic functions to solve optimization problems in Algebra 1.
Because I designed tasks that prompted students to solve problems using multiple strategies and emphasized the importance of listening to each others’ thought-process and build upon others’ ideas, a result of my work with NTL, 96% of students said they were more comfortable solving math problems using a variety of strategies (in a survey I gave near the end of the school year) compared to only 26% of students stating this confidence in the same survey I gave at the start of the year. One of my students shared, “Now [I know] it’s better to know other ways of doing a problem. At the start of the year I only wanted to know what I knew, but now I want to know all.” Another student shared, “I’ve gotten better at listening to different strategies because I’ve been thinking more flexibly about what others say and not assuming that they are wrong because it’s different.” By the end of the year, my students not only demonstrated proficiency with important math content, like analyzing infinite geometric series in precalculus which I knew would equip them to conceptualize Riemann Sums and integrals in calculus, but they also felt more confident to collaborate and think flexibly, which I knew prepared them for college level math and enabled them to view a career in STEM as a viable path for them.
I believe highly accomplished teachers are some of the most powerful people in education because we know first hand what our students’ interests are, how they learn, and what they need to succeed in and after high school. NTL helped expose me to a wider range of data sources that broadened my knowledge of students, which enabled me to better align my lessons to their interests and needs. For example, I learned many of my 9th grade students wanted to attend college but did not know what careers they were interested in, so I created a math project for students to explore and compare various careers (both STEM and other fields) by creating equations and graphs for systems of linear relationships so they could learn about long-term costs and earnings for each career. Since I also wanted to improve my students’ ability to communicate effectively, I prompted them to present their findings to their peers, which not only allowed them to learn from each other, but also exposed my adolescent students to a wider range of careers while modeling with piecewise linear functions. NTL also helped reveal that my students needed to build their capacity to think flexibly when problem solving – a highly valued skill in STEM fields and one they would need in college (or any collaborative setting). By collaborating with my NTL cohort and colleagues at my school, I designed lessons that prompted students to first think independently about how they would solve a problem, share their strategy with peers, and then build upon the various strategies to build consensus about the final solution. As a result, I know I equipped my students with problem solving and collaboration skills they would need after high school.
The NTL program is certainly hard work, but I believe it needs to be. Every child deserves to have positive learning experiences throughout their educational journey, and our daily decisions shape the types of experiences they have. During the NBC process, I learned more about my students and broadened my repertoire of strategies for task design and implementation, which enabled all of my students to gain confidence and improve mathematical learning through problem solving. The weekly meetings with my cohort and mentors encouraged me to inspect my differentiation strategies, task design methods, and classroom assessments on a consistent basis, which over time became a habit of thinking that influences my work to this day. For example, I am more efficient when converting problem sets to group worthy tasks and I now emphasize the use of various solution methods with my students, which helps shift my students’ focus from rushing to solve problems and getting the right answer to, instead, seeking more solution methods and making mathematical connections across their varying methods. When I collaborate with my course team at school now, I am clearer in my communication about how to design a collaborative task and why specific components in the lesson implementation are helpful to promote student collaboration and assess student learning. Admittedly, the critical feedback I sometimes received in NTL felt painful because it brought to light how my decisions were not always aligned to what I knew were my good intentions. But I believe that if we as educators are not pushed to challenge our own practice, how will we really grow? By taking in my cohort’s feedback, I learned the importance of providing students more time to communicate, explore, and exchange ideas with their peers during my lessons, and included more prompts in my assessments that required students to solve one problem using two different strategies. As a result, my students learned to not only seek, but value, the use of different perspectives for problem solving, such as solving systems of linear equations using graphical and algebraic reasoning, which improved their ability to think flexibly during group tasks and on assessments. Because I learned how real world scenarios can relate to more abstract concepts in math, such as calculating the total distance a bouncing ball travels in physics or figuring out how much medication would be consumed after reducing the dosage by a percentage each day in medicine, using partial and infinite geometric sums, I was able to embed these scenarios within the tasks I designed. As a result, my students were better able to translate real world math contexts into mathematical models by creating equations, graphs, sequences, or partial/infinite sums, and then use their models to solve problems and write clear justifications in their work.
No matter how exhausted I felt after the school day, I found nearly every meeting with NTL valuable because it helped hold me accountable to reflect on, and adjust, my practice in a way that felt meaningful to me. The mentors made time to celebrate positive moments and help navigate the challenges we faced at school, which was necessary to sustain our work together. For the first time in my teaching career, I felt truly pushed to zoom closer into my lesson design process, my implementation moves, and my assessment and feedback methods. I often left NTL weekly workshops with a clearer direction on what actions I needed to take to improve student learning. My collaboration with teachers through the NTL program, and then at my school, helped develop my own ability to design collaborative and positive learning experiences for my students which benefited my school as it established a professional learning community that has sustained into this school year.
Thanks to NTL I now feel more confident knowing that I am providing my students with learning experiences that enable them to improve their math confidence and skills and explore more career paths, and I am better preparing them to succeed in the 21st century landscape. In working towards NBC through NTL, I was able to make progress towards my goals as a math educator. I now feel more inspired to continue pursuing opportunities that will enhance my own teaching practice and leadership to improve student learning with math.
