In 2021, Jennifer Hedrington was named the Massachusetts Teacher of the Year because of her profound dedication to the young people in her classroom. Hedrington worked in Baltimore and Houston before accepting her current position in the Malden Public Schools. I had the opportunity to speak with her on the importance of retrieval, self‐explaining, and predicting in her middle school mathematics classroom. Where does she find the energy to be the best? Small teaching, of course.

• How do you incorporate retrieval into your classroom routine?

  I work with 13‐year‐olds. We do a lot of song and dance. I try to tap into whatever music is popular at the time and get them excited about math. For a lot of kids, math is not their favorite subject. Opportunities for repetition and practice are important. When you recall a concept over and over, it becomes like a song or a melody. I have kids who come back and tell me, “When I had to take freshman algebra, all my classmates were asking me what I was singing.” It's a matter of catching their interest to help them remember. I teach math through stories. I've had kids who are now in college that say, “Whenever I have a test, I still remember the story you told us about integers.”

• I imagine turning a rule into a song gives them an easy context to help them remember it. Do you return to past songs throughout the year?

  I use songs and stories to intertwine concepts we've learned in the past with what we are learning now. All of my word problems become relevant stories. I know a lot of textbooks chunk practice problems to focus on one skill at a time, so it's important to continuously ask students to go back to older material that is relevant to what we are learning now. We take breaks. I call them my commercial breaks. We pause and I tell stories to help the kids put it all together.

• It's so easy to compartmentalize skills when you follow the textbook.

  For the last 11 years, I actually haven't had a textbook. It allowed me the freedom to incorporate my own stories and word problems.

• Were you able to find any credible resources online to lighten your load?

  Prior to COVID, technology had not entered my classroom very much. A lot of my students were like, “Miss, for someone so young, you're so old.” I'm old school in the sense that I'm comfortable with chalkboards and chalk. But with COVID, I was forced to embrace technology. For the first few months, I would cry every day after school. I'm not naturally tech savvy. For example, it was because of my students that I got a smartphone. I was happy with my flip phone and they were like, “Miss, you need a smartphone to keep up with us!” They teach me. During COVID, I learned how to make a Google Slides presentation for the first time. I began assigning choose your own adventure math homework. I would break up a slide into six boxes. And in each box, there would be six activities of different levels targeting the same skill. They ranged from really easy to medium and hard. I offered games like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, but I also included a traditional worksheet option. Believe it or not, some kids still prefer traditional models. Of the six different formats, all they had to do was complete three of the six over the course of the week. On the slides, I also included videos of an individual teaching a lesson on the targeted skill. I understood that not everyone preferred or understood direct instruction from Ms. H. I encouraged my students to stop and say, “This isn't working. Let me see if I can learn it from someone else.” So, I provided videos of other people teaching the same lesson with a slightly different approach. My students had a range of needs. They might say, “I really don't want to hear a male voice right now. I'd rather hear a female voice.” There would be an option for that. To be honest, they might look at my version of the lesson and say, “I really don't want to hear this from you right now when I can hear it from a cartoon.” It's the reality. Right? I would attach YouTube videos to the slides teaching the same concept with different approaches. If a student didn't come to school that day or wasn't paying attention because remote learning was so difficult—whatever the situation—the lesson was still available to them. This made planning much easier for me. I was like, Why didn't I do this for the last 17 years of my career?

• I think it's important to find ways to help kids achieve mastery without burning out ourselves as teachers.

  Yes. One thing I started doing was using online resources to help students raise their assessment grades. If I gave a quiz that had 10 problems and the kid got a 3 out of 10, which is a 30%, they would have an opportunity to raise that grade. I'm a big advocate of not giving children less than 50%. If the kid was like, “Miss, I wanna take it over again.” I was like, I know my burnout threshold; I don't feel like giving another quiz because that means I have to grade another quiz and if 130 kids want to do it over again, that will become double the work for me. What I did instead was I started using a website with lessons to match each quiz. I told them, “You have 48 hours to get it done and whatever score you get, you bring it to me.” As an educator, you get to see how long they spent working on the site. I would get the scores back and see this kid was on it for 3 hours, and 90 problems later, he had earned a 100%. I was like, “Who am I to take that away from the kid?” I put 100 in the grade book.

• I agree with your policy. Failing students and immediately going forward with the curriculum seems like it prevents learners from moving much of anything into their long‐term memories.

  The traditional grading policy is not fair. If I were to tell you that you had a 60% chance of crashing during a flight, would you get on the plane? Most people would say no. If I told you you had a 60% chance of getting a divorce if you married this man or this woman, would you do it? No. But as children, when they walk into a classroom, they have a 60% chance of failing because the grading system goes from 0% to 100% and a failing grade is from 0% to 59%. That's 60 points of failure. I push my students not to let a teacher give a 30%. It doesn't make sense. It's not fair. Everything else is in increments of 10%, except for the letter F and the kids who are most harmed by that letter F are children of color, economically disadvantaged students, and students with special needs. They just reach a point of no return and believe it doesn't matter. I do professional development sessions with teachers where I talk about cheating. When a kid cheats, most educators say, “How dare you be so dishonest?” I say, “You're looking at it the wrong way; if a kid didn't care, they would not even write their name and turn in a piece of paper. When a child is cheating, they're telling you they care. They're crying for help. They're cheating to try to survive.” We are all human. We all mess up.

• How do you use self‐explaining to elevate the student voices in your classroom?

  I am huge on student voice. When I talk to my students, I remind them I'm not a teacher, I'm an educator. I tell them that I only teach math because I need health insurance. Right? I'm here to educate the entire child, the whole child. Honestly, my class is like 40% math, 60% the rest of the child. I advocate for kids to raise their voices in math and also in life. I tell them when I make a mistake or feel embarrassed. I apologize in public. I have to be the living example. I want them to know that it is okay to make a mistake and talk through it. It's known in my class that I welcome students to disagree with me as long as they are willing to speak on it. I'm not always right. If you can come up with a good argument proving I messed up, then I'll give you the credit. I'll fix it to benefit you. Normalizing these conversations helps students make progress in their own learning and in their school community.

• How do you create an environment where students are willing to take risks, not just by raising their voices, but also by grappling with new problems and making predictions?

  I tell my students, some of us are Chia Pets. They receive the information, get a little water, and boom! They've got it. But me, I'm a maple tree. It takes years for me to understand things. Especially with the pressures of COVID, I feel like we're expecting all of our kids to be Chia Pets and it's unrealistic. For one thing, I make mistakes in front of them. Half the time it's intentional, the other half, I really just made a mistake. I'm comfortable with that and I show them it's not a big deal. I'm human. I try to foster growth by praising mistakes. If a kid answers wrong, it's okay. It's awesome because it gives us an opportunity to think it through and talk about why you said what you said. Mistakes are steppingstones. If none of us made mistakes, I wouldn't need to be an educator. There would be no need for schools. My classroom exists because we make mistakes.