Chadd McGlone, a Marysville High School graduate and founder of Teachers2Teachers Global, has spent the past six years traveling internationally to improve math education. Through math workshops and trainings for educators, the non-profit aims to change the way teachers think about math by incorporating stories and hands-on strategies. He said a training in Guatemala has grown from 35 teachers in 2014 to 200 last year. (Photos submitted)
Chadd McGlone helps spread teaching skills through non-profit
Chadd McGlone sees a path to equity through math.
Since 2014, the Marysville High School graduate has traveled around the world with his non-profit, Teachers2Teachers Global, working to empower people by improving math education.
Beyond that, McGlone said he hopes his work helps teachers and students discover a love of math.
He recalled a moment when a teacher in Galapagos told him, “I want to thank you for helping me find the love of math I had as an elementary school student. I didn’t know that still existed.”
McGlone said that was one of many similar experiences while traveling internationally to lead workshops and trainings for teachers across the globe.
Sharing new strategies with teachers is the first step to changing the way educators think about math, McGlone said.
Whether its planning a birthday party for a friend or shopping at the mall, he said the applications of math always tell a story.
However, he said teachers often skip sharing the context and students hear just the numbers.
“We’ve forgotten what the story starts with and gone straight to the shorthand,” McGlone said.
He said this is reflected by a teaching practice common throughout the world: lecturing.
In 2013, McGlone said he spent time with native Mayan teachers in Guatemala. Even in a traditional community, he said teachers stand at the front of a classroom and lecture students.
Like many other communities, he said these classrooms illustrated a gap between the way adults teach students at home versus at school.
At home, he said parents and adults taught younger people by doing rather than telling.
When cooking together at home, McGlone said, “(Parents) don’t say, ‘Diagram an egg and then I’ll quiz you on it,’ they just tell their children, ‘Let’s cook.’”
He said this experience sparked a desire to connect learning at home and in the classroom, which became the inspiration for Teachers2Teachers Global.
What began as McGlone and his wife “volunteering full-time” is now a North Carolina-based non-profit established in three countries – the United States, Guatemala and Ecuador – with 10 full-time staff members.
McGlone said Teachers2Teachers creates partnerships with interested schools to share effective, hands-on methods of teaching. He said the goal is that teachers trained by the organization will then pass it on to others they mentor.
He emphasized that the organization doesn’t create new curriculum for teachers, but is there to support them.
“We give them permission to be the experts they know they are,” McGlone said.
The hands-on learning experience promoted by Teachers2Teachers Global is powered by “engaging stories” people share from their personal lives, McGlone said.
The organization compiles the stories and shares them with teachers in the form of a tool called Global Math Stories. McGlone said the stories give a glimpse of what life is like around the world through stories that can be used to craft math problems.
For instance, McGlone said he wrote his own math story about spending childhood summers at the All-Ohio Balloon Fest. Others include stories about people in Papua, New Guinea who live in treehouses and children who work in a shipyard in Bangladesh.
The variety of stories and life experiences are meant to be shared by teachers in other countries. From there, students can solve problems about the trajectory of hot air balloons, the height of treehouses or how hourly income is calculated.
Aside from math skills, McGlone said the hope is that students learn to “walk a mile in another person’s shoes” and strive to understand others’ experiences.
After students solve the math problems using the story from Bangladesh, for example, he said teachers can open a discussion about whether it is fair that children in other countries have to work in places like a shipyard.
He said tying math into the “real world” helps students to appreciate the opinions of others in an environment where “mistakes are valued.”
Additionally, McGlone said it makes it clear for students why math is important.
“I’ve never had a kid say to me, ‘When will I use this?’” he said.
These practical applications are especially important in the international communities where Teachers2Teachers Global works, McGlone said.
He said learning math “allows you to critically evaluate what you see… and gives them a voice for themselves.”
“Then they can say (to others), ‘We do understand and here are the numbers to back it up,” he said.
He said he hopes Teachers2Teachers contributes to a movement of teaching math differently and, more importantly, continues listening to and sharing others’ stories through it.
“The world’s an amazing place,” McGlone said, “and math opens the door to problems you wouldn’t think exist.”