Six Steps to Surviving a Teaching Emergency

Abstract

We describe how a modified version of an emergency survival strategy led our team in addressing problems of practice identified in two second grade classrooms. We attended to the urgent needs of students by enacting the curriculum with integrity, doing what was most important and effective, while accommodating their classroom context (LeMahieu, 2021). We describe the steps we took, the influences on our thinking, and the resulting impact. In hopes of elevating the participating teachers’ voices, we have integrated the explicit reflections of the teachers as they responded to prompts from the mathematics teacher educator. We offer our own Six Steps to Surviving a Teaching Emergency as a way to structure collaborative professional development between mathematics teacher educators and classroom teachers.