Caroline Able, a first-grade teacher at North Frederick Elementary School in Frederick County, sat in a small office with her principal, Tracy Poquette, carefully practicing the next day’s math lesson.
Able, who is in her third year teaching, walked through each step, demonstrating how she was going to present comparisons between two numbers, then what students would do. She sometimes stopped to focus on granular details: Should she go over math vocabulary words like sum and difference beforehand, or will her students remember what they mean? Should students write down problems and answers in notebooks, or on mini-whiteboards?
