Goochland Pre-K Teacher Presents Math Toolkit at Congressional Briefing

Bethany Gordon teaches four-year-olds in Goochland County, but on Wednesday she stood before members of Congress and described what a Pre-K math classroom looks like when evidence actually drives the instruction.

Gordon, a Pre-K teacher at Goochland County Public Schools, addressed a Congressional briefing organized by Knowledge Alliance, which posted video of her presentation. She spoke about her hands-on classroom implementation of the Teaching Math to Young Children Toolkit, a program built by REL Appalachia, the Regional Educational Laboratory serving Virginia under the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences.

Goochland County and Winchester City Public Schools were selected as the two Virginia divisions to pilot-test the toolkit in live classrooms before any broader rollout. The framework, developed by the Early Math Collaborative at Erikson Institute, runs 19 weeks and centers on five skill areas: number, shape, pattern, measurement, and data analysis. Teachers commit roughly one hour a week to self-directed professional learning, then apply those lessons with students the same day. The core design goal is for teachers to learn to engineer daily "aha" moments, so that ordinary routines, like identifying which cup holds more water or sorting blocks by color and shape, become intentional mathematical experiences rather than background activity.

Those same habits are replicable at home with nothing but daily life. The toolkit is designed to help young children view and describe their world mathematically, and a grocery trip, a kitchen counter, and a pile of laundry provide the same raw material as a classroom. Counting items while unloading groceries builds number sense. Asking which banana is longer or which bowl holds more introduces measurement. Spotting repeating patterns in floor tiles or fabric targets pattern recognition. Sorting silverware by type, then by size, exercises data analysis, the same category Gordon's students practice each morning in Goochland. REL Appalachia also developed a companion families and caregivers resource through the IES website, with printable activities organized around those same five areas, requiring no purchase.

The urgency behind that home reinforcement is visible in Goochland's own numbers. State test scores show roughly 57 percent of the division's approximately 2,571 students meet math proficiency standards, compared to 74 percent in reading, a 17-point gap that keeps Goochland below Virginia's 70-percent ESSA math benchmark. Pre-K is where researchers say that gap begins forming or closing, which is why REL Appalachia researchers from Magnolia Consulting are tracking implementation through Virginia Kindergarten Readiness Program math assessments, comparing outcomes in toolkit classrooms against those using standard instruction.

The broader evaluation spans 50 schools across roughly 10 Virginia school divisions. Whether the daily "aha" moments Gordon described on Capitol Hill close the 17-point gap in Goochland is exactly what that study is designed to find out.