Published: February 21, 2025
Next in our series of blogs introducing you to our team, we have ALN Facilitator Lilly DePino.
As a young child Lilly loved numbers and playing with math. Although she was at a public school, Lilly remembers her second grade teacher using a very hands on math program. Lilly loved all the activities they did during math like counting with beans and creating counting collections. This physical and visual connection to math would stay an important factor for Lilly throughout her math career.
Until sixth grade Lilly remembers most subjects coming easy to her at school. Before moving to middle school all students had to take a test to determine their placement in math class. Lilly figured that she didn’t do well on the test because she was placed in the lowest math class. As she looked around the first day in her new math class she didn’t know any of the other students. In this class, students were working on concepts that Lilly had already learned. After a few weeks, the teacher realized that Lilly shouldn’t have been placed in that class, but it was too late to move her to a different class. The best solution they could design was for Lilly to work on packets of math worksheets in the back of the class. Lilly did her best with the limited instruction her teacher was able to give her, but she found herself copying steps rather than developing a true understanding of the concepts.
The following year Lilly was moved up to the second highest level of math class, but without having developed true conceptual understandings in the prior year Lilly wasn’t ready to learn the new concepts. During this class Lilly found herself sitting at the back of the class, not because she was trying to hide but because sitting in the back allowed her to see and hear how all her fellow students were working through the math. For the next few years through high school, Lilly kept being bounced around to different math classes, and she never felt like she was in the just right class.
In order to help, Lilly’s parents hired a math tutor to work with her. It was this tutor who realized that Lilly needed to “see the shape of math” to understand it. For example, Lilly didn’t understand why something was called slope when it just looked like a bunch of numbers. As a skier, Lilly knew a slope as something that went up and down. This idea clicked once she was able to draw the slope equations on a graph. Drawing the math was tricky at times though. There wasn’t a clear and easy way to draw a cosine or a tangent, but they figured it out.
After high school, Lilly went to college not knowing what she wanted to do. On a whim, she took an Art Therapy class during which she got to go work in a school with young children . She loved working with these students so much that she ended up changing her major to education. Since she decided to have her concentration in Arts and Literature, Lilly only had to take one math class for her degree. It was during this class that she first was introduced to the Investigations math program. Learning how to teach math by using manipulatives reminded Lilly of how she had learned math in her early elementary years. It helped her realize why using the hands on method early on really worked for her. It was the visualization that she needed. This class brought back the love Lilly once had for math and her interest in breaking down concepts to really understand them.
After teaching in the classroom for a few years, Lilly continued her education at Bank Street College for Education in New York City. There Lilly wanted to continue analyzing how young students understand math, so she decided on a concentration in Early Childhood Mathematics. During her time there Lilly was able to design her own program, and she worked at a school that let her try all different projects with the students to help her understand how their thinking developed.
Once she was done at Bank Street she went back to being a classroom teacher. When the opportunity came up for her to teach Kindergarten she wasn’t sure at first, but shortly after the first day started she realized that Kindergarten was where she was meant to be. She was able to design lessons so that everything was integrated. She found herself being the teacher she wanted to be. While she was teaching all subjects, math was always her favorite part of the day.
Over the following years, Lilly spent time as a classroom teacher, an interventionist, and a math coach. While working as a coach Lilly was handed the High Leverage Concepts (HLCs) by a colleague. Lilly had questions about the HLCs. . She knew that a group called All Learners Project, as it was called at the time, had put them together, so she went to a meeting they were holding to find out more. From that meeting forward Lilly was sold. She joined a Coaches Academy run by All Learners to continue her education. It was during her time in this program that Lilly got involved in helping develop the Games Before Kindergarten resources. Lilly was able to pull from her experiences at Bank Street and as a classroom teacher to help develop games and activities that parents and teachers could do with students before they even get to kindergarten. To this day Lilly continues to be an integral part of the PreK team at All Learners Network.
To Lilly math is a puzzle, and it is one that once she learned how to think about it, she loves doing. Through her work at ALN Lilly loves working with teachers of all grades and helping them see that everything in math is connected. Her participation in Vermont Mathematics Initiate also allowed her to make connections across multiple grade levels. A counting activity initially intended for little ones could also be used in older grades when students are learning about ratios. While some puzzles can be boxed up and put away once they are finished, math is a never-ending puzzle with endless connections.
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1. If you haven’t yet, check out our other Math Story blogs!
2. Sign up for All Learners Online (ALO) to get access to the content Lilly and our other facilitators are working on!
3. Bring All Learners Network (ALN) into your school or district for embedded professional development.
All Learners Network is committed to a new type of math instruction. We focus on supporting pedagogy so that all students can access quality math instruction. We do this through our online platform, free resources, events, and embedded professional development. Learn more about how we work with schools and districts here.