Better through reflection
This summer I’m offering a two-day math and technology workshop series for JH and HS teachers. The purpose of the workshop? Equip teachers with digital tools and skills that will help them engage students, promote the CCSSM mathematical practices, and “multiply our hours” as teachers.
The workshop runs twice this summer: June 5-6 and June 23-24.
If you’re going to be in the area (Fresno, CA) this summer, or know someone else who will be, check out the the flyer for more details.
Simple slide stealing in three flavors: Keynote, PDF, PowerPoint.
Attended the workshop? Let me know what you thought.
Estimation 180
A great resource for developing students’ number sense, estimation skills, unit sense, and ability to explain their reasoning in concise, specific ways.
Statistics Learning Centre
http://learnandteachstatistics.wordpress.com/
A blog all about teaching and learning statistics from Middle Earth New Zealand.
Illustrative Mathematics
http://www.illustrativemathematics.org/
A free online source of rich tasks illustrating the Common Core mathematics standards.
Progressions (Tools for the Common Core)
General website: http://commoncoretools.me/
Progressions category: http://commoncoretools.me/category/progressions/ or http://ime.math.arizona.edu/progressions/
HS Statistics and Probability document: Here
Emergent Math’s PrBL Curriculum Maps
http://emergentmath.com/my-problem-based-curriculum-maps/
“Geoff Krall Combs The Internet For Lesson Plans So You Don’t Have To”
Join Twitter, follow some of these people, and check out their blogs.
I spent this week with a group of about 60 teachers at a California Math Science Partnership grant in Kings County. This is our third summer together. In the past I’ve always shared resources through Dropbox and/or Bitly. This year I’ve decided to share links, handouts, and a bit of commentary with a blog post instead.
On to the resources!
The slides for the entire week are here.
We started each day with 30 minutes of “problem solving” (really just my excuse to share some fun things I’ve discovered or created over the past few months).
Created by @fawnpnguyen
My landscape version of the student handout is here.
My old (two-column, portrait) version of the handout is here.
Here are the slides I use to introduce Visual Patterns to my students (over the course of multiple days) in PDF, Keynote, and PowerPoint.
This is a work in progress, but I’m happy with how things are moving along. I’ll probably write a blog post in the next few weeks describing the project. At that point I’ll add a page to the blog with a catalog of all the challenges.
For now you can find the first two challenges here. Look around in the images folder for the solutions.
Created by @mr_stadel
Scroll down to find the handout. The latest version (including the space for reasoning) should be on Estimation180.com soon. If it’s not, you can get it here.
Update: The latest version of the handout (including space for reasoning) is posted here on Estimation180.com. A post by Andrew Stadel describing how to use the handout is here.
Back in May Niko Rowinsky tweaked this game to create an excellent, logic-rich challenge for students. I love it. My students love it, too. How to play is in the full slide deck (and here for those who don’t like hunting for needles in slidestacks).
Created by @dandersod, @j_lanier, and @mjfenton
If you enjoy solving the challenges, consider submitting your own. Details on how to contribute are here. In most cases, creating your own challenge is easier than solving someone else’s!
We spent the mornings looking at various tasks from mathpractices.edc.org and discussing how they aligned to the CCSSM Standards for Mathematical Practice.
Here are the goods (hopefully with appropriate credit given where due):
Grade 3-6 Tasks
Grade 6-8 Tasks
Practice Standards with Commentary (from thinkmath.edc.org)
Teachers had 90 minutes each day after lunch to design units and lessons. I wanted to share some awesome ideas I’ve picked up from the #MTBoS recently, so Monday and Tuesday I gave brief presentations to kick off the planning time.
On Monday I nearly ran out of breath trying to share all of the awesomeness contained in Fawn Nguyen’s blog posts on Deconstructing a Lesson Activity (Part 1 and Part 2). If you haven’t read the full posts… Go. Read. Unless you just don’t care. (In which case, shame on you!)
On Tuesday we looked at Dan Meyer’s Makeover Monday series. Too much awesome to describe. I will say that several of the teachers have really taken the makeover model and run with it. Fun to watch!
I gave a brief presentation each afternoon on the key ideas from Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions. My talking points and the discussion questions are in the full slide deck.
For those who didn’t win one of the free copies of the book, I highly recommend you pick it up to add some meat to our daily discussions. Drop a line in the comments if you try these ideas out in your classroom. I’d love to hear how things are going.
I’ll just drop some links here and hold off on the commentary.
SBAC Pilot Test (on the Smarter Balanced website)
SBAC Grade 4 Performance Task and Rubric
SBAC Grade 6 Performance Task and Rubric
If you don’t read math blogs, you should. If you don’t know where to start, here are a few ideas.
This is just the tip of the math blogging iceberg, but it’s a great place to start. Enjoy!