April 26, 2016

This Week: What We Build With Mathematics

Edited By Brian Bushart @bstockus

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Coding in Math Class
Presented by Dawn DuPriest (@DuPriestMath)

Coding is not just a hot trend. It’s a fundamental 21st century literacy skill, a key area of job growth, and a great way to model with mathematics. Through computer coding, you and your students can enjoy being creative problem-solvers and making original works of math. Where should you start if you’re new to this world? We’ll explore some topics that work well for beginning coders, learn the basics of a web-based programming environment, and leave with some lessons and lesson structures you can adapt for late elementary or secondary math learners.

To join the meeting when it starts at 9pm Eastern (or RSVP if it’s before 9pm), click here.

Did you miss the NCTM Annual Conference in San Francisco? Check out the recording of last week’s Global Math to hear favorite moments and takeaways from the conference.

What Can You Build?

Building a Love of Math

While many are still recovering from the excitement of NCTM 2016, I can’t help but to think of summer. Partly because my jealousy of not being able to attend this year makes me shut the thoughts of NCTM down in my brain. And partly because the fear of my daugther having a less than stellar 3rd grade teacher frightens me.

To minimize my worries, I have decided to create a summer notebook for her filled with activities to catapult her to a more confident school year. Buying a book from the nearest school supply store won’t make my free spirit want to work when it’s nice out. Although I have my own ideas, reading How to help you kids fall in love with math offered some really great starting points. The idea of learning through play is backed up by this post on Talking Math with Your Kids. Even dot activities like those discussed Joe Schwartz’s post Dot Crazy will help to promote mathematical thinking through art.

Written by Jenise Sexton (@MrsJeniseSexton)

Building a Podcast (and Audience)

Anne Schwartz (@sophgermain), a math teacher recently launched a teaching podcast called Chalkline. Her first two guests are rock-star educators Megan Hayes-Golding (@mgolding) and Rafranz Davis (@RafranzDavis), both of whom join Anne for wide-ranging discussions on issues of equity in education, as well as whatever topics come to mind!

Sometimes I get lonely as a teacher. Even though I’m in a building full of other educators, I rarely find the time to sit down for a casual chat with any of them. So eavesdropping on Anne’s conversations via this podcast is a great way to feel connected to other people who care about teaching and learning.

Written by Kent Haines (@MrAKHaines)

Building Projects…with Math!

I wasn’t lucky enough to attend the NCTM Annual in San Francisco, but thanks to Max Ray-Riek, (@maxmathforum), I saw this tweet:

Like a ninja, I made sure to get Margaret’s resources (by asking her for them!) She kindly gave me this link to her padlet wall, which is a veritable treasure-trove. It contains Margaret’s rationale behind and details on several projects that her students have done over the years, in which they digitally built a virtual thing, ie a bicycle or Rube Goldberg machine, using Dynamic Geometry Software. Initially, that was Geometer’s Sketchpad, and more recently, Geogebra and Desmos. Talk about right where my head is. I’m already planning next year’s trigonometry project for my students. Muahaha.

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

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April 19, 2016

This week: Access and Purpose at #NCTMannual

Edited By Sahar Khatri @khatrimath

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Last week, Global math was on hiatus this week due to the NCTM Conference in San Francisco. Join us this week for

#NCTM My Favorites: Recaps from NCTM Annual Conference: San Francisco Edition! where speakers will share some of their favorite moments from NCTM16.

Join us tonight at 9PM EST/6PM PST by clicking here.

Spotlight on NCTM Annual Sessions

NCTM 2016 and Purpose

The NCTM 2016 Annual was full of great ideas, resources, sessions, and experiences. I felt a common theme throughout many of the sessions I attended: PURPOSE. Because there is a lot to process. I know your time is precious, so I blogged about it here.
~ by Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel)

Creating Accessible Learning Environments

As usual, the 2016 NCTM annual meeting & exposition was a whirlwind of excitement, ideas, and inspiration. Bright and early on Thursday morning, I led my first NCTM session about teaching math to students with disabilities called Students with Disabilities CAN Do Math. Christine Roberts took these amazing doodle notes during our presentation!

Our presentation was mainly about creating access for students with disabilities in math class. Whether this was on my mind (as it usually is) or not, other sessions I attended also seemed to have creating access for students (of all kinds) in math class as a focus.

Marian Small’s session, Becoming the Math Teacher They Need (Click on “SmallNCTM”) was focused on using open-ended questions to create access for all students.
Both Elham Kazemi and Graham Fletcher mentioned or referenced using Numberless Word Problems to create access in their sessions.
Robert Kaplinsky’s Digging into Depth of Knowledge presented the different DOK levels as a way to create access and then increase the cognitive demand as appropriate. Dan Meyer described this as turning up the math dial!
Tracy Zager’s session on relational thinking highlighted question prompts to create access to this kind of thinking.
Carl Oliver described the process for choosing non-routine problems to use in class and how to create access to them for students.

(PS – Dan corrected me. This was not his quote, but a session participant!)
~by Andrew Gael (@bkdidact)

Great Blogging Action

“Teaching on a normal day is balance.”

With all the reading and video catch-up I suspect many of us are doing post-NCSM/NCTM, I’ll keep this short.

I’ve been watching across social medias as different states begin their testing days for various disciplines. While I miss pretty much every aspect of classroom teaching, I cannot confess to missing reading instructions verbatim and scrutinizing students grouped by grade and name as they sit exams all sharpened pencils and big eyes eyes pleading for better spare calculators than the ones I had.

To everyone living through the experience now, I wish you the best of luck and recommend the latest blogpost by José Vilson who reminds us all of the connections and true cadence of the profession we chose that’s more fun than fun.

~Ashli Black (@mythagon)

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April 13, 2016

New Ideas Around The Blogosphere

Edited By Carl Oliver @carloliwitter

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Last week Kasi Allen presented Math Trauma: Healing Our Classrooms, Our Students, and Our Discipline. “Math trauma” is a real thing, affecting students and adults at every level. Research from a range of elds—including psychology, cognitive science, and neuroimaging—indicates that such trauma keeps many students from succeeding mathematically. As math teachers, we play a powerful role in validating the condition and supporting healing. To view the recording click here.

Global math is on hiatus this week due to the NCTM Conference in San Francisco this week. Join us next week for

#NCTM My Favorites: Recaps from NCTM Annual Conference: San Francisco Edition! where speakers will share some of their favorite moments from NCTM16.

Great Blogging Action

The Many Ways Things Make Sense

You know it’s a good workshop when everyone walks away learning something new. It’s an especially good workshop when ‘everyone’ includes the workshop facilitator!

At a workshop on increasing student engagement and discourse in the math classroom, Chase Orton (@mathgeek76) walked away with a number of new things to think about. In particular, he learned the power of one phrase that “opens up learning opportunities for all learners and puts the focus on explaining sense making rather than just getting answers”. In “The Powerful Phrase: ‘…in a way that makes sense to you’” Part 1 and Part 2, groups of teachers were working on a Clothesline tasks, inspired in part by the work of Andrew Stadel and Chris Shore. As Chase was rearranging numbers on one group’s clothesline, the group said “Whoa whoa whoa!! What are you doing?” This group had a clothesline that made sense to them, and as Chase wrote, “their order does indeed make sense if I would get out of the way to let them explain.”

The two posts bring out many ideas about how the teacher or facilitator can stay open-minded to the thinking that people work on in groups.

By Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter)

Confession

I have a confession to make. I love writing for this newsletter because it forces me to catch up on everything that’s built up in blog reader. And when I do, the abundance of ideas is overwhelmingly great. This afternoon, I forwarded 12 links to myself, took 5 screen shots, and made lists on 3 different pads.

Tina Cardone wrote about setting up Math Practice Portfolios for her students last summer, and this week she’s given us a report on the results thus far, complete with examples of student work. She’s created a wonderful structure for her students (and the rest of us!) to monitor their growth as mathematicians.

I cannot WAIT to listen to Episode 1 of Anne Schwartz’s new podcast, Chalkline. Anne writes about (among many other things) issues of social justice in the classroom, and she plans to address these in her podcast. Her first guest, Megan Hayes Golding, addresses LGBTQ issues in teaching.

If you’ve never read about Jonathan Claydon’s Sidewalk Chalk activity, go do that right now! For the last five years, he has taken his students outside to draw polar graphs on the sidewalk around the school. The pictures are completely inspiring, and I’m wondering how I can add a little color to Brooklyn during our Coordinate Geometry unit…

Don Steward. That’s all. I know I’ve written about him before, but his prolific posts continually blow me away – how does he come up with those beautifully simple yet rigorous ideas that go right to the heart of the structure of a topic? Looking for a rigorous Geometry task? This problem on the volume of a torus took my breath away, as I thought about how my students COULD actually do this. This happens with post after post on this blog.

Finally, Evelyn Lamb delves into an error in Andrew Hacker’s book, The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions in her blog in Scientific American. There are a lot of reasons (IMHO) to reject Hacker’s ideas, but I love Evelyn’s analysis of the story of Jeb Bush and the 3-4-5 triangle.

Cheers – Wendy Menard
@wmukluk

Hot on Twitter: #NCTMAnnual starts this week

‏@SuMACzanne

And stop by Booth 1335 (p. 193 in Program Book) to pick up a #MTBoS ribbon! @NCTM @themathforum @crstn85 @MFAnnie pasta? #MTBoS

Global Math Department and #NCTMAnnual

There are a number of presenters at this year’s NCTM Annual Conference who shared talk with Global Math earlier this school year. If you’re not able to go to San Francisco, you can still learn from these speakers by watching their talks below. If you are able to go to the conference, use the links below to find the rooms and times of each talk.

Presenter	Global Math Talk	#NCTMAnnual Talk
Bob Lochel	TMC15 – My Favorites	Explore Variability and Inference with Student-Generated Data
Carmel Schettino	Problem-Based Learning: Clarifying Misconceptions and Understanding Differences	Mentoring Each Other: Teaching Teachers to Teach with PBL
Matt Larson	An Update on Initiatives from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics	A Brief History of Math Education: Lessons for Today
Amy Lucenta, Grace Kelemanik	On-Ramps to Mathematical Thinking for Students with Learning Disabilities Through the Standards for Mathematical Practice	Teach Your Students to Think Like Mathematicians
Heather Kohn	TMC: History, 2016 Preview, Speaker Proposal FAQ	Experiencing the Engineering Design Process through a Math Lens
Geoff Krall	Designing Systems of Teacher Learning Around Student Work	Experiencing the Engineering Design Process through a Math Lens
Robert Berry	#blackkidsdomath	Using Identity and Agency to Frame Equitable Teaching Practices
Shelley Carranza	Desmos Activity Builder: Best Practices for Charging Up Your Middle School & High School Lessons	Three Phases of Constructing Viable Arguments
Kasi Allen	Math Trauma: Healing Our Classrooms, Our Students, and Our Discipline	Healing Math Trauma: What to Do When Math Hurts

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April 5, 2016

This Week: Math Trauma, Ladies Who Code, Poster Projects, and a Challenge

Edited By Brian Bushart @bstockus

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Math Trauma: Healing Our Classrooms, Our Students, and Our Discipline
Presented by Kasi Allen (@math4justice)

“Math trauma” is a real thing, affecting students and adults at every level. Research from a range of fields—including psychology, cognitive science, and neuroimaging—indicates that such trauma keeps many students from succeeding mathematically. As math teachers, we play a powerful role in validating the condition and supporting healing.

To join the meeting when it starts at 9pm Eastern (or RSVP if it’s before 9pm), click here.

Last week at Global Math, Shelley Carranza shared about best practices for using Desmos Activity Builder to charge up middle and high school lessons.

Check out the recording here if you missed the presentation.

A Little Light Reading

Teacher-Ladies Who Code

This week I attended a screening of a documentary called “Coding: Debugging the Gender Gap”, which was organized by “Ladies Learning Code”, and hosted at the Montreal Google office. It was a fascinating evening, during which I got to meet some wonderful women coders, and as a bonus, get a look at the amazing environment that Google’s employees get to work in. As a math teacher, I’m especially interested in integrating coding into the math class, something I fancy I’m sort of doing by getting my students to create their own interactive applets using GeoGebra. But I looked for female math teachers who really do use coding and found these:

Dawn DuPriest (@DuPriestMath) has an entire website called “Coding in Math Class” that is all about using coding as a math teaching tool. I plan to read all of it. It’s exactly what I want to do. She also referred me to Diane Tepylo (@drtepylo) and Lisa Floyd (@lisaannefloyd), whose website contains a huge inventory of programs she’s created for integration in the math class.

Then this post by Douglas Rushkoff (@rushkoff) came along and made me rethink everything. That’s the way it is on Twitter.

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

It’s Not What You Got (It’s How You Use It)

Worksheets, lectures, and textbooks are just a few of the many elements of the math classroom that get a bad reputation. And yet each of these elements, when used thoughtfully, can support a deep and engaging math experience for students.

Jo over at Resourceaholic just wrote a great piece about another maligned element of some math classes: the poster project. She gives an example of a failed poster project and a successful one, both from her own classroom experience. It’s a great reminder that teachers can rescue many maligned teaching devices such as poster projects or worksheets and put them to good use. In the end, it’s not about the poster. It’s about whether the task promoted high-level mathematical learning.

Written by Kent Haines (@MrAKHaines)

28-Day Challenge

Have you been looking for a motivating challenge to get beach body ready? Or how about one to cleanse all the toxins from your system?

Well, then this post isn’t for you.

If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a 28-Day Number Sense Challenge, then keep reading! Christina Tondevold (@BuildMathMinds) is preparing to host a number sense challenge for PreK – 2nd Grade teachers. Even if you don’t work in those grade levels, consider joining the challenge to learn more about what concepts make up number sense and why they are such a crucial part of students’ mathematical understandings. The first challenge is being sent out April 17. Sign up now so you don’t miss it!

Written by Brian Bushart (@bstockus)

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Online Professional Development Sessions

What Can *You* Build?

Online Professional Development Sessions

Spotlight on NCTM Annual Sessions

NCTM 2016 and Purpose

Creating Accessible Learning Environments

Great Blogging Action

“Teaching on a normal day is balance.”

Online Professional Development Sessions

Great Blogging Action

The Many Ways Things Make Sense

Confession

Hot on Twitter: #NCTMAnnual starts this week

Global Math Department and #NCTMAnnual

Online Professional Development Sessions

A Little Light Reading

What Can You Build?