Online Professional Development Sessions

And now for more good stuff…

Extending Our Reach

Sara Van Der Werf has written a beautiful essay about losing a former student to suicide and how we, as teachers, have both an opportunity and a responsibility to reach out and provide comfort to those members of our school communities who experience loss.

To summarize Sara’s advice: go with your gut, and don’t worry so much about what you say to people who are grieving. Just try to say something, because something is better than nothing.

As many teachers prepare to begin the school year anew, it’s important to keep in mind the many ways in which our jobs extend far beyond the content we teach and into the lives of the young people we work with.

Written by Kent Haines (@KentHaines)

Contributions

It’s already three weeks since TMC16, and many, many blogposts have been created since then, but I want to take you back to the astonishingly rich blogging that was achieved every single day of the conference, including Desmos Day, by Greg Taylor (@mathtans). If you weren’t at TMC16, reading his posts will make you feel like you were. If you were at TMC16, reading these posts will make you feel like you were MORE there. And by the way, in one post, Greg asks himself what he contributes to the MTBoS. I can answer that! Just take a look at the sheer quantity and quality of his writing, starting with these puppies:

Descon

Entry 1

Entry 2

Entry 3

Entry 4

After TMC

This is just the tip of the iceberg – Greg actually wrote more posts than those I’ve listed, the links to which are embedded in his daily posts. They go into more detail about specific sessions. Normally, when I write for this newsletter, I put some kind of summary about the post(s) in my article, but there’s just so much here, summarizing would take up a few newsletters. Enjoy – I know I did!

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

A Post About Posts, About Posts, About Posts

Mike Wiernicki literally created a black hole of blog posts. As he discussed his work with Blogarithm, he opened the #MTBoS up to multiple blog posts to satisfy anyone’s math palate. His Blogarithm post began with a brief discussion of a 6th grade lesson on building fluency in multiplication using the Pythagoras Square. Then he encouraged us to look at recently added posts to NCTM’s Blogarithm. Much to my surprise, there were many, many posts to choose from.

Rethinking the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model by Tim McCaffrey provides a perspective of many math and science teachers – start with an investigation. Gradual release has become a bit of an education catch phrase. Often those who implement this model try to remain true to the flow laid out within the book written by Fisher and Frey: I do, We do, You do.  McCaffrey’s post provides practical ways to keep inquiry within the math lesson and establish a student-centered environment. He follows this up with Reel ’Em In and discusses an eighth grade lesson using the reverse model of “I do, we do, you do.” He aimed to paint a clear picture, and I think he accomplished that.

Matt Kitchen answers the age old question “When Am I Ever Going to Use This?” with his social emotional response to students’ frustration. Most think we should just explain to students how the math concept we are teaching connects to something we do in real life. Kitchen shows there’s a time and a place. Once we help students process their frustrations, we can have discussions with them as discussed in Show Students the Real Purpose of Math.

I could go on and on, because as I said, it is a black hole.  Go get lost, friends. 🙂

Written by Jenise Sexton (@MrsJeniseSexton)