Online Professional Development Sessions

Highlights from last week: 6 Hand Signals that Bring Learning to Life! The research-based practice of making thinking visible with non-verbal signals elevates the level of student participation in elementary classrooms. How can signals be used to even greater purpose in the math classroom to build problem-solving stamina, develop students’ ability to describe patterns and make conjectures, and aid teachers in assessing student learning? We considered the impact of several powerful signals in the present-day elementary math classroom. Missed it? Get the recording here.

Great Blogging Action

Visualizing Standard Deviation

Imagine getting into the driver’s seat of any modern day vehicle. Chances are really good, you can adjust the seat’s height, backrest, and its distance from the pedals. Now imagine getting into a vehicle manufactured back in the 1960s or before. Chances are slim those same adjustable features don’t exist. I ask you to picture this scenario because we live in two worlds: a world designed for adjustability (modern day car) and a world designed on averages (vehicles before 1960s).

Sam Shah’s wonderful post about Visualizing Standard Deviation took me to a few familiar places:

• Sam is focused on using visuals to give students a solid conceptual understanding of Standard Deviation and students often deserve visual representations to build conceptual understanding

• Sam’s post reminded me how many things in our world are still (unfortunately) designed around averages (one of them being education)

• Sam’s post reminded me of Todd Rose’s great TED talk “The Myth of Average” where Todd explains the reasoning behind adjustable seats and how this might translate to education.

Check out Sam’s post and Todd’s TED talk. Both are winners!

~by Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel)

Teachers as Content Creators

In an ignite talk at the 2016 NCTM annual Meeting and Exposition, Max Ray-Riek warned of the risks of getting all your lessons from blogs (coherence, alignment, and consistency). But he also highlights why reading about and getting lessons from blogs feels like a successful endeavor for teachers across the country. You get a first hand account of the teacher who not only created the lesson, but how they used it in their classroom.

So, in order to heed Max’s sage advice, I will not encourage everyone to throw away their current expensive curriculum mandated by their district. Instead I will just list some teacher creators who are sharing lessons they’ve created and some first hand accounts of how they used them in their classrooms.
 

Carl Oliver and Kristin Gray recently made Desmos activities through teacher.desmos.com. Carl teaches high school and Kristin’s lesson is for kindergarteners. That’s pretty cool, in my opinion! The best part is, both of them asked and received feedback on their lessons from other teachers through twitter.

Graham Fletcher just posted how 3-act tasks are used in the elementary grades. If you’re interested in trying one out here are some from Graham, Kendra Lomax, and me.

Simon Gregg recently wrote about how he uses Cuisenaire Rods. These fantastic manipulatives can be used for a variety of mathematical content as well as a sense-making tool.

Also if you haven’t heard about Open Up Resources, then you don’t follow me on twitter! Many teachers from the #MTBoS have been recruited by Illustrative Mathematics to develop an open education resource curriculum for the middle grades!

Finally, let us know how you are creating or using teacher-created content! See you on the interwebs!
~by Andrew Gael (@bkdidact)

Online Professional Development Sessions

Highlights from last week: Teaching Ideas to Prepare Your Students for the AP Stats Exam
Presented by Amy Hogan (@alittlestats), Doug Tyson (@tyson_doug), and Bob Lochel (@bobloch)

 AP Readers Amy Hogan, Bob Lochel and Doug Tyson reviewed three of the questions from the free response portion of the AP Statistics exam from 2016. Ideas related to avoiding common errors and practical teaching tips were shared. Listen to the recording here.

Great Blogging Action

Showing Math some Love

There was an interesting blog post from the other side of the Atlantic from me that caught my attention. Last week there was an article by an anonymous teacher about a number of issues facing the UK’s math curriculum. This was a Secret Teacher article from the UK newspaper The Guardian that invites teachers to “[lift] the lid on teaching… [and write] about the trials, tribulations and frustrations”. Blogger Miss Blilly wanted to respond to the negative tone of this article by highlighting the positive and encouraging other teachers to do the same using the hashtags #loveteaching & #NotSoSecretTeacher. Scottish blogger Julie Moran followed that with a #loveteaching post of her own and mentions other #MTBoS initiatives that spread positivity including the One Good Thing blogand the hashtag #mathsrockedtoday. If you’re interested in spreading positivity and connecting with with teachers in the UK you should check out either of those articles.

If you’re interested in branching out to other bloggers, you may want to check out the blog post from this newsletter’s own Wendy Menard! In this post Wendy discusses her own blogging history, as well as the blogs of a number of her friends, colleagues, and people who have inspired her. If you want to learn more about how one teacher fills up her feed reader, head over to Wendy’s blog and check out the post Enrich and Enhance Your Professionalism through Blogging.

Written by Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter)

Great Blogging Action Spotlight: Simon Gregg

It’s always great to watch fellow teachers explore and work with the primary grades. In particular, it’s interesting to see how teachers of the intermediate grades interact and learn with younger students whenever they get the chance.  
 
This year our friend Simon Gregg has taken the leap from teaching 10 year olds to teaching 5 year olds.  What’s awesome in watching his journey is that Simon’s brought his Cuisenaire Rods with him and the exploration that’s taking place shouldn’t go unrecognized. I’m just thankful he’s continued to share his experience.
 
Sure it’s early in the year but Simon will keep on sharing and we’ll all be better because of it.  
 
Written by @gfletchy (Graham Fletcher)
 

Online Professional Development Sessions

It Came From the #MTBoS

I have really smart friends.

(Photo credit to Dan Meyer @ddmeyer http://threeacts.mrmeyer.com/tacocart/)

This week, my good friend Jennifer Silverman (@jensilvermath) shared this article by Tom Vander Ark (@tvanderark) about Open Up Resources, a non-profit company that is building and collecting  “high quality open standards-aligned math curriculum.” Jennifer happens to be one of the people (along with Kate Nowak @k8nowak of Illustrative Math) involved in the design of these materials, which can only mean that it will involve THE most gorgeous GeoGebra activities, and it will be amazing.

Another good friend, Mary Bourassa (@marybourassa) blogged about her tweaking of a Desmos activity that had threaded its way from Andrew Stadel to Nathan Kraft, to her. I especially love reading posts about designing and implementing these activities. I find looking at the activity alone doesn’t always give me a big picture – what the goal is, how the kids reacted, and ideas for improvements. Also, I noticed that Mary made sure to “close”, which is something that came up at this summer’s TMC during Tracy Johnston Zager’s (@TracyZager) keynote. #ISeeWhatYouDidThere Mary!

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

Geometry Shouldn’t Be “Plug and Chug”

The numerous posts I’ve seen recently about geometry concepts reminded me of a conversation I had with a teacher last year. The teacher expressed he didn’t need to teach his students the concepts of volume and area, they only needed to know how to “plug” numbers into the given formula and calculate.  There are few things teachers say about instructional practices which appall me, but that day, I was appalled. Why rob students of understanding when you can challenge their thinking with activities like these?

@wheeler_laura shared her 4-part lesson on similar triangles in this post allowing inquiry and review of students’ prior knowledge of triangles. Technology was woven into the lesson as well. By the time students arrived at the procedural fluency component, they had an understanding of why they were multiplying to find the unknown sides.

Dane Ehlert causes you to pause and think about how you’re helping students make sense of triangle theorems with this post and this post.  

And during a time when people are using the catch phrase “Don’t be basic” @lisabej_manitou provides what she calls quality basic stuff.  Her students taken a concrete look at quadrilaterals and make connections from background knowledge to current and future knowledge. And although it seems basic to her, the purpose of bringing out students’ misconceptions and understandings is huge.

New goal, help that 7th grade teacher see his connection to the geometry understanding students will need in 10th grade.

Written by Jenise Sexton (@MrsJeniseSexton)

Maze Runner

I tell my colleagues all the time that all I have to do is hop on Twitter for 10 minutes, and I’m liable to have emailed myself 2 or 3 or 15 links to great resources I want to check out. On a recent visit to Twitter, I came across another fantastic Steve Wyborney (@SteveWyborney) creation.

The man who loves to create and share unique resources just dropped the Maze Hundred Chart – an interactive Powerpoint where all the numbers on the hundred chart are hidden. You (or your students!) have the power to create “mazes” on the chart and use the relationships within the chart to name the numbers that aren’t showing. He even wrote a follow up post called “Strategies for Using the Maze Hundred Chart” to give you some ideas of how to use this clever tool.

If you’re new to Steve Wyborney, be sure to check out his math imposter sets, cube connectors, and massive space to notice resources. You’ll be happy you did!

Written by Brian Bushart (@bstockus)

Online Professional Development Sessions

Highlights from last week: Children have an over-reliance on counting, they lack number sense, and the manipulatives we use in the early grades actually hinder students’ abilities to progress to more advanced addition strategies. This session discussed why these three ideas keep kids from being fluent with their addition facts AND what we can do in the classroom to help.Check out the recording by clicking  here.

Great Blogging Action

The 1-2-3-4-5 Punch
 

“I think I have the best of both worlds here can pack a powerful 1-2-3-4-5 punch!”

Jon Orr used student-centered Pentomino activities that deliver critical thinking, manipulation with numbers, algebraic thinking, and lots of creativity. No matter how you slice it, this post will take your algebraic expressions and equations unit to a whole new level or two or three… Go check it out!

~by Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel)