Online Professional Development Sessions

Convergent or Divergent Problem Solving As a teacher, should you converge to a single solution at the end of a lesson or diverge to different thinking with each student? Is an open-middle a better approach to an open-ended type problem? Through activities, you will be able to compare differences and similarities between both strategies. Tune in tonight at 9 PM HERE.

Last week: Mathematical Modeling in School Mathematics – Even if we give students the very best mathematical modeling problems, we are not necessarily teaching students to be good mathematical modelers. Mathematical modeling requires making choices, and teaching mathematical modeling requires knowing the choices to be made and teaching students how to be, well, choosy. We will make explicit the little and not so little things we can do every day to help students learn how to make choices that matter when modeling. To listen to the recording, click here.

Great Blogging Actions

Abductive Reasoning

You’ve probably heard of inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning in math classroom. Have your heard of “abductive reasoning”? Head on over to Chase Orton’s blog, Undercover Calculus, and read about his new favorite term in math education. Don’t let the [calculus] title of Chase’s blog scare you. He works with all grade levels of math students and educators, documenting both his work and thinking along the way. Always a joy to read. Happy summer!

~by Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel)

More Vocabulary!

Anything that gets students using more vocabulary is going to catch my attention, and Sara VanDerWerf’s (@saravdwerf) recent post has done just that.  This post was actually a guest post on Sara’s blog.  The author, Ole Rapson, highlighted a new routine she and other teachers are experimenting with that they call Tally Talks, where students get together and solve a problem while using specified vocabulary in their responses.  One student explains how to use it using the vocab given, while the other marks off when the words are used.

A feature of this post that I really enjoyed was the author’s highlighting of the evolution of the activity and its various tweaks.  I could totally see this basic idea being utilized in so many ways to fit many different situations.  Students will be talking and writing math more using this simple routine, and it seems that you get a lot of bang for your buck with this one.  I can’t wait to try it myself in the fall!

~ by Matthew Engle (@pickpocketbme)