This Week at the Global Math Department

Edited By Chase Orton  @mathgeek76
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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight!

SmartSlides for Engaging Students

Presented by Lynda Moore

In this session, you will see how Lynda Moore (teacher of 30 years) uses hyperslides to engage her students and build confidence and ownership in their learning. She uses live data, immediate feedback and self assessment to teach HS Geometry. The use of Teacher Time, Think Pair Share and looping of content are some of the tools that you will learn in this webinar. Math can be paperless, Math can be engaging, and Math is AMAZING, and Learn to KnowMooreMath with Lynda Moore.

To join us at 9:00 PM EST for the webinar click here!

Next Week

The Era of Resource Abundance

Presented by Hilary Kreisberg

Tired of spending hours searching for fun activities and tasks to elevate your lesson? Tired of being distracted by “imposter resources” which look pretty but don’t truly support conceptual understanding? Come learn how to stop being tired and start being productive by understanding how to analyze resources to transform your teaching.

Register ahead of time by clicking here!

You can always check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

From the World of Math Ed

Storytelling and Mathematics

Recently, Desmos posted a blog post titled, “How Might You Launch a Lesson?” where Christopher Danielson (@Trianglemancsd) and Michael Fenton (@mjfenton) share three ways to get students involved in a math lesson. Launch 1: One Question draws on Dan Meyer’s Three-Act Tasks, and Launch 2: Notice and Wonder draws on the work of Annie Fetter (@MFAnnie) and Max Ray-Riek (@maxrayriek), both of which have become popular strategies in #MTBoS as these strategies tend to invite and validate students’ natural curiosities and instincts regarding math exercises.

Launch 3: Storytelling, suggested by Lauren Baucom (@LBmathemagician) brings forth the practice of telling stories from African-American culture. While the other two launches elicit students’ mathematical thinking, and may allow students to share their personal experiences, storytelling has an additional benefit of explicitly making space for students to bring forth parts of themselves that are not normally honored in the math classroom. Students can inform and compose these stories through their lives outside of the math classroom, which can allow students to feel heard, understand that creativity and imagination have a role in mathematics, and create personal and mathematical connections through the lesson.

Shraddha Shirude (@ESMathTeacher) writes how storytelling, and the lack thereof, affects how students engage with mathematics in her blog post titled, “Math is Life. Life is a Story. So why aren’t we telling stories in math class?” Shirude notes that omitting stories and the human aspects of mathematics in math classrooms can create barriers for students to connect with each other and the mathematics, which, in turn, can push people away from math. She also shares her love of mathematics and stories, and how the two merge to inform her implementation of Ethnic Studies into practice. Shraddha’s writing as an Ethnic Studies Math Educator was invaluable for me so I encourage you to read the post in full and follow her on twitter.

By Christelle Rocha (@Maestra_Rocha)

Tell Me Everything You Know

My team (@musiccitymath) and I brought back a somewhat old idea of “tell me everything you know.” We were using it as a way to create a mastery experience for teachers to help build collective efficacy. The idea came from a blog post in 2016 by Joe Schwartz (@JSchwartz10a) titled “Unknown Unknowns.” He talks about changing the question of a problem to “tell me everything you know about…” and this brings forward not only what students know but also unfinished learning. My favorite quote from the post is, “The questions we ask and the tasks we post yield information about our students.”

Kristin Gray (@MathMinds) has a video from 2017 on Teaching Channel where she does this routine with kindergarteners. Here is the tweet where she posted about it.

Have you used this routine? Tell me everything about it! I’d love to continue the conversation on Twitter.

By Amber Thienel (@amberthienel)

Transdisciplinary Learning: Mathematics Blending & Intersecting
I’ve been thinking recently about transdisciplinary–different from interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary–learning, especially as it occurs in mathematics education. I realize this may be a new term, as neither the adjective nor the noun has appeared in any #MTBoS tweet at the time of writing:

Pulling a sample definition [source] for ‘transdisciplinarity’ yields the following:

“Transdisciplinarity occurs when two or more discipline perspectives transcend each other to form a new holistic approach. The outcome will be completely different from what one would expect from the addition of the parts. Transdisciplinarity … output is created as a result of disciplines integrating to become something completely new.”

One source of interest for me is around whether one can/should call ‘mathematics education’ itself a discipline, or whether it is fundamentally transdisciplinary. Another source of interest for me is around various combinations of disciplines, and whether the work happening is inter/multidisciplinary or truly transdisciplinary.

Here are a few twitter-based examples of discipline-interactions that are on my mind. [I’d love to hear about more!]

Math & Math Education: Check out this brief thread from Dr. Wandering Point. It begins with the tweet below [the “preface” clues that there are some criticisms to follow!] and contains a link to Askey’s Good Intentions Are Not Enough.

Relatedly, Michael Pershan [@mpershan] has an observation and a question related to who criticizes whom in the context of Math and Math Education:

Dr. Diaz Eaton [@mathprofcarrie], a math professor, poses the following questions around Programming & Ethics:

[BTW: I strongly recommend @_KarenHao’s recent article on making AI fairer.]

Math & Ethnic Studies: A group out of Washington has put out their K-12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework [pdf]; check out co-creator @TCastroGill’s tweet mentioning collaborators @ESMathTeacher and @fearnonumber:

The aforementioned materials inspired Jenna Laib [@jennalaib] to tweet a blog post well worth reading over:

Math & History: Check out @MathHistFacts, which is definitely and certainly not drawn from the research of @mbarany, for tongue-in-cheek takes on these two disciplines. [See Michael Barany’s main account for more serious work on historical theories of mathematics.]

Math & Gender Studies: My work environment has continued to push my thinking around math and gender studies, or math education and feminism, as my colleague Georgina Emerson [@teachaboutwomen] alludes to here:

As in the above-tweet: Recommended readings are strongly desired! In the meantime, I’ve been threading a number of paragraph-pulls after Georgina, my history teacher colleague who founded Teach About Women, pointed me to work by Suzanne K Damarin. I hope I can interest you in taking a glance at some of these threads; below is a sample excerpt from yet another thread [about a math text inspired by work of Peggy McIntosh, Joan Countryman, and others] to whet your appetite:

What *is* that different mathematics that Shelley refers to in the excerpt above? Or what could it be?

A few bullet-pointed items, without commentary, at various intersections.

Math & Social Media: See Dave Richeson’s [@divbyzero] three part thread [click for more!]:

See also Ayesha Rascoe’s [@ayesharascoe] quantitative approach to (un)presidential tweets:

Math & Motherhood: This was the topic of a special issue in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics in July 2018 [JHM link]. See also: Francis Su [@mathyawp] tweeted out a link to Allison Henrich’s [@KnottyAllison] AMS Math-Mamas-blog post:

Math & the Prison System: See Darryl Yong’s [@dyong] blog post on working with students inside of a men’s prison:

As a closing note: Last week I highlighted some positive examples of sourcing practices, but also pointed out two instances in which there was a clear lack of proper attribution: two from @fermatslibrary and one more from @edutopia. I am happy to report that folks behind the scenes from both accounts contacted me, and have both recommitted to avoiding these omissions in the future [and moved to correct the ones that were pointed out].

As always, please reach out to me [DMs, email, @ me, etc] with any happenings in or around the world of mathematics education that you believe should be amplified!

Benjamin Dickman @benjamindickman

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