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)

Online Professional Development Sessions

True Confessions from a Math Teacher!

Math Residue and Wheels

I think it goes without saying that the #MTBoS is an amazing community. Nowhere else in education have I heard of a place where elementary, middle, high, and post-secondary teachers hang out to learn from one another.  This week Alex Overwijk (a high school teacher) shared a post about radians. Here’s the truth, I’m an elementary teacher at heart and I had no idea what a radian was…but I do now.  

I get intimidated and lost in some of the posts our friends outside K-8 share, but I read on because I know it leaves residue. The math residue makes the understanding of future posts I read much easier to digest.  

What I love most about Alex’s post is that he makes the math accessible to both his students and readers.  Alex walks us through his 5 days of learning and shares pictures of hands on learning that would make any elementary school principal proud. Did I mention that Alex teaches high school!

If you teach radians, great! You can use Alex’s lessons.



If you don’t teach radians (like me), great!  I’m sure you’ll walk away with residue sticking to your brain. Just be sure to tell Al thanks.



Written by Graham Fletcher (@gfletchy)

I Know Dan Meyer Doesn’t Need My Help…

..but you should check this out – cross-posted on both dy/dan and the Desmos blog – features from Desmos called the Classroom Conversation Toolkit, which allows a teacher to control the pacing of a Desmos Activity.  Desmos Activities are awesome, to be sure, but they can create a roomful of plugged-in children.  The Toolkit counteracts that one potential downside by providing teachers with a means to pause, anonymize, and share contributions by students, and giving space for some lovely ‘collective effervescence’.

Dave Sabol, over at The Rational Radical, has been running a series called This is How I Teach, riffing on the How I Work series at lifehacker.  Each participant answers the same series of questions, and then tags whomever they would like to hear about.  Even if you know someone, or have been reading their blog for years, there are insights to be gained from reading about how others manage their teaching practice.  I personally was quite heartened to read that at least three participants used some sort of favorite pad as their ‘favorite to-do list manager’.  

Maybe you know about wild.maths.org already, but I just learned about it via a post on Algebra’s Friend about Factors and Multiples Chain, a great pre-factoring activity.  A cousin of nrich (another wonderful task and activity resource), wild.maths is dedicated to creative explorations of math, and is chock full of interactives.   This website is a rabbit hole worth exploring – I mean, they have a section called Dotty Grids!

Finally, some mathematical art:  Rafael Araujo is a Venezuelan architect and illustrator whose artwork is geometrically constructed, much of it using the Golden Ratio.  He leaves the construction lines in his pieces, which serve to enhance and highlight their mathematical and aesthetic beauty.



Written by Wendy Menard (@wmukluk)

How Often…

How often do you look at student work with other teachers, only to have the conversation turn to student deficits? “This kid can’t subtract.” “That kid’s handwriting is atrocious.” Kim VanDuzer wrote about this phenomenon in her recent post, First Blog Post. In an impressive first foray into blogging, Kim describes how she experienced this among other teachers, and in herself. She traced it back to the idea that some teachers operate from a  “deficit perspective.” Teachers’ focus on deficits aligns with the traditional view of teachers as “Givers of knowledge.” Kim admits to falling into this perspective as well, but she goes on to talk about how she shifted her perspective and provides links to some relevant resources.



How often have you questioned the man? More specifically, how often have your students had a chance to analyze “REAL life products and company promotions”? If you want to dive into these kinds of tasks, then you should follow what happens over at getmadmath.weebly.com. Jen McAleer has been curating a collection of tasks that can get kids thinking about estimation and problem solving while also questioning the world around them. The picture above is from the task Starburst Mini-Gate, a task that asks students to analyze the serving size on the label versus in the bag.



How often have you heard of a student actually wanting their mom to work in their school? Hedge’s recent post, Following Danielson’s advice: “Find What You Love… Do More Of That…” recalls how her son made that exact request and what her son said next that brought her to tears. It’s the cutest thing ever! She goes to explain more about her decision to return to the classroom, mentioning Christopher Danielson’s speech from Twitter Math Camp ‘15, and the rest of the #MTBoS. Expect to see more of her writing and reflecting about the goings on in her classroom.



Written by Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter)

Online Professional Development Sessions

It Came From the #MTBoS

Knitting – a Math Teacher Superpower?!?

This article was shared with me by a friend on Facebook – that friend being Scott Delahunt, aka @MorganBallantin. It’s a fascinating read about how math teachers have greatly facilitated the visualization of highly complex shapes by using their knitting needles. An interesting bit of history – Richard Feynman seems to have been the first to notice how knitting can be used to teach math! The article has plenty of links if you want to drill deeper, including this one about an afghan, knit by Pat Ashforth and Steve Plummer, that teaches the multiplication tables – so it’s not just the hyperbolic planes or the Möbius bands that can be rendered with needles. I used to know how to crochet…maybe it’s time to dust those needles off!

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

The Secret of the Desmos Activity Builder Guide

If you’ve been nervous about exploring the capabilities of the Desmos Activity Builder, now is the time to jump in. The Activity Builder is a wonderful platform that provides teachers with enormous flexibility, and it can be used from elementary math (plotting fractions on a number line) to calculus (derivatives of a unicycle’s motion).

To help you get started,  Dan Meyer has written a guide to creating great digital activities. Secretly, though, it’s just a great guide for creating activities of any sort. Imagine this post as a summary of Dan’s advice and philosophy over the past 5 years or so. Dan hasn’t given a TED talk in a while, but this post could probably act as his outline.

Written by Kent Haines (@KentHaines)

Online Professional Development Sessions

Great Blogging Action

Cathy Is On Fire

If you’ve never tuned into Cathy Yenca’s blog, carve out a few hours and get plugged in. Recently, she’s been on fire with some great posts, ideas, and a plethora of Desmos activities. Here are two post recaps:

Classroom & Twitter Hodge-Podge

Cathy always expresses her gratitude for the #MTBoS and this post is no exception, ranging from student playlists to Explain Everything to Desmos. As I said, she’s on fire building some amazing Desmos activities. Add this link to your bookmarks and check out her List.ly.

5 Practices in a 1:1 Classroom

Cathy gives us some simple tips on ways to use digital tools and student work to extend the power of NCTM’s 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions. In addition to monitoring student work, Cathy is excited to “see and analyze student work/thinking outside of class.” allowing her to see student mistakes and misconceptions. Even after 15 years of teaching she came across a new mistake. That’s exciting! I highly recommend you check out the rest of her blog post here.

Enjoy!

~by Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel)

Online Professional Development Sessions

Wanting to do ALL THE {math teacher} THINGS!

Inspiration for the School Year

Here in New York, school doesn’t begin until Thursday (September 8), so I have the advantage of reading about how everyone else begins their school year, making my to-do and to-implement lists ever longer.  As always, there is some tremendous intentional and reflective work going on in the Math Blogosphere.

For example, Anna Blinstein, over at BorshctwithAnna, has written about a Habits of Mind unit that she is doing with her 9th graders – a great use of instructional routines to establish classroom norms and expectations.

In the ‘Make Your Ideal Classroom’ department, John Berray gives step-by-step instructions in turning your classroom tables into whiteboard surfaces!  (I’ve already written my Donorschoose proposal for the supplies.)

 

Tina Cardone rethought her homework strategy for the coming year, and has come up with a plan which provides spiraling practice in one type of assignment, and addresses broader goals of social justice, student voice and critical thinking in another, more-extended type of assignment.  By hooking her students with prompts that are designed to elicit both opinions and mathematical thinking, Tina is creating a space in which students can connect math with real world experiences.

My colleagues in NYC are doing some great pre-year reflecting as well. Matt Baker breaks down his starting routines for the coming year, which are closely aligned to his teaching goals.  These routines include high 5’s and warm-ups designed to help his students take better notes and understand the goal and sequence of lessons.  Brian Palacio, about to begin teaching at a new school, takes a major look in the teaching mirror, looking both forward and back. It’s a great piece, one that led me to reflect on my own career.

Two math and social justice notes:  Do you follow Jessica Hagy’s blog Indexed?  You probably should, for her wonderful graphs, like this:

And you might want to read Cathy O’Neil’s (mathbabe.org) book, Weapons of Math Destruction, about the mathematical models by which financial decisions are made and personal futures controlled.   Evelyn Lamb reviewed this important book here.

Written by Wendy Menard (@wmukluk)

Finding Your Teacher Mojo

We’re off to a pretty good school year, MTBoS. Take a look at some of the excellent things going on in so many different classrooms.

#MTBoSBlaugust came to a close last week, but not before at least one more inspiring blog post. Elissa Miller’s post Guys I’m Killing it talks about how in the few weeks back at school, she’s confident she’s got her “teacher mojo back.”

Matt Vaudrey has his “teacher mojo working,” and he’s been beginning each post about the topic with the opening line “Dear Claire,…”. Each is a letter to Claire Verti, whose classes he is covering until she returns from maternity leave. The posts are full of Matt’s enthusiasm and insight as he returns from being a coach/author to teaching. The most recent post Visual Patterns – 2 describes some teacher “Trolling,” while referencing Fawn Nguyen’s fantastic First Two Days post.

If you aren’t yet convinced that this is off to a great start, check out Brian Bushart’s post More Than Words. The post begins by discussing Tracy Zager’s post How Not To Start Math Class in The Fall which talks about how a mandated test set a bad tone for the year. Later in the post, Brian describes how a group of elementary teachers in his district who worked on math in the summer have begun their year blogging about the start to their school year. Their uplifting first posts are listed in the post’s last paragraph and are sure excite you about this school year’s potential.



Written by Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter)

Online Professional Development Sessions

It Came From the #MTBoS

Math On-A-Stick!

This week I will be glued to Twitter, watching what happens every day at Math On-A-Stick. Started last year by Christopher Danielson (@Trianglemancsd), Math on a Stick is a free exhibit at the Minnesota State Fair where kids can play and explore math in a way that few of them have ever done before. This includes tesselating turtles, Truchet tiles, pattern machines, egg sorts, and The Number Game. You can get a sense for the exhibit by seeing this short video.

Adding to the fun, Ilana Horn (@ilana_horn) and Melissa Grisalfi will be there doing research on how kids interact with math in this setting! Ilana wrote a quick summary of the project on her blog, and there is more to follow as her team examines the data they’ve collected.

Written by Kent Haines (@KentHaines)

When in Doubt, Listen to Fawn 

Rather you are entering your first week of school or fourth like me, these are definitely ideas you should use to challenge your current perspective and make the proper adjustments to make this year better than last.

Written by Jenise Sexton (@MrsJeniseSexton)

The Match Game

This show used to be on tv when I was a kid, and what’s happening these days in the #mtbos reminds me of it.

I’ve been saying for a long time that this is truly an exciting time to be a teacher, but my reason for feeling that way has shifted a bit. It used to be because of all the new tools like GeoGebra and Desmos, which we can match up with specific concepts. But now these tools are being matched with instructional practices to exponentially crank things up. For example, Michael Pershan (@mpershan) wrote about using Desmos Activity Builder to Talk About Student Work,  Amy McNabb (@amcnabb3) tweeted how she is using the new Desmos card sort to make “Always, Sometimes, Never” activities. This summer, at TMC16, during David Wees’s (@davidwees) TMC16 session on Contemplate then Calculate, Alex Overwijk (@alexoverwijk) observed that it would be a perfect routine to introduce Fawn Nguyen’s Visual Patterns. Finally John Golden (@mathhombre) tweeted a link to this video about Joshua Kwon’s students, who are coding in math class, which he introduces to them with a Desmos activity.

Gene Rayburn would be proud!

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

Online Professional Development Sessions

It Came From the #MTBoS

Start Off the Year Right!

As we inch closer and closer to the first day of school, so much is starting to come out about how to spend the first days. It seems that people generally feel the same way about starting the year out right:

• Establishing norms is important for setting the tone of your year together

• Kids need to experience the norms to really understand them and feel their need

• Norms take purposeful and consistent implementation to last

• Proper implementation takes time, but that time is worth it in the long run

I encourage you to look for posts out there to fine tune your week 1 tasks. A great place to start, which is cited by so many as inspiration, is with Jo Boaler’s Week of Inspirational Math and her norms at YouCubed. Laura Wagenman has a great post found here chock-full of links to activities and tasks which align with Jo Boaler’s norms. I really liked how Mark Chubb posted on these same norms here, and at the end he gave some really good suggestions for the types of tasks to be looking for to establish these norms.

Sara VanDerWerf shared last winter a really awesome task called 100 Numbers that really gets groups looking exactly how you want them to look, complete with a suggested norms checklist for students. Sarah Carter posted about the Broken Circles task which really elicits student need of each other as well, complete with a reflection at the end.

However you do it, start things out right and keep spreading the messages to kids that math is awesome and accessible to everyone!

Written by Matthew Engle (@pickpocketsbme)

Supporting Parents, Supporting Children 

I want to assume that everyone reading this newsletter is already familiar with the website Talking Math With Your Kids. If not, score one for me for introducing it to you! Go, check it out right now! The purpose of the site is to help parents find answers to the question, “We know we need to read with our children every day, but what should we do for math?” In addition to the site, there’s even a hashtag on Twitter – #tmwyk – where parents tweet out snippets as they talk math with their kids.

I’m excited to share this week that there’s now another great resource for supporting parents in supporting their children’s mathematical development: Table Talk Math.

John Stevens has created a weekly newsletter that provides mathematical prompts for families to discuss around the dinner table. So far the newsletter has shared examples of Which One Doesn’t Belong and Would You Rather…?

Be sure to share the link with parents so they can sign up to receive the newsletter. You should sign up for it, too! That way you can talk to parents about what kinds of conversations it sparks at the dinner table.

Written by Brian Bushart (@bstockus)

#ObserveMe

Last week, Robert Kaplinsky blogged about his concern that lack of collaboration amongst teachers at school sites is looking more like teachers being “independent contractors than colleagues.” Read more about what we can do about this concern.

Inspired by a tweet from Heather Kohn, Robert is encouraging us to open our classrooms so others may come observe our teaching and offer us constructive feedback targeted at improvement. Join the craze! It’s far better than any Pokémon game could ever dream about.

Robert’s Call to Action:

Post a sign to let others know they are welcome in your classroom. Here’s a template you can use and below is what it looks like.

Robert is posting your tweets and images about it on his blog, so be sure to let Robert know via Twitter and the #ObserveMe conversation.

Written by Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel)