Group items tagged

How can a game help students develop mathematical habits of mind? "Then we talked about the game for a bit, and discussed the "habits of mind" they had employed to figure out the game - noticing and wondering, guessing and checking, persevering, struggling productively, learning from mistakes without worrying about making mistakes (since they knew the only way they were going to make progress was to make mistakes and learn from them), and working together. We talked about how these skills are as important as any content they learn in their school classes, and how they can use those skills to make progress on math problems they're not sure how to solve. In fact, much of the math programming we did the rest of the year employed huge doses of Noticing and Wondering and generating ideas about math situations, or scenarios (a math problem with no stated question). Anecdotal reports suggest that by the end of the year, most of the students felt pretty confident that they could generate ideas about most math situations we handed them. Big win!"

"Add "Would You Rather?" to your bookmarks. Phrasing math problems in terms of "Would You Rather" is simple and brilliant. I love this framework for three reasons:" Interesting framework for solving math problems. This post links to a resource of "Would you rather" problems that could be useful in a variety of different math courses.

I saw this Dan Meyer TED Talk on re imagining Math through problem solving. I like how he takes a problem from the textbook and makes it more rigorous. "Today's math curriculum is teaching students to expect -- and excel at -- paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. In his talk, Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that prompt students to stop and think. (Filmed at TEDxNYED.)"

This is a list of teachers, coaches, and educators involved in the Math Twitter Blogosphere. The MTBOS is an extremely active and rich community of individuals looking to improve and refine their own math instruction. This document contains an excellent collection of blogs and twitter handles worth sharing with your math teachers.

"Solving a math problem means unfolding a mystery, enjoying the pleasure of discovery. But in every geometry lesson that year, I blundered along and blurted out the secret. With a few sentences, I'd manage to ruin the puzzle, ending the feast before it began, as definitively as if I'd spat in my students' soup. Math is a story, and I was giving my kids spoilers." This post speaks directly to math, but can be applied to any content. When we provide students with the answers rather than developing lessons that let the students ask (and answer questions), we take the fun out of learning.

"This theory says, "For math to be engaging, it needs to be real. The fake stuff isn't engaging. The real stuff is." This theory argues that the engagingness of the task is directly related to its realness. This is a limited, incomplete theory of engagement. There are loads of "real" tasks that students find boring. (You can find them in your textbook under the heading "Applications.") There are loads of "fake" tasks that students enjoy." I agree completely that there are plenty of REAL tasks that aren't engaging, but in my personal experience as a math student and as a teacher that occasionally creates math lessons, I find the most engaging problems are those that have a real application to my personal interests and life. Personally, I believe that if teachers present "real" tasks to the students that they are passionate about and have fun teaching, that rubs off on the students.

"There's a contest called Math-O-Vision, which your students should enter. Here's the premise: The Neukom Institute for Computational Science, at Dartmouth College, is offering prizes for high school students who create 4-minute movies that show the world of equations we live in. In 240 seconds, using animation, story-telling, humor, or anything you can think of, show us what you see: the patterns, the abstractions, the patterns within the abstractions." Two interesting things going on in this short blog post: 1. It introduces a contest which might be interesting for some of your students. I looked at the winning video from last year (linked in the post) and know that our students are capable of making something of similar quality. 2. The articles provides an interesting insight on math as a "product." This is quite an interesting discussion when thinking about how/why to assign this type of activity to your students.

ThatQuiz is a free testing service for teachers to use with their classes. Multiple choice tests and math tests can be administered to students using this website. All grades are immediately reported to the students. Teachers receive complete record keeping of test results, including all grades and wrong answers. Teachers can create math assessments with images and video. Students login with a username & password and a code for each assessment. There are some ready-made activities as well.

ThatQuiz is a free testing service for teachers to use with their classes. Multiple choice tests and math tests can be administered to students using this website. All grades are immediately reported to the students. Teachers receive complete record keeping of test results, including all grades and wrong answers. Teachers can create math assessments with images and video. Students login with a username & password and a code for each assessment. There are some ready-made activities as well.

"The following Problem Based Learning (PrBL) curriculum maps are based on the Math Common Core State Standards and the associated scope and sequences. The problems and tasks have been scoured from thoughtful math bloggers who have advanced our practice by posting their materials online." This is an incredible accumulation of lessons, tasks, and assessments that address the mathematical standards for the common core. Although it might take some time to align our specific SOL strands and content with the appropriate common core tags, these curriculum maps are still worth scouring and using, as there is a TON of good stuff here. This also might be a decent bookmark in case Virgina ever goes to the Common Core…

""That's why the goal of school has to be automaticity," my dad concluded. The Sunday morning roads were empty, and we'd nearly made it home. "Take learning your times tables. You've got to know them cold so that you can go on to finding common denominators, or reasoning about algebraic functions, or whatever. You need each task to become automatic before you can move onto the next intellectual step."" Humorous, yet enlightening take on math class, which can be applied to school in general. What is more important for us to teach students so that it becomes more automatic? Should we make facts automatic? Or should we instead focus on skills and thought processes that can be quickly applied to many scenarios in a variety of contexts?

There are a lot of great problems here that could be used in math class. Starting class with one of these problems could be a great way to hook students into the lesson and have the students start generating their own questions and problem solving methods. Then, the math can be brought in appropriately. A lot of these problems seem to lend themselves to the "3 Act Task" model. A video/image representing the problem could go a long way in getting kids hooked.

A great collection of Bloom's math question stems

Math interpreted resource for blooms taxonomy.

We could build something like this cumulatively for math conversation. Measurement is a big need for math and science.

math projects; stem

Math behind health insurance. Interesting video that could be applied to math (probability, ratios, etc.) or social studies (government spending, incentives, role of government)

Crowd sourced (by math teachers) list of iPad Apps for math.

an emerging resource from one of the leading experts on math education, Jo Boaler, professor at Stanford University. If we want change in terms of math achievement in education, this is a great place to start.

"A study conducted by two Michigan psychologists, for example, reports that middle-school math students asked to anticipate how linear and exponential factors work-before this information was taught-became more curious about the content of the lessons they then proceeded to learn. Even more importantly, the act of venturing predictions prompted them to understand the material more deeply as they engaged in reasoning and sense-making about math instead of mere memorization."

"Set up a surprise, such that resolution of that becomes the lesson that you intended. Anything that makes students ask the question that you plan to answer in the lesson is good, because answering questions that haven't been asked is inherently uninteresting." This article discusses how to create lessons that provoke student interest and prime them for your lesson. We all know that it is important to have a good introduction or a "hook" for a lesson, but this concept goes one step further. A hook that provides too much information leads to waning engagement. The goal is not just to get the student interested, but to make them curious and ask questions that we plan to answer on that day. Although this particular blog post and the examples within are math related, this technique can be implented in any content area.