Behind every math teacher is a calling to invest in the lives of others. But sometimes that calling gets lost in the daily hustle and bustle of teaching. During this session at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Regional Conference in Nashville, TN, participants were asked to recall, refine, Read more…
#CelebrateTheStruggle Teachers of mathematics are being called to promote productive struggle in their classrooms, or as the Common Core State Standards puts it, students should be able to “make sense of problems and persevere in solving them”. But what if struggle, the thing that is necessary to persevere, is seen Read more…
What is your relationship status with mathematics? A productive way for me to think about how best to teach mathematics is to consider facilitating a relationship between a student and mathematics. What are things that I can do to improve the relationship? And how can I avoid damaging the relationship Read more…
Good tasks are out there. The rice on a chess board task. The handshake task. The names of these tasks are familiar to most math teachers (if not, google them) as classic problems that have been leveraged to teach mathematical concepts to many a math student. Finding a good task Read more…
Sometimes things do not go exactly to plan… As any teacher can attest, there are times when the intended outcomes of a lesson do not simply materialize when the bell rings. The same principle exists for the professional development of teachers. At the annual conference for the Association for Mathematics Read more…
Reacting to a Cognitive Shove I define an opportunity to develop as a professional a success when my thinking, my stance as a teacher of mathematics and a preparer of teachers of mathematics, changes. By that measure my time at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Annual Meeting Read more…
Struggle is a good thing. That cannot be true…can it? I don’t want to see my children struggle. I don’t want to see my students struggle. When someone struggling, I want to run over and help them. I want to remove the struggle. But I know that struggle is good. Read more…
Sometimes I am called an optimist, an idealist, or just disconnected with reality. Usually a comment like that emerges after I “confess” I have never given a test or quiz, yet I have been a teacher/teacher educator for 15 years. Instead I like to give “learning celebrations” (a term I Read more…
Formative assessment a process of gathering evidence within the stream of instruction in order to inform teaching and learning (Black, Harrison et al., 2004). To be considered formative, the evidence must be “elicited, interpreted, and used by both teachers and learners” (Wiliam, 2011, p. 43) From the Joint Position Paper Read more…
The Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators met in Orlando this week which provides the opportunity for fellow teachers of teachers of mathematics to discuss how to improve the field of mathematics teacher preparation. Sounds like a niche field but the importance of preparing teachers to teach mathematics, a subject which is directly connected to Read more…