I work in math education professional development, curriculum writing, and resource creation. The strategies I share would be considered inquiry-based instruction. That being said, I believe that students benefit from blends of many learning strategies, including direct instruction. This blog post was originally just about episode 3, but I am now including episode 4…
This blog post is for education leaders who wish that educator conferences were more equitable. For perspective, if everything was perfectly fair, when you go to an educator conference and looked at who was speaking, the keynote and featured speaker demographics would be representative of the people living in the areas they’re pulling from. You’d…
I was beyond fortunate to have the opportunity to provide professional development to math(s) educators in Australia six times over twelve days in late November and early December 2023 in Brisbane, Melbourne, Bairnsdale, and Sydney. It was one of the best professional experiences of my life and I will cherish every moment. I realize that…
When I first started doing paid professional development work in 2012, I was ecstatic to be asked at all. I had no idea how much to charge or how much others were earning for similar work. Fast forward more than ten years later and I’m very aware that educational consultants get drastically different payments for…
I’ve been using an inclusion rider since April 2019. Its purpose is to move from lamenting the lack of diversity at educational conferences and other professional development to actually making change happen. I wish I could say that I always realized this was needed or something I could do, but truthfully I was comfortable in…
On September 30, 2022, I presented at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual conference in Los Angeles, California for my co-presenter Rosalba Serrano (who was unable to attend) and I about 5 Struggles Your Foster Students Wished You Knew. This was a passion project for us because we both came through the foster…
A while back I listened to the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. He shared research conducted on pairs of companies that initially seemed identical on paper but then had completely different paths with one becoming an extremely high achieving great company while the other maintained about the same good success it had. He…
One of my favorite thought experiments is “What if __________________ didn’t exist today and was invented tomorrow? What would be different than it is now?” As an example, imagine that your content standards had never been invented. Tomorrow a group of people will start creating them. What are the odds that they’d end up with…
Imagine that people who wanted to become a math teacher had to take a test to determine how well they understood mathematics. Sounds reasonable. However also imagine that this test was both ludicrously hard and assessed topics that had little to do with what teachers actually teach. Not so great. Well unfortunately, this test exists…
How should the mathematics we teach students change over time? Should students learn the same things in 2020 as they will in 2070 or 2120? What about 2520? I believe that how a person answers these questions depends a lot on how he or she see math’s purpose. If math’s purpose is giving students basic…
I am writing this blog post for the earlier version of myself who naively thought that “not seeing color” was a sufficient social justice perspective and wishes he could have realized how inadequate that was. I’m also writing this for other white people who see the injustice in the world and want to do…
I loved my job as a teacher specialist in Downey Unified School District because I was part of a team that helped students and teachers better understand and love mathematics. Over time, we built relationships and created processes that played a small part in our overall improvement. Clearly not everything we did was successful, but…
If you’re a leader or nurture other leaders, then this blog post is for you! I believe that mangrove forests are a great metaphor for a leader’s role. To understand what I mean, please watch this 13 second video that shows how mangrove forests protect the shores from large waves. Then continue reading. I love…
I recently finished reading George Courous’ book The Innovator’s Mindset and enjoyed his storytelling as well as many thought provoking moments. One in particular stands out, and I wanted to explore it more in this blog post. He wrote: If worksheets were handed out as professional learning, some teachers would be bored to tears, yet…
What if you could predict which students would struggle before they do? What if your predictions were so accurate that they let you to focus your attention on those who truly needed your help? What if this enabled you to put support programs in place that made learning more equitable? This doesn’t have to be…
Have you ever noticed that sometimes people don’t realize how others perceive them? This can be problematic if they don’t realize their potential or conversely don’t realize that they are rubbing people the wrong way. This blog post uses a tool called the Johari Window that will help you make sense of it all and…
There’s a scene from The Matrix which I absolutely love as a metaphor for the choices we make and the ignorance we can choose to turn on or off as it suits us. Watch the scene or read the dialogue below. Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) explains to Neo (Keanu Reeves) that the Matrix is an illusory…
I believe that schools and districts waste a lot of time and money on initiatives that never go anywhere. Perhaps it happens when a district spends over a billion dollars on new iPads and changes its mind. Perhaps it’s less publicized and happens when teachers are sent to a conference, students get an expensive software,…
I frequently hear teachers say “How are we supposed to teach all of this in one school year?” or “What are we supposed to cut to make time for what you’re showing us?” These are valid concerns as >82% of math educators said that they don’t have enough time to teach one year of standards…
I recently read a blog post where someone referenced Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. In his book, he listed five groups of potential customers with ideas for selling to each of them. When I read it, it reminded me of the relationship between educators and the knowledge we “sell” our colleagues and students. Here are…