If you’re reading this blog post, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re also a big fan of the kinds of problems on Open Middle, a site I co-founded with Nanette Johnson and run with help from Bryan Anderson, Zack Miller, and Dan Luevanos. In case you aren’t familiar with Open Middle, it’s a website…
Most teachers believe that there is not enough time to teach all their grade level standards in a single year. I’m guessing that this doesn’t come as a surprise to you. So, the question then is what do we do about it? I think that the most common reaction is to want to skip certain…
Not that long ago, I would have laughed at the thought that I would be using social media to talk about math education. Nowadays, I can still recall that feeling but my perspective has changed so much that I can’t imagine being an effective educator without support from the community of math educators in the MathTwitterBlogosphere (#MTBoS).
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the MTBoS, you’re a part of it and you probably don’t even realize it. The MathTwitterBlogosphere is the collection of people and content (think blog posts, lessons, activities, tweets, etc.) about math education. Some people create the content. Some use it. Some do a combination of both. Every role is needed! For example, if everyone made content and no one used it (or vice-versa) that would be a problem.
So, I want to share three reasons why being a part of this group is so important to me so that you might want to participate more as well.
If you are frustrated that your students will try a math problem once or twice and then give up, this blog post is for you. Let me (re)introduce you to one of my favorite tools for helping students persevere when problem solving: the Open Middle Worksheet.
To explain why many educators find it invaluable, I’ll need to tangent and briefly explain a central theme of one of my favorite books, Freakonomics. Life is all about incentives. There are positive incentives (I go to the gym because I want to stay healthy) and negative incentives (I don’t steal because I don’t want to go to jail). Without these incentives (or if the incentives changed) what you do would change.
My favorite tool for helping students solve problems is the Problem Solving Framework. I love using it because it scaffolds students often underdeveloped critical thinking skills and helps them develop their own problem solving techniques.
I want to start off by making this post’s intention clear: my goal is to level the information playing field which will enable us to improve math education conferences for speakers and attendees. Working together we can create something better than any one of us could have created on our own. A key component of…
It’s challenging to have a conversation about depth of knowledge (DOK) when everyone has different ideas of what it is. So, I’ve decided to refine how I distinguish between DOK levels and turn it into a tool that can be used to facilitate a conversation. The two-page tool covers topics from 1st grade through high school as well as topics ranging from number sense, fractions, geometry, probability, and functions. The pictures below give you a preview of the tool and you can download it by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.
I wanted to share a resource from Tina Cheuk out of the Understanding Language department at Stanford University who created a very useful graphic organizer to show that the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for Mathematics, English Language Arts (ELA), and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have significant overlap and can be collectively implemented for…
The most straightforward method I have found for distinguishing between the first three levels of Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) is to take a single mathematical concept and provide a problem at each DOK level. Here are three examples that illustrate the differences well using: fractions on a number line perimeter and area surface area and…
When the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for Mathematics were written, the authors defined three shifts (coherence, focus, and rigor) to articulate “how the standards differ from previous standards—and the necessary shifts they call for.” The shifts are useful in articulating the big picture as to how things have changed. This blog post delves solely into…
I am no longer using these posters. If you are interested in a tool to help math teachers make sense of the depth of knowledge in mathematics, please check out this post with a reproducible handout for educators.
This search engine searches all of the sites below to quickly help you find a problem-based lesson (also called 3-Act Task, mathematical modeling, or application problem): The links below are the pages that are being searched by the search engine: 101 Questions Andrew Gael Andrew Stadel Catherine Castillo Dan Meyer Dane Ehlert Emergent Math’s Problem…
It is often helpful to have a map to your destination when taking off on a journey. Without one it is easy to lose your way. This holds true with groups of teachers collaborating as part of a Professional Learning Community (PLC). Sometimes teachers find themselves in situations where they have time to meet as…
Below are links to PDF copies of the Common Core State Standards’ Standards for Mathematical Practice in multiple languages. Please let me know if you have them in any other languages so I can add them to this list. Armenian Chinese Korean Spanish Tagalog
Math content and language objectives can be challenging to create, especially when you don’t want to explicitly tell students what they will be learning at the beginning. Additionally, if your school is using the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) model, content and language objectives are required for every lesson. Fortunately, the Common Core State Standards’…
My best advice to anyone preparing to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for mathematics is to get students talking and writing about their work. Regardless of your stance on the CCSS, being an effective communicator is a valuable and often challenging life skill. It is even more challenging when the content is…
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) emphasizes mathematical modeling, or “link[ing] classroom mathematics and statistics to everyday life, work, and decision-making” for all grade levels with Math Practice 4. Some content standards are easier than others to connect to everyday life, and often the more abstract the standard is, the more challenging it is to…