This month’s book study chapter addressed the messages we send with our classroom management. If we demand academic excellence, we should also demand behavioral excellence. We want students to exactly follow procedures, not just adequately. What does this look like? Students may have to repeat procedures until they get it right. At my school, we do this with fire drills. … Read more →
I recently read Walking Papers in which Francesco Clark tells the story of his spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed. He describes the treatments he has sought out, how he has dealt with a variety of attitudes within the medical profession, and how he has started a business creating skin care treatments. The medical professionals provide a great analogy… Read more →
So I’ve been visiting with a colleague over some common challenges, and I’ve been impressed by what a deep thinker he is. Even when he’s talking about students’ behaviors, he’s really talking about the big picture and what that student behavior represents. During one of these conversations I complimented him on a really engaging lesson and he responded with a… Read more →
Today’s classroom goal was to build connections between the volume of a cylinder and its matching cone (same radius and same height) and the analogous prism/pyramid pair. There is a classic demonstration filling a cylinder/cone pair with water or sand. It takes three cones to fill the cylinder. An extensive youtube search shows only two videos of this demonstration: one… Read more →
Getting ready for tomorrow’s campus book study found me reading about classroom procedures in Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion. Often I’ll attend an inservice or read an article and be reminded of techniques I used long ago but abandoned for some reason. A sort of, “Hey, I used to do that and it helped a lot. Why did I… Read more →
My PLC wrote a list of the key skills and concepts we want our students to know. The idea of these power standards is very powerful, but we sure made some mistakes along the way… and we keep finding more mistakes. When we reflected on last year, we realized that we had written power standards, but we didn’t pay much… Read more →
Socrative… Thanks to MathyCathy for this one. You create a quiz. Students access the quiz online via a web browser or an iPhone/iPad app. The quiz gives immediate feedback as they answer each question, then emails the teacher a nice color-coded spreadsheet with each student’s response. Remind101… send text/email announcements to students/parents without ever sharing your phone number or email…. Read more →
It’s time to cover square roots in preparation for the Pythagorean Theorem. I’ve written before about some of the struggles I have teaching the concept of a square root. I believe that if a concept cannot be briefly defined to a student, then that is a signal that the student does not have the necessary foundation and is likely to… Read more →
Our campus teachers have been following the model of Professional Learning Communities: We focus on Learning, Collaboration, and Results. This year, many of us realized our weakest link was our Power Standards, our curriculum. As the year has rolled on, I continue to see how shoring up our Power Standards has paid dividends I never anticipated. Power Standards: The Solution… Read more →
My last post shared students’ writing about their grades. Now, in a lighthearted Christmas break post, here are some student messages in pictures. I sometimes ask students to draw what they look like in math class. The results are sometimes rich and insightful. Obviously, some students enjoy their math class:Students often show that they understand the strengths and weaknesses of… Read more →
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