Most people think of us as literacy educators instead of mathematics educators. Our professional lives have been shaped by the role that language plays in learning. We believe that human beings learn through language—listening, speaking, reading, writing, and viewing. And this applies to all content
At the beginning of the 2015-16 school year, preschool students in the Corinth-Alcorn-Prentiss Learning Collaborative were tested using the Star Early Literacy assessment as part of a state-wide assessment process. Only 20.1% of these children scored at or above a standard score of 498, the
Working in education takes a specific kind of courage. Educators constantly face the question: Am I competent at what I do? Am I relevant? In 2009 I published Owning Up, a curriculum that was a combination of social emotional learning, bullying prevention, and media literacy. But
Helping students develop the language of mathematics begins by helping them develop their conceptual understanding using the four language acquisition skills: Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening. [caption id="attachment_7164" align="alignleft" width="300"] Figure 1[/caption] As can be seen from the diagram in Figure 1, reading and listening are inputs
In my second blog I talked about how traveling to dozens of schools and talking with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students had, over time, aggregated into an abstraction in my head. Especially regarding collegiality and time, my new role in one concrete school,
Close to ten years ago, while serving as President of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) I wrote a President’s Message that was entitled “Go Ahead, Teach to the Test!” I had very deliberately chosen the title of my message to “grab” readers,
Part 3 of a 3 part blog posts series on overcoming teacher burnout. Read Part 1 and Part 2. Burned out and bummed out? It’s okay. Even the most passionate and motivated educators can fall victim to burnout. We’ve all experienced the exhausting feeling of the “daily grind,”
How do we give our students a present without telling them what it is before they open it? Often when we tell our students what they are going to learn at the beginning of the lesson, I feel that we are telling them what the present
Contrary to all advice educators receive about timely and high quality feedback, I have an alternate hypothesis. Most mistakes children make are the result not of a misconception they have about mathematics but instead the student has a totally coherent conception that is the result
Welcome to school! As teachers, each year and each class brings new joys and challenges as we get to know our students as people and as learners. We are faced with the often-daunting task of designing learning experiences to entice and excite our students to