Take Stock of Your Classroom Culture by Serena Pariser Every teacher and student want and deserve a positive classroom culture where learning can thrive. Now is a great time to check in with how your classroom culture is going. A good rule of thumb to remember is
I was the type of student teachers want – hard working, teacher-pleasing, bright. Until one day I just quit doing my math homework. My teacher asked me why and I said, “Please just give me a different way to do it! Anything but another worksheet.”
You want to teach mathematics to students in the middle grades—but are you ready? Early adolescents have very unique characteristics that you need to be aware of and can capitalize on to facilitate productive lessons. Your students will be innately curious, enjoy active learning experiences, and prefer social learning over passive learning activities (Kellough & Kellough, 2008). They will experience
The story behind the 1,400 meta-analyses, the over 80,000 studies included in those analyses, and the 300 million students represented in the Visible Learning research is this: learning best occurs when teachers see the learning through the eyes of their students and students see themselves
In today’s classrooms, teachers are called upon to gather and use evidence of student thinking in a timely, formative way to implement and differentiate instruction that improves learning for all students. An important part of that process is “to identify and address potential learning gaps
Last week, I had the opportunity to work with a group of STEM educators. One question I posed to this group was, “What do you feel a teacher’s role should be during collaborative student work?” Participants were to share their ideas by inputting up to
Has this ever happened to you? “My lecture went perfectly! I worked the sample problems. I could tell the students really understood the material.” The next day: “I don’t know what went wrong! I thought all my students understood what I went over yesterday.” If we’ve been there,
“Engaging students” might be in the top five of most common phrases in mathematics teaching discussions, journals, and professional learning. Strategies to engage students have included cooperative learning, questioning strategies, and classroom discussions. What do these ideas have in common? Each is a way to
It’s fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way—even if you don’t solve it at the end of the day. —Andrew Wiles It seems intuitive that students who are genuinely engaged in a mathematical task will learn the mathematics
It always feels good when we ask a question and we get a correct answer in response. It feels good when our students do well. But sometimes their “success” fools us. We might think of correct answers as an example of learning. But along the