As teachers we want to use rich tasks to support our students in acquiring conceptual understanding that leads to stronger procedural fluency. Sometimes when we are caught up in our routines, we may not pause to consider if a task is significant enough to impact
“How do I know that students have learned more than just an algorithm?” “What are some tasks I can give students that push them to think critically?” “What tasks can I use to create more opportunities for student discourse?” These are questions we as math teachers sometimes ask
This blog is the sixth and final part of a series on learning transfer. For more on teaching for transfer, see the first post, second post, third post, fourth post, and fifth post. What if we plan backwards from students’ ability to transfer their learning to
“A good beginning makes a good ending” goes the old English proverb. And likewise: “Work well begun is work half done.” The most effective teachers don’t take student engagement for granted. Yet in our work in classrooms, we see that not enough attention is paid to good beginnings; this lack
We find the same issues cropping up in conversations with thousands of teachers across the U.S. You face a high-stakes conundrum when it comes to planning instruction: either create curriculum from scratch, cobbling together their own resources with ones from online repositories that have little to no quality control OR follow a mandated, scripted
I lean toward Luddite. I use “the Facebook” and “the Netflix” and I have an e-reader so I can read on vacation without having to pack a trillion books. But, I have just a handful of apps on my very outdated phone because that’s all
Disclaimer 1: This post is the third in a series on planning. The first part of the series covered Long Range Plans. The second part of the series covered Unit Planning. You wouldn’t read Prisoner of Azkaban without reading Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets,
This post is the second in a series on my lesson planning process. I teach 5th grade Language Arts and Social Studies in Baltimore County, Maryland. The first part of this series was on long-range planning in a post called, “The Process of Planning: 3
My friend, who is also a teacher (because let’s face it… most of my friends are also teachers and I bet you can relate), asked me if I wanted to do some long-range planning together some time before September. She is a 4th grade Language