I love lesson study. I recently finished another cycle and I was thinking back to when I first learned about it. I remember talking with Sadie about my frustration of doing workshops and having some teachers say, “That sounds great and all, but I can’t do that with my kids.” Sadie pushed me to use lesson …
For those of you who think I spend the summer sipping pina coladas on the beach, you’re right—I do. Don’t be jealous. However, I also spend some of the summer going to and running professional development. I had the chance to work with some amazing teachers this week on the fair share task I talked about last …
I sat in one of the worst PDs ever this week. It didn’t build on what those of us in the room knew. It didn’t engage us in conversations or activities that were relevant. It shared products and not processes. At times, it treated us like we were no different that the children we teach. …
Why can’t we just teach them the rule? At what point do we stop this “exploration” and just give them the rule? When I was in school, the teacher just taught us the rule–we didn’t need to understand it. I’ve talked before about why teaching math as a bunch of rules to memorize is a …
September is off to a great start. Here are some highlights from my week: 1. This activity: I love that this task is accessible and challenging to different level learners. Students who didn’t know their multiplication facts used drawing and square tiles to help them figure out the dimensions. Higher level students were able to …
This was the first full week of school in New York City! As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with teachers about routines. Veteran teachers know the importance of setting routines and new teachers quickly learn that without routines, the best planned lessons quickly fall apart. While routines for classroom management are …
I’m back. It’s been a while. I took a break this summer–from blogging, from twitter, from workshops. I did a little writing, some for my dissertation and some for academic papers. I went to Vancouver and gave a talk at a conference. I visited Puerto Rico and drank pina coladas by the pool. I spent …
When I do workshops with parents, I often get complaints about why students don’t just memorize things. It’s often followed by, “I learned math that way and I’m fine!” I then ask them to solve a multiplication of fractions problems, say 4/5 x 2/3. Inevitably, one person will tell me to draw “butterfly wings” and …
What amazes me about working in schools is that when I walk into one I am immediately transported back to being a student. The clothes may be different and the hairstyles may have changed, but in the over twenty-five years that has passed since I was a student in an elementary school the model for …
When Angela Duckworth was a NYC math teacher she noticed something that I think will sound familiar to most teachers: it wasn’t always her most talented students that performed best in her class. She had a hunch that there was some quality that made those students successful and that doing well in school and life …