Ramblings and Musings

Why Lesson Study?

Imagine a football team operating like a faculty at a school site.

Players (teachers) gather at the beginning of the season (school year) for some team-building and some pep talk (fall PD) about goals and visions for improvement from their coach (principal).

The players then study a playbook (curriculum) and some plays (instructional strategies) and maybe they practice them. Maybe they don’t. Once the season starts, they hardly ever observe each other run drills (routines). They definitely don’t scrimmage together. The coach may walk around once or twice, check some boxes on a list, and give that feedback to a player, but rarely does the coach model techniques or facilitate collaboration and discussion between players.

The players practice all year for one single game (student testing) that they don’t even believe is worth playing but everyone makes them prepare for it anyway because how else could we measure our effectiveness except through standardized test data. The players won’t find out until 4 months later how they did and how they compared to other teams (schools) in the league (district). Except by then, the offseason has happened, players have shifted teams, new playbooks have been adopted, perhaps new coaching has been hired, and it’s time to start the whole process again.

The season concludes without any player ever watching another player play.

How stupid is that?

Read more

Seesaw 2: A 3-Act Lesson for 6th Grade Expressions and Equations

How do we invite 6th (and 7th) grade students to authentically engage with an equation in a way that invites students (1) to appreciate how the structure of an equation models a context and (2) to dive deeper in to the meaning of the relationships between variables?

Instead of teaching students how to use the properties of equality to solve “one-step” equations first (which is like using a bazooka to kill a cockroach by the way), I’m wondering if there’s a way to start the exploration of equation solving by inviting students to experience the dynamic relationship between variables first.

Here’s my thinking on one way to do that. I’d love to hear your thoughts so we can get better together.

Read more

The Objectives of Objectives, Part Three: Joy

One of the reasons why we teach is because we want our students to experience the JOY of mathematics. Mathematics should be about questioning, wondering, and the joy of discovery…and math classes should leave students wanting to know more math and do more math thinking. We cannot build an appreciation of math through content standards alone. Math classes should be filled with opportunities for students to have voice and a choice. At the very least, they need a voice in making meaning of problems and a choice in how they go about seeking a pathway to a solution.

But sometimes we (or our textbooks) squash all the joy out of a math lesson. We rob them of their right to notice math things, wonder about math ideas, or do messy math stuff. And lessons that focus on “measurable outcomes” with “explicitly defined objectives” often euthanize mathematical curiosity.

Read more

The Objective of Objectives, Part Two: Headache First

Welcome back Math Geeks! I’ve been thinking a lot about the objectives of lesson objectives, and I’m committing to writing a series posts to spark a conversation. I’m curious about how you frame lesson objectives to maximize student thinking, and I invite you to tell me. If you missed my first post about ways to make the learning objective an invitation and not a mandate, I encourage you to check it out here.

Dan Meyer has written extensively about the importance of creating intellectual need in the mathematics classroom. If we are going to ask students to use mathematics to solve problems, we need to let students internalize problems through inquiry and exploration BEFORE we teach them the mathematics. As Dan suggests, if math is the aspirin, then how do we create the headache?

Read more

The Objective of Objectives, Part One: Invite

Why we teach must align with how we teach. In other words, our professional identity (the reasons why we became teachers in the first place) must be congruent with our choices and our practices in the classroom. When purpose and practice are not aligned, both teachers and students waste energy fighting needless friction in the classroom and learning suffers.

One habit where I continue to see a misalignment between purpose and practice centers on how we post, frame, communicate lesson objectives to our students. All teachers want students to be inspired, motivated, engaged, and curious, yet I’ve witnessed a lot of teachers euthanize student intellect by spending the first 5 minutes of a lesson reading aloud and unpacking a lesson objective that is written on the board.

Read more

A Bright Idea for 2nd Grade Addition Strategies

It’s my hope that there are other elementary teachers out there that might find this analysis useful if they want to use this compelling and fun lesson by Graham Fletcher in their classrooms to engage their students in exploring addition strategies with regrouping (2.NBT.5, 2.NBT.6, 2.NBT.9). This engaging lesson is very open in the middle. Students have a wide variety of addition strategies they can use including concrete models (base-10 blocks, place value discs, etc) and abstract strategies (arrow method, decomposing, bar method, etc).

Read more

#mathconfession

I was moved by Jamie Garner’s (@mavenofmath) recent post about her #mathconfession.  I encourage you to read it here. Here are a few rambling thoughts and musings she’s sparked in my brain. I think most of use walk through this world with an unconscious fear that we will be exposed as a fraud…that we are not …

Continue Reading

To Design for the Average is to Design for Nobody

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “differentiated instruction” because it’s always felt redundant to me.  How is “differentiated instruction” different from “effective instruction”?  Are there ever really times when we want instruction to be “undifferentiated”?  What are the implications for lesson design? I bring this point up because, in my humble opinion, thinking about …

Continue Reading