Category: Problem based learning

Patient Problem-Solving

I recently saw a wonderful TED talk online by a teacher named Dan Meyer. Here is the link to the video http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html
I highly recommend watching it because Dan talks about something he calls “patient problem solving” which unfortunately, he claims that today’s textbooks and curricula do not teach towards. After you watch this, I’d love to hear from people to start a discussion of what they think of his thoughts. In many ways what he’s talking about in rewriting the problems from textbooks (or writing your own) is basically what my colleagues and I have done, but not as technologically savvy as he has become. The goals, however, are the same. To not be as “cookie-cutter” with how we teach problem solving in mathematics. I’d actually love to see him in action sometime.

As the year winds down, I am getting geared up for the PEA conference and looking at my class evaluations from my geometry course. Summarizing student thoughts are always the way that I look at ways to improve this course for the fall. I would be happy to share all of that with you this summer. Talk to you soon! Enjoy the video.

Reality Check

On Friday, I spent the day at Harvard Graduate School of Education, at a conference where many graduate students were presenting on recent research that they have been doing – either for their dissertaion work or for courses they are taking, etc. I observed many students from other schools presenting their work which ranged from highly interesting to highly esoteric. I was excited to hear positive feedback from my research on dialogue in the PBL classroom. Many people felt that it was important work and well done. Very nice to feel validated in that way. I also heard great reseach being done on discipline in urban schools, learning differences in math education and other areas.

I’ve also had this website go public, so hopefully if you are reading this you have either received my invitation email, or have heard from a friend about my website. My hope is to really create an online community where those educators who have been in touch with me with interest in these areas can have a space for the types of discussions that we are all interested in. I think this might be a good start and hopefully it will take off soon.

Winter into spring

Hello reader – hopefully you have found this site easily. I am writing here at the beginning of March, as I sit down to fulfill about 6 goals written down on purple post-its stuck to my computer. I have many issues that I would like to address here in my first blog entry, but not knowing the issues that are on the readers minds is of concern to me. I would love to hear from people that I haven’t heard from in a long time – those from my summer courses, or those I have seen in workshops, etc. If you have thoughts, please let me know.

I will be creating forums based on topics that people inquire about or have interest in. My goal is to have this site become a resource for teachers who are interested in PBL or transitioning their school to PBL curriculum.

So for now, I am looking forward to seeing how my school will do this spring with the advent of our new Algebra II/Trig PBL curriculum. This will be the first semester that we utilize the trigonometry portion that we wrote last summer and it will be interesting to see how it goes. The students with which we will be using this curriculum did go through our geometry curriculum, so they do know what they are getting into. I wonder how they will react.

Hopefully, with spring will come new life, goals fulfilled (including my paper getting out to a journal), and new challenges faced as well. If you have a new challenge that you are facing in the utilization of PBL curriculum or movement towards it, please let me know!