So I have one class this year that is rather frustrating and pretty tough to handle when it comes to buy-in with what I’m doing in the mathematics classroom. Perhaps it’s because it’s first period, or perhaps it’s the mix of kids (quiet, shy, cynical?) – but I’m having a hard time inspiring them to […]
I just read a great story posted on a blog about Malcolm Gladwell’s comments about Alan Schoenfeld’s research on persistence in problem solving in Gladwell’s book Outliers. In this story, a young woman persists for 22 minutes on a problem that had an average persistence time for most students of about two minutes. Of course we […]
OK, so I’m not really doing the full blog challenge – This weekend was nutso and blogging everyday is really tough – enough with the excuses. But this question, “Who was or is your most inspirational colleague and why?” just really struck me at my core. There have been so many, probably for all of […]
So the question for today is “Discuss one observation “area” that you would like to improve upon for your teacher evaluation.” This is a tough one for me because as a teacher at an independent school formal evaluations are done in the second and sixth years so I don’t have formal evaluation “areas” per se. […]
For the past two years, I have been lucky enough (or unlucky if you are less inclined to use technology) to have classroom sets of iPads for my geometry classes and have been able to experiment pretty easily with some different ways of teaching – collecting homework electronically (that was a fail), using Geogebra and […]
OK, so I’ve decided to try to blog more this coming year (like I don’t have anything else to do working at a boarding school) and I happened to run across the TeachThought Blogging Challenge the other day, so I thought I would try to see how many of the 30 days, I might be […]
(Sorry, this is a long one! and caveat: I am not claiming that Wikipedia is the be all and end of definitions!) So according to Wikipedia, PBL means two things (well, three if you count Premier Basketball League, but that’s neither here nor there). If you look up PBL on Wikipedia, the first hit is, […]
Returning from a week-long conference is always invigorating for me – not for the reasons that many people think. I do appreciate the great feedback I get from my “teacher-students” that I interact with during the week who are so extremely eager to learn about PBL – this truly invigorates me and allows me to […]
I’m in the middle of working on organizing my courses for the Exeter conference in about a week and something I’m really struggling with is trying to articulate to teachers how they can impart to their students this idea of grit in the PBL classroom. So I started doing a little research online (besides looking […]