“Kids will never understand fully if you just tell them the answer. They have to break it down and understand it, take it piece by piece ‘cause if you get it straight on you’ll never know what happened. Like if you’re building something you’ll never understand how it’s built, you can never build it again […]
One of my major goals in attending the NCTM annual conference this year was to see how widespread PBL had become in terms of mainstream education practices across the US. I have to say that this year there were quite a few sessions that had PBL in the title or as the central theme and […]
Wow! What an amazing three days I spent at the NCTM annual conference in New Orleans! I can’t believe how much I learned (which actually never amazes me and always humbles me – one of the many reasons I love going to these conferences.) I also hate leaving and knowing that I missed at least […]
One of the things I do at the middle of the term to have students reflect on the way that they talk about mathematics in class, is have them evaluate their work with my Student Self-Report on Class Contribution and I give them detailed feedback on their rankings of each type of question and what I think […]
James Henry Trotter: “When I had a problem, my mum and dad would tell me to look at it another way.” (Roald Dahl) I’ve always thought that PBL fostered creative problem solving as opposed to memorization of pneumonic devices. One of my students today proved me right when I gave a “quick quiz” on the […]
I’d like to think of myself as a master teacher. I’ve always thought of myself as very aware of student perspectives in my classroom, but today after a weekend of being in bed with a bad cold, all I wanted to do was get through the problems and get back home – I admit it. […]
In early January, I had the good fortune to go down to the NCSSM Teaching Contemporary Mathematics Conference in Durham, NC. There were many wonderful speakers there including Dan Teague, Maria Hernandez, Gloria Barrett and the Key Note Speaker on Saturday morning, Gail Burrill. Gail spoke about making up tasks and lessons that actually allowed […]