Beating the Math Game: Helping Students Embrace the Struggle

Doc Running at Everything Ed has organized another great blog hop, this time on strategies to help students who struggle in math:

Gaming is such an integral part of today’s culture that it can be hard to remember that in the early 80’s, video games were still a novelty one step away from pinball machines. Today, the graphics and audio as well as the complexity of the narrative have advanced to cinematic proportions, and today’s online multi-player games allow extensive social interaction and coordination. But my 20^th century adventures with the pixelated worlds of Atari and Nintendo 64 were nearly as compelling. How is that possible?

Making Mastodons Real

For many years, in addition to teaching I ran an outdoor education program at a school in urban southern California. Most of my students lived far-removed from the natural world and outdoor education was literally a breath of fresh air for them. Usually we took students to Joshua Tree National Park, a land of giant granite boulders sculpted by the wind and glowing gold in the setting sun. One evening we drove into the park with a new group of middle schoolers, their faces pressed to the window in awe of the hulking stones looming like mastodons. One kid, who had studied the basics of geology in his science class, nevertheless innocently exclaimed, “Woah, who put these here?”, thinking that the fabricators of Disneyland had been hard at work in Joshua Tree. This climbing trip made those stones real for the students, bridging the gap between the abstraction of nature and the reality of rocks.

Climbing in Joshua Tree

Tricks for Counting Treats

There are lots of treats (including freebies) in this post! Read on...

The leaves are changing color in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. The surf is picking up at Pacific Beach in San Diego. The elk are tangling in the forests near Jackson Hole but soon the first snow will urge them to warmer plains. Great flocks of warblers are touching down and stirring the glassy waters of the salt marshes of Louisiana. A welcome reef of cloud dulls the Mediterranean sun in Alicante. Autumn.

7 Ways to Drop the Mic in Math Class

I like to think I’m an entertaining story-teller. Even the driest of mathematical procedures (quadratic formula derivation, anyone?) can come to life when I’m in performance mode. But over the years I’ve lectured less and less, giving students more autonomy to follow their own paths of inquiry. Students work in small groups on real world scenarios, experimenting, drawing conclusions and solving complex problems while I facilitate, motivate and occasionally lecture. Here a few tips on how to drop the mic and let students pick it up in math class.

1) Ask Curious Questions

How much taller is a human compared to a carpenter ant? How much faster can a sailboat go if you double its length? How many trees per person are there in the world?  If you flip two coins, are you more likely to get two heads or one head and one tail? If you double the radius of a pizza, how much more food do you get? What function is the best model for a car accelerating from a stop light, and why? Can you figure out the percentage of green m and m’s in the world from one bag?

Ten Tricks for Effective Group Work

When I first considered putting students in small groups to work on missions the biggest fear was that students would run amuck, losing focus and wasting time when they weren’t being told what to do. Even more, I was worried that some elements of the activities not might not work, and imagined the exhausting challenge of dealing with the pandemonium of various groups variously confused. It would be so much easier to simply keep a tight reign on a quiet class as I gave them a solid and entertaining lecture. And yet it seemed that group work provided an opportunity for students to engage in the risk-taking, creativity, conversation, failure and recovery which gives students greater ownership over learning. Was I willing to take the personal risk to give up some control and allow students to become the principle agents of their own success?

Better Together: 11 Tips for Great Group Work in Middle and High School - Teachers Pay Teachers

Courage To Core materials are designed for students to work in small groups to explore math deeply. It can be a challenge to organize and manage groups successfully. Jodi Rigotti at Teachers Pay Teachers recently assembled a fine list of teacher tips on how to help students get the most out of their group work. My personal favorite is that we set clear expectations knowing that students will need to practice in order to work effectively in groups. What's your favorite, or do you have any tips to add? On an upcoming post I'll discuss in detail the structures and techniques I use to get the most out of group work.

Better Together: 11 Tips for Great Group Work in Middle and High School - Teachers Pay Teachers

A Snapshot of Interactive, Hands-On Math

What they're working on.

Flexible Learning Spaces

In the collaborative space of my math class, students usually work in groups of 3 or 4 which I've assigned. And yet, sometimes it may better to allow students to work in pairs, or to shuffle the groups, or allow a particular student to work on their own. This sort of flexibility has to exist within a classroom where structures have already been established, but it's great to have that flexibility. I was moved to reflect on this after reading a great piece, with photos, about flexible learning spaces in libraries. Check it out! It's About Information: Flexible Learning Spaces. How do you make your classroom a flexible learning space, what are the challenges of doing so, and how do you deal with them?

An Introduction To Courage To Core

Introduction
My first year of math teaching was in 1995 at an innovative private high school in San Francisco named Lick-Wilmerding. Students worked in small groups to explore algebra and geometry, reporting their findings in documents written as if they were lab reports. Students would receive direct instruction when necessary, but frequently, questions were explored and answered by members of the groups themselves. I adapted hesitantly to this new structure, as I myself had been taught by teachers and professors using lecture combined with extensive homework practice. Over my subsequent years of teaching in the states I explored a range of methods tailored to the various cultures of the schools at which I taught. This included straight lecture and homework, a mixture of lecture and independent class work, and collaborative group work supported by a textbook. Over the last 8 years of teaching at La Jolla Country Day in San Diego and two international schools in Spain, the American School of Valencia and the American School of Madrid, I’ve developed Courage To Core which allows my ninth and tenth grade math students to explore mathematical concepts as if exploring scientific concepts in laboratories.