Mathsational

This winter break  @druinok  organized a blog challenge.  I think it was meant to be completed during winter break, but I'll likely be finishing long after that.  That said, I do love good prompts, so I'll stick with it.  You can find more info  here  if you'd like to join in the fun. So, what am I looking forward to most in 2018?  Well, I love the start of a new school year.  One of the great things about teaching is that it is filled with new beginnings.  You can try a new grading system, you can try a new warm-up routine, you can try a new tech tool.  Sure, you can do some of these things in the middle of the school year, but many of the routines are best changed at the start of a year.  This year, I'm switching schools in the middle of the year.  Sometimes when I think about it, I get super overwhelmed.  I can hardly wrap my mind around the idea that I'll be teaching a lesson at my current school ...

This winter break  @druinok  is organizing a blog challenge.  I'll likely be finishing long after break, but I do love good prompts, so I'll stick with it.  You can find more info  here  if you'd like to join in the fun. The next prompt that seemed like a good fit for me was: What worked (and what didn't) in 2017? I'm fortunate to be starting a new job in the next few weeks.  I have the opportunity to start fresh with my goals for the year and I intend to take advantage of that unusual benefit.  Some of my goals going into this year was to improve the process of going over homework, to increase active student participation, in encourage a sense of community between students, and to improve my work-life balance. I was able to improve the process of going over homework .   I'll need to modify this as my new school is 1-1, but not with iPads.  I'm not sure if the student laptops have cameras, but I'm considering having ...

In reading this weeks #MTBoSBlogsplosion prompt , I realized that I do a pretty poor job of explicitly teaching soft skills.  I'm looking forward to see what everyone else posts to see what I can add to my daily routines.  My curriculum is so jam packed that I really don't have the free time to take a an entire period to teach a soft skill. The one thing that I think I do well is building the capacity of my students to work collaboratively.  This is because I use the hybrid rotational model of blended learning .   It's also largely due to the fact that I stumbled across the Kagan  geometry book a few years ago.  This book gave me activities to have students learn geometry through collaboration.  I love the focus on vocabulary and notation that are so important in geometry, but also the varied collaborative structures.  Each structure gets students actively involved in the learning process and some even incorporate movement into class. My...

Engagement in Algebra 2 can be tough.  The scope and sequence is brutal, even for me as someone who really enjoys math.  I wrote about the objectives of my algebra 2 class here .  Seriously, if you have a great application project or activity for the following, please let me know: multiplying/dividing polynomials (long division), working with radical and complex numbers, rational functions, polynomial functions, conic sections, inverse functions, sequences and series & truth tables.  Ugh, I'm bored just typing that list of unbearable content. So, what I attempt to do is 1) gamify as much as I can and 2) Kagan the rest. I wrote several posts about the games that I try to incorporate: Dice Breakout Edu Chains Tarsia Board Games My Ship Sails Color by Number Old Maid TIC TAC TOE and Go Fish Rummy For more info on Kagan strategies you can start here .  Kagan strategies are methods of having students work collaboratively.  Each person ha...

I'll be the first to admit the my formative assessment strategies are typically very low tech.  I'd like to incorporate more high tech options into my class, especially at the direct station.  My class is not one-to-one, but I do have a class set of laptops and many (but not all) of my students have their own smartphone or tablet.  This should make more tech integration at the direct station very doable.  However, I need to give students time to log off and put the classroom laptops away, so I'll be sticking to low tech exit tickets. Here is what I have done in the past at each of the stations for formative assessment and what I'd like to do this year. Warm-ups:  About half of the time, I like to do a fun warm-up such as Estimation 180 , Visual Patterns , Graphing Stories , Which One Doesn't Belong, or  Would you Rather .  The rest of the time, I like to use the warm-up for lagging or spiraled practice in conjunction with the exit ticket. ...

I love this time of year.  Planning for the new school year is in full swing and you get a fresh start.  No matter what has happened in the past, you get a brand new group of students and you can do anything, change anything, keep anything.  You can build a better classroom every year. This year, that main thing that I am going to start is student reflection after each station (twice per day) in my hybrid classroom.  The reason that I'd like to do this is to prevent kids from just going through the motions.  Often I feel like my students don't metacognate about their learning.  I want to them to really think about what they have learned and what they have done and accomplished.  I may do this less often as the year progresses, maybe once per day or once per rotation after I know that students have started to become more reflective. The thing that I am going to stop doing is more like something that I am going to modify.  I love sta...

This lesson may not make sense to some of you, especially if you do not know me or what a hybrid classroom looks like.  You can read more about my hybrid classroom on the Hybrid Learning and MTSD Training – Hybrid Learning tabs of my blog. The short version of this information is that my students learn by traveling through 4 stations over a period of 2 days.  The first day consists of a 5 minute warm-up, two 20 minute stations and a 5 minute closure activity (usually an exit ticket).  The second day consists of a 5 minute warm-up, one 20 minute station, one 20 minute whole group activity and a 5 minute closure activity.  Sometimes the whole group activity is a lecture, sometimes it is a quiz, and other times it is a group work assignment or project.  The warm-ups and exit tickets might be review of a specific skill or a fun MTBoS warm-up.  Check out the MTBoS Resources tab above for more information. The first of the 3 stations is the indepen...