Post #1 in what’ll be a small series on my August summer professional development reading. I picked up a copy of Ilana Horn‘s book Motivated: Designing Math Classrooms Where Students Want to Join In last summer, and made zero progress reading it until now. As I read the introduction properly this week, I joked to…

The Signal from Tölva is a wonderfully atmospheric exercise in tactical archaelogical drone combat, with a hint of existential horror. Or whatever “existential horror” means when you sort of don’t exist. Anyway. It’s good. Read on for details. (Mild spoilers by some standards)

So Joey Kelly asked what a lesson plan would look like in a Thinking Classroom. Rather than tweet-thread this, I’m bloggin’ it here.   The all-in approach usually plays out something like this (in my experience): 1. Form groups (via cards or whatever). 1-5 min 2. Call students around, tell them the story of today’s…

Final journal entry for my current math course. Lots to think about looking back. Comment on our discussion of point gathering vs data gathering. Short version: every teacher (in Peter’s words) is either doing one of these two things, or trying to mush them together. Point gathering is what it sounds like: a gradebook where everything gets points…

So during this class, we discussed homework. The research on who actually does it (not the kids who need it), the effect it has on inequality in education (makes it way worse), and generally why it should be knocked off its high pedestal. Now, honestly, a lot of us teachers kind-of-sort-of know this but then…

Comment on our discussion on numeracy in general and our discussion on the relationship between numeracy and mathematics in particular. (and etc on numeracy tasks) Okay, so Prof. Liljedahl has a very particular idea of what numeracy is and what it isn’t. I’m convinced, but the challenge will be whether the rest of the world chooses to…

One of the bigger misconceptions about the Thinking Classroom approach (that I’ve already seen come up in discussion at my school) is that students are never shown a glimpse of how the teacher thinks about the subject. Peter refers to this as “leveling to the bottom” (I think he means leveling from the bottom), or…

It’s Spring Break, I’ve made it this far. Now for the unfortunately-large task of figuring out which journal responses I’ve yet to catch up on … you know this whole blogging idea seemed great a few weeks ago … Going to make a big post of things I missed blogging about earlier, write until it…

Journal-writing time for my class, and by that I mean, “hmm I’m three weeks behind now … wait, 1, 1, 2, 3 … dang it I’m turning into a Fibonacci sequence, this is bad!” First, an update on how my math classes are going. I’ve been sticking with (what I know of) Thinking Classroom strategies…

Hi intrepid readers, so here’s me homeworking again. First, the classroom action: My first week of semester 2 classes has been pretty great. Both math classes have had a full 5 days of beginner-Thinking-Classroom stuff: verbally delivered problems that have interesting patterns / solutions, room for extensions, and working in visibly random groups on whiteboards…