A long time ago I was given a shirt. It said, “You can’t scare me. I teach middle school.” The premise, clearly was middle school students are a difficult audience to work with. While this premise may be true, my last ten years as a mathematics instructional coach (technically I’m the Senior Math Coordinator…but I […]
We have all heard the claim that any big change a school district might want to make will require 3 to 5 years of concentrated effort. You want better scores? 3 to 5 years. You want to fundamentally change what instruction looks like in your classrooms? 3 to 5 years. You want to close achievement […]
About 18 months ago in March, 2024, two black teenage girls from a New Orleans high school announced they found a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. What makes their proof especially impressive is that out of more than 400 unique proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem, theirs is the FIRST proof that relies entirely on […]
The other day I was in a class doing a demonstration on what a lesson looks like in the style of Building Thinking Classrooms. The concept we wanted students to learn was sorting decimals. Here was the task… At first, we asked students to simply sort the decimals from least to greatest in order to […]
Years ago I was invited by my district office to leave my classroom of 26 years to become an instructional coach serving 300 K-5 teachers as they transitioned to Common Core. Up to that point I was happily and successfully teaching math to middle school students. I also coached the golf team and was one […]
The report, Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics, begins with a strong statement, “All young Americans must learn to think mathematically, and they must think mathematically to learn.” Adding It Up breaks down what it means to think mathematically into several strands of proficiency. These abilities are described as five interwoven and interdependent strands. The […]
While perusing the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) website to learn about – go figure – what works for improving math instruction, I stumbled upon the gem of a document called Assisting Students Struggling with Mathematics: Intervention in the Elementary Grades. You can download the document here. The name of the document is unfortunate because the title suggests it is […]
The other day I received a text from a school district I serve. It read, “On a scale of 1-10, how important is math fact fluency?” My answer: 11 In a follow-up text, they asked for my thoughts on fluency instruction, fluency practice, and whether there are any online apps to support the development of […]
I recently had two exhilarating conversations with teachers I work with: one with high school teachers and the other with second grade teachers. First the high school conversation: I posted this problem on the board and asked the teachers to solve it on their own before sharing their thinking with the others. A few moments […]
There is substantial evidence that throughout the school years children benefit when parents are involved in their learning. What more could a school want than parents who are actively involved in supporting their children at home with their math homework? Well…it turns out the answer to that question is a bit more tricky that you […]