Hello math teachers, Welcome back and Happy New Year! I wanted to share some golden nuggets from the NCTM math conference I attended in December. All the sessions I attended were worthwhile. They included many new activities and strategies to deepen student thinking. I don't want to dump too much at once, so I thought I would share a little at a time. Here goes... A session by Tracy Zager (@traceyzager) challenged us to slow down our approach and allow time for students to develop math questions themselves. This doesn't mean to completely #ditchthattextbook, but try sharing the context of a word problem with the question removed. Ask students what they notice about the scenario and then what they wonder. There is a good chance that one of the things they wonder about is the question that is already in the textbook, but there is more student ownership since they are now answering their own question instead of yours. A recent example from 5th grade: One lap around the track is 1/4 mile. Amy ran 13 laps. How far did she run? We just removed the question "How far did she run?" However, enough of our class is going to be curious to ask that question themselves. I already wrote much more than I thought I would at the start, but if you are still with me, Annie Fetter from the Math Forum shares this much better than I do. Click on the link below for the short video (only 5 - fantastic - minutes). Comments are closed.
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Matt HawkinsGull Lake Middle School Archives
March 2018
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