A Math Crisis: In the offing long before it made headlines… A lot of what we do on our team boils down to wiring ourselves for learning: confronted with a teaching and learning problem, we try to assemble the right people and design the right processes to find solutions. One way we do this is…
Fascinating post from William Schmidt, Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University and co-director of the Education Policy Center. Schmidt compares the differences between the PISA and TIMMS assessments. In a nutshell, he notes the Major distinction in what the two tests purport to measure: the TIMSS is focused on formal mathematical knowledge, whereas the PISA emphasizes…
As soon as we cut this clip of math teacher Katie Bellucci this week, I knew readers would want to see it. It’s a pretty amazing demonstration of several of the techniques in the (NEW!) Check for Understanding chapters in TLAC 2.0… it’s also a clip I’m likely to add to the 2.0 version of the book……
When we teach math we try to develop number sense- a broader intuition for how numbers work, an affinity for the logic of how they fit together. When we set out to teach ‘number sense’ one tool we often use is a simple version of “sensitivity analysis.” We ask students to evaluate the effect of changes…
When you finally get your hands on TLaC 2.0, technique #36 (or thereabouts) will be something you didn’t see in the first edition of the book: Show Call. The idea was developed by teachers at Uncommon who adapted Cold Call with a view to building incentive for students to do top quality work when writing or…