Before I get to that, I'd like to just reflect on some of the things that have occurred in my teaching career that have ultimately led to me finding this amazing community of math teachers in the "Mathtwitterblogosphere". I have been teaching for 13 years at the high school level (grades 7-12). I have taught all courses except Algebra II and Calculus. I absolutely LOVE my job most days and wouldn't trade it for any other. But, I started off (as most teachers do) by teaching the way I was taught in a mostly lecture, notes, examples, homework format. I started becoming increasingly dissatisfied with my teaching style and started to question the status quo. I started looking for ways to incorporate cooperative learning, hands-on, and discovery activities in my classroom. I wanted to find ways that I could structure my classroom so that my students were doing more "work" than I was. I wasn't trying to find a way to be lazy about teaching, but I already know how to do this stuff and I wanted my students to have as much experience with math as possible. I wanted to find ways to become a facilitator instead of a deliverer. So, as I hunted for resources to fit this teaching style eventually stumbled upon twitter and I can't believe how amazing it is. It seems like I've finally found some other math teachers who are like minded and willing to share ideas and resources.
Before I go any further, let me just say that I really don't think that I'm all that great of a teacher. I know that there are so many things that I need to improve on. I guess that's why I'm out there pretty much begging, borrowing, and stealing resources a lot more that I'm sharing my own.
Well anyway, onto some of the things that have become routines and habits in my classroom:
- I always have my students working in some sort of groups. At the very least in pairs, but often in groups of 4 or 5. I encourage my students to talk to each other all the time. I don't want to be the only person that they can ask questions of. I LOVE when my students start to discuss things with each other and debate about math problems without any prompting from me.
- I try to incorporate discovery into as many lessons as I possibly can. I really want students to see things for themselves instead of just believing what the teacher tells them. I want them to understand WHY things are true and behave the way they do. I want them to see connections between mathematical ideas, like how the pythagorean theorem is related to the distance formula and the equation of a circle. I LOVE incorporating technology like Geometer's Sketchpad and Desmos to facilitate student discovery.
- I do bellringers (warm-ups) with my students almost every day. I've done this for quite a few years usually just pulling problems right from the textbook. Every year, though, I have found myself having to remind students to work on their bellringers at the beginning of almost every class. This year, I changed the format of my bellringers to daily themes. Using resources such as Daily Desmos, Estimation 180, Would You Rather, Visual Patterns, and Graphing Stories, to give my students yearlong practice with skills that are central to my courses. I can't believe how much this has changed how my students approach bellringers and the rich discussions that unfold while they are trying to figure out a pattern or how to graph a situation. Here are my bellringer sheets for Honors Geometry and Precalculus.
- I like to encourage "good mathematical practice" in my classroom (hence the title of my blog) and get students to think about what that means. This means addressing things like giving an exact answer unless asked for an estimate (students like to give rounded decimal answers for EVERYTHING!!), expressing answers in the same form as the problem (decimals vs fractions), precisely graphing points and lines on a coordinate plane, drawing and labeling diagrams carefully, etc. I actually considered making a "ten commandments of good mathematical practice," but haven't gotten around to it, yet.
- I really, really LOVE it when students come up with different ways of thinking through a problem or find shortcuts (I LOVE SHORTCUTS!!) to solve a problem. I encourage students to do math in their head and show as much work as they need to in order to solve problems. I will often ask a student to explain their reasoning to me if they can do a math problem in their head and then encourage them to try something a little bit harder.
Thanks for visiting =)
