Math Ed Said
March 18: Next to last week's TWiME post, the most shared link last Friday was to the schedule apps for the upcoming NCTM Annual Meeting.Shared by: Suzanne Alejandre, Norma Gordon, Michael Fenton, Peg Cagle
March 19: I'll share just one of the five post-popular links from last Saturday: James Propp's "Believe It, Then Don't: Toward a Pedagogy of Discomfort." It's about getting students to look past the temptation of obvious truths/proofs, and includes this great line: "The discomfort of being mistaken has led the students to divest themselves of the approach that led them into error, and they are now standing in their intellectual underwear."
Shared by: Steven Strogatz, Patrick Honner, George Woodbury
March 20: Brian Marks and Leslie Lewis shared their slides from "Teaching with Rich, Real World Tasks," a presentation they gave at the Association of Teachers of Mathematics in Massachusetts Spring Conference.
Shared by: Brian Marks, Laura Wagenman, Pat Power, Darren Burris
March 21: Dan Meyer is concerned that some of us are getting ripped off at gas pumps. Actually, I doubt he's too worried about that, so let me try again: Dan Meyer is concerned that students get the opportunity to develop the mathematical skill to argue they're getting ripped off at gas pumps. Yeah, that feels about right.
Shared by: Nancy Terry, Erik, Dan Meyer, Eddi Vulić, Kyle Pearce
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| Jo Boaler speaking at the 2015 NCTM Annual Meeting. |
Shared by: Jo Boaler, Kate Owens, Laura Wagenman, Nita Cochran, George Woodbury, Richelle Marynowski, Jill Buecking, Greg George, Federico Chialvo, Bridget Dunbar, Matthew Oldridge, Imtiaz Damji, Regina Barrett, Mark Chubb, Andrew Gael, Bryson Perry, Miss Kodroff
March 23: This one is personal for me, because I now know that Ben Orlin and I share a certain pain when students shun fractions for decimals. In another Math with Bad Drawings post, Ben illustrates "Decimal-Crazed Lunatics," wondering why students would write \(0.\bar{3}\) instead of \(\frac{1}{3}\). I tried to get my students to understand why doing more work to get a less precise answer was silly. I'm still thankful for my former student Alex W. for giving me the term "decimalized," as in "I decimalized the fraction \(\frac{3}{7}\) to 0.43," mostly because it gave me another way to tell students to "Stop unnecessary decimalization!"
Shared by: Ben Orlin, Jo Morgan, Simon Gregg, David Petersen, Bridget Dunbar, Mattie B, Taylor Belcher, Ken Smith, Jim Wysocki, Federico Chialvo, Carrie Muir, T R
March 24: "Fractions on a Numberline" is a Desmos activity designed by Nathan Kraft. As someone well-versed in Realistic Mathematics Education, I think this is a fine, short timescale example of progressive formalization and the use of increasingly generalized mathematical models to support growth in student understanding and reasoning.
Shared by: Shauna Hedgepeth, Andrew Gael, Simon Gregg, Geoff Krall, Jo Morgan, Nyima Drayang, Jessica Jeffers
Around the Math Ed Web
TODOS: Mathematics for All and NCSM NCSM quietly released a new position paper, "Mathematics Education Through the Lens of Social Justice: Acknowledgment, Actions, and Accountability." Website announcements of this paper are lagging a bit, but the paper itself is worth a read and well-placed alongside high-quality, yet somewhat business-as-usual (particularly at a systemic level) documents like standards or Principles to Actions.AMTE has posted their call for proposals for next February's conference. The online submission site opens April 1 and closes May 15.
Next week's Global Math Department meeting is "Desmos Activity Builder: Best Practices for Charging Up Lessons," by Shelley Carranza. Last week's session, "Transforming Intervention: Moving from Skills Remediation to Rich Problem Solving," by Mary Beth Dillane and Kassia Omohundro Wedekind, is here:
Research Notes
Yet another article has been added to the June 2016 issue of The Journal of Mathematical Behavior:- Student noticing in classroom settings: A process underlying influences on prior ways of reasoning by Charles Hohensee, University of Delaware
- Research on mathematics teachers as partners in task design by Keith Jones, University of Southampton, and Birgit Pepin, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
- Reflective analysis as a tool for task redesign: The case of prospective elementary teachers solving and posing fraction comparison problems by Eva Thanheiser, Portland State University; Dana Olanoff, Widener University; Amy Hillen, Kennesaw State University; Ziv Feldman, Boston University; Jennifer M. Tobias, Illinois State University; and Rachael M. Welder, Western Washington University
- Task design for ways of working: making distinctions in teaching and learning mathematics by Alf Coles and Laurinda Brown, University of Bristol
- Teachers, tasks, and tensions: lessons from a research–practice partnership by Raymond Johnson, Samuel Severance, William Penuel, and Heather Leary, University of Colorado Boulder
- Collective design of an e-textbook: teachers' collective documentation by Ghislaine Gueudet, University of Brest; Birgit Pepin, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven; Hussein Sabra, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne; and Luc Trouche, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
- Supporting teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge of fractions through co-designing a virtual manipulative by Alice Hansen, Manolis Mavrikis, and Eirini Geraniou, UCL Institute of Education
- Supporting primary-level mathematics teachers' collaboration in designing and using technology-based scenarios by Morten Misfeldt, Aalborg University, and Lis Zacho, Skolen Ved Søerne
- Professional learning through the collaborative design of problem-solving lessons by Geoff Wake, University of Nottingham; Malcolm Swan, University of Nottingham; and Colin Foster, University of Nottingham
- New perspectives for didactical engineering: an example for the development of a resource for teaching decimal number system by Frédérick Tempier, Université de Cergy-Pontoise
- Roles of a teacher and researcher during in situ professional development around the implementation of mathematical modeling tasks by Hyunyi Jung, Calvin College, and Corey Brady, Northwestern University
- Factors Associated with Alignment between Teacher Survey Reports and Classroom Observation Ratings of Mathematics Instruction by Julia Heath Kaufman, RAND Corporation; Mary Kay Stein, University of Pittsburgh; and Brian Junker, Carnegie Mellon University
- Learning to Leverage Student Thinking: What Novice Approximations Teach Us About Ambitious Practice by Marcy Singer-Gabella, Vanderbilt University; Barbara Stengel, Vanderbilt University; Emily Shahan, University of Washington; Min-Joung Kim, Louisiana State University
- After the Elementary Mathematics Teacher Workshop: Stories of Becoming Complex Instruction Teachers by Joy A. Oslund, University of Michigan
Math Ed in the News
- Let's Fix Math Education By Redefining Math (National Geographic)
- Problems with math — The way math is taught makes learning boring and difficult (University of Idaho - The Argonaut)
- Texas Extends Use of Adaptive Math Program (THE Journal)
- BYU STEM education majors help fill Utah's teacher void (The Daily Universe)
- UPDATED: Lafayette Parish decides on math program (The Advertiser)
Math Ed in Colorado
On Monday the 28th I'll be attending the Colorado Math Pathways Conference along with representatives of our post-secondary teacher education and mathematics programs, the Department of Higher Education, and special guests Uri Treisman and Joe Garcia. I've been thinking about pathways a bit more since last week during the webcast of the March 2016 Research + Practice Collaboratory, Phil Daro said:If you can't see the video, his comment comes down to this: we have 30-40 pathways students follow from 7th grade through high school, and no pathway has more than 10% of students in it. To me that means (a) we have a lot of different ideas about the series of courses students should take to be college-ready, and (b) from those ideas no dominant pathways are becoming more successful than the others. It's not just a matter of Geometry before Algebra 2 or vice-versa; a study of transcripts of actual student pathways tells the story, as seen in this quote from Daro's SERP report:
The data tell a compelling story; one that makes it uncomfortable to defend the status quo. For example, the most common course sequence in the transcripts of one of our districts was as follows: grade 8: Algebra I, grade 9: repeat Algebra I, grade 10: Geometry, grade 11: Algebra II, grade 12: repeat Algebra II. The next most common sequence also involved repeating algebra I. The third most common sequence repeated algebra I three times! Only 5% took the presumably normal sequence running from Algebra I in 8th grade through Calculus in 12th grade. Perhaps even more damning was the fact that not a single sequence was followed by as many as 10% of the students. Of the many, many sequences, few were defensible as a desirable pathway.I'll report out what I can from the conference. I'm very interested to hear what everyone has to say, and I find it very promising that pathways to statistics are being given the kind of attention and value we used to only give calculus.
Other Colorado-relevant announcements:
Cassie Harrelson of Aurora Public Schools is facilitating an online book study of Jo Boaler's Mathematical Mindsets. The book study can be found on CEA's COpilot site and a course flyer can be found here.
Jackie Weber, director of math and computer science in the Boulder Valley School District, is trying to collect names of people who are leading computer science efforts in their districts. She's looking to form a cohort of district CS leaders, and you can give her your name here.
Rebekah Ottenbreit from CDE's Office of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education is offering two more sessions focused on helping math teachers and ESL/bilingual educators use tools and strategies to make mathematics content more accessible to English learners. You can grab a flyer here.
- May 10, 2016, from 8:30-noon at the Pueblo City Schools Administration Building, Pueblo, CO (register by 5/5/16)
- May 13, 2016, from 8:30-noon at the NW CO BOCES downstairs conference room in Steamboat Springs (register by 5/8/16)
- HS Teacher Workshop: Active Learning Activities for Teaching Precalculus (June 13-17)
- HS Teacher Workshop: Active Learning Activities for Teaching Calculus (June 20-24)
- Summer Workshop in Winter Park with Northern Colorado Math Teachers' Circle (July 11-15)
- Additionally, the Rocky Mountain Math Teachers' Circle and the Southwest Math Teachers' Circle are jointly offering a workshop from August 8-11 at Fort Lewis College in Durango. Graduate credit or continuing education units will be available, and information about scholarships to pay for those credits is forthcoming. Applications are accepted until June 15.
CU-Boulder is looking for a master teacher in mathematics for their CU Teach program. It's an awesome opportunity to help prepare the next generation of math teachers in Colorado, as well as a great place to work.
The "Expanding Your Horizons" symposium for middle school girls interested in STEM registration begins March 1.
NCTM is offering two summer institutes this summer in Denver:
- July 18-20: Algebra Readiness Institute (6-8)
- July 21-23: Number and Operations Institute (Pk-5)