Author: Geoff
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Stop Thief!, The Fugitive and introducing equations of circles
When I was a kid, we had this super high-tech board game called Stop Thief!. The gist was this: someone committed a crime somewhere on the game board, which was rife with jewelry displays, unattended cash registers and safes. Your job as the detective was to identify where the thief was. The location of the thief…
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Necessary conditions: understanding groupwork with a three-legged pedagogical framework
At some point this year (2018), I’ll have a book for you to read from Stenhouse that proposes a framework for effective math classrooms. These are the three broad ingredients that create a successful math classroom as well as how a student experiences math. They are: Academic Safety – the social/emotional state of a student…
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Counting Idling Cars: An Elementary Math Project Based Learning Unit
I’m sitting in my car, waiting to pick up my son from school. It’s too cold to wait outside this time of year so I keep the heat on, the engine running, and continue listening to the Dunc’d On Basketball Podcast, the nerdiest podcast about basketball out there. I’m also quite anti-social, so I prefer…
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Why we teach the “other stuff”
“I don’t know what to say.” “I don’t know how to talk to him.” I’m sitting in a coffee shop with my back facing a mentor and her mentee, a college student who is apparently struggling through her semester. I can hear them clearly, even though I’m trying not to eavesdrop. The mentor is pleading…
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Vivienne Malone-Mayes and Waco, Texas
Vivienne Malone-Mayes grew up in Waco, TX, a highly segregated community in a highly segregated state. She attended a highly segregated high school where she graduated two years early at the age of 16 so she could pursue Mathematics at Fisk University, where she graduated in four years with a bachelor’s’ degree and another two…
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You are the Name Rememberer
I’m just not good with names: It takes me a long time to remember them and even then I sometimes forget. Not anymore. For you are the Name Rememberer. The One Who Remembers Names. It’s difficult with so many students. These first few months of school it’s hard to get names straight. I’m not a names…
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Find, Adapt, Create: A Path Towards More Agreeable Task Design Time
In the past I consistently struggled with making the turn from the excitement toward problem-based learning (PrBL) to the actual design of complex, engaging problems. Typically I would spend the morning building the buy-in (the “why”), another part of the morning conducting some sort of problem simulation to showcase PrBL (the “how”). Then my instructions…
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2017 New Tech Network PBL Chopped Recap
I had the honor of co-designing and MC’ing the first ever PBL Chopped competition at the New Tech Annual Conference in July. While this is typically a blog about math instruction, this experience welcomed all content areas and all grade levels, teachers, principals and instructional coaches. It was an absolute blast and the teams were incredible. It’s…
emergent math 