Author: Geoff
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Portfolio Problems: Rebuilding Assessment with Rich Tasks
We have the technology. We can rebuild assessment. We can make it better than it was. Better, stronger, more accurate. We all understand how assessment has served as a destructive force in our classrooms. And we’re all to blame. While the obvious perpetrators of destructive assessment are those foisted upon us by states and districts,…
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Culture and the kitchen sink
I was finishing up a whirlwind site-visit at a school last week, trying to collect my thoughts. It had been a ping-pong kind of a day, bouncing to several different classrooms, meetings with teachers, tours with students, a quick look at a school. In the short time I had between exiting the school doors and…
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On sequestering math
I struggle with how “special” we treat math in schools. It’s not uncommon for math teachers and departments to run professional development apart from all other subjects. Or use different classroom norms. Or instruct entirely differently. Or blog or tweet exclusively about math. Math teachers have their own software, their own language, different and separate…
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Protocol me maybe (teaching edition)
Facilitating is really hard. We miss things. Perhaps is little misconceptions that we hear but don’t make it to our brain because we’re too busy taking roll and pointing out where to pick up missing work for the umpteenth time. We (ok, I) need to figure out a way to slow things down, so we can…
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On designing tasks to elicit questions
Some interesting criticism of my most recent post on question mapping from Dan: the idea of considering questions you want your students to ask that will enable the teacher to more readily get into content. There seems to be two strains of criticism, which I’ll attempt to distill here. Criticism 1: By designing tasks to…
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Question Mapping
I’m really good at enjoying the cleverness of a scenario and grafting (sometimes seamlessly, sometimes less so) it onto a mathematical standard (or two or three). I’m less good at starting with a standard (or two) and designing a scenario that appropriately and precisely maps onto it. Sometimes that results in a problem that doesn’t…
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Global Math Department 12/15/15 – Designing Systems of Teacher Learning around Student Work
I’m chatting with the Global Math Department on 12/15/15 about using student work as the driver of teacher learning. Consider this post a repository for pertinent links, my slide deck, and a comment section for further conversation. GMD_LASW Link to working google doc for the session: [Global Math Department 12/15] LISTEN: Podcast in which we with…
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Shuttling vs. Driving to the Airport
A quick Would You Rather today. I was inspired by a teacher asking students to model airport parking as a means to get at linear equations. I thought I’d frame it similarly, but using the WYR format, because I like the WYR format. I live a good distance away from a major airport, and I…
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Complaining about what students don’t know vs. learning how to teach that stuff yourself
It’s a lot easier to complain that students don’t know, say, their multiplication tables than to actually teach multiplication. Setting aside the oft problematic mindset of a teacher complaining about what “these kids” don’t know for the time being, consider actually teaching to the gaps you feel are present. Let’s be clear: not a single…
emergent math 