One of the struggles I have as department chair is coming up with what we should be doing in our PLC time. I decided that we needed to start examining the CCSS much closer, and really start implementing things this year that we are going to be asked to implement next year. Why? Because if [...]
My last post was about an idea to use old scantrons as a visual aid to build knowledge of the binomial probability formula before the learners actually were introduced to the formula. Short post: it worked, I think. Long post: I passed out the scantrons, which immediately brought forth a groan. We just had the [...]
I was not familiar with the acronym T.P.O.V. either until a couple of weeks ago when I was introduced to it at the NCTM’s Reasoning and Sense Making Institute. It was the presentation by Timothy Kanold that introduced the phrase, “Teachable Point of View”, and he brings it up in his book in Chapter 1: [...]
In Montana, there is a town called Haugan on I-90 near the Idaho border with an interesting building. As you approach, you see signs like this every couple of miles. [click on the pictures for a higher res image] Outside, the place looks like any tourist trap. Do they really have 50,000 silver dollars inside? [...]
This will be the last post I make on the specific topic of the 3 days spent in Orlando at the Reasoning and Sense Making Institute. I will expect that I make many more posts on things I do in the classroom that are based on the ideas I have learned, however. A collection of [...]
At the NCTM Reasoning & Sense Making Institute, I attended the session given by Beth Chance and Henry Kranendonk, two of the three authors of the Reasoning and Sense Making in Statistics and Probability book. I have that book on my bookshelf at school, and I have looked at it, but have not tried any [...]
I can’t figure out how to do a complete and thorough archive without running software on a computer. From my phone, however, I was able to activate my Archivist.visitmix.com account and tell it to archive the hashtag #nctmrsm11. (click the link for some interesting visuals from the archive) Then, when I got home, I searched [...]
Viva Hathaway was the third session on Saturday, and I looked forward to her presentation with great gusto. I attended a short session she gave at the NCTM Conference in Salt Lake City in 2009, and walked away from her session with a brain exploding with ideas. In fact, on her site, she still has [...]
I have to say I almost left Mr. Godbold’s presentation. It started off on a odd note, where he told us what he wanted to go over, then said we couldn’t do all of it, but we would be lucky if we did half, and then repeated himself for about 10 minutes. He looked and [...]
Timothy Kanold was the Superintendent of Adlai Stevenson High School District in Illinois. This school is a huge success story, because it went from bottom of the bottom to top of the top. They did this through a strong commitment to PLC’s and communication. Now Mr. Kanold did not spend a second on his Keynote [...]