Insight struck twice in our living room a couple weeks ago as my daughter was teaching herself the Peppa Pig theme song, with some help from us. We played it for her, and put some stickers on the keys to help her, but it took a long time for her to actually start playing it in sequence. When she was actually learning this she would sort of work away quietly, until she hit a point where she needed a break. Then she would get really silly, blow raspberries or joking around. After about 4 or 5 rounds of tunnel-vision followed by silliness, she eventually had the song mastered. I was left thinking about what her learning style might mean for her future schooling, as it seems to be quite similar to mine. Julianne's focus was as intense as her silliness and she shifted back and forth between the two so quickly, Read the full post...

So my thinking classroom may have just given the best math class interactions I've ever had. More on that later. First let me get up to speed with this experiment. Last cycle I had a good experience with the Thinking Classroom. I've written a few blog posts about it, including one about my plans, another about my awesome and excessive randomizer, and another about kids taking notes. The experiment ended in January because the marking period closed, but I decided to reboot it with a new kids on a different schedule. It's really great having a second chance to go over the norms with a fresh group and get more practice on-boarding them. Having a bank of problems to use is an added bonus. So far, we have been doing visual patterns, including my new favorite visual pattern lesson for VNPS, which I could write a whole other post about. Read the full post...

I spent another day thinking about TMC related things, and I've decided to write some thoughts on the off chance that what I have to say might be valuable. Lots of people have very strong feelings about this, and I am trying to honor all of those people and their feelings while also offering some thinking about structure. Just so we're clear, I don't know what happened, or what may be in the works, or why anyone would want to read this. Let me go further to say that I am not really interested in keeping TMC nor am I attempting to minimize any harm that was experienced in order to revive #TMC19. The reason I keep thinking about it, and why I'm writing now, is that the model of teachers organizing on twitter to create their own PD is both powerful, and timely. Given today's climate I think the Read the full post...

My kids are awful note takers. It's not just me, this is what they are telling me. Each Friday I ask kids to do a 6-question weekly reflection with questions like “This week I took useful notes.” For that item, students all consistently report the lowest scores over the first 4 weeks of the class. It's clearly the biggest takeaway from doing all of these weekly reflections, so I should probably address it. Notes were an important takeaway from what I learned when I began looking into the thinking classroom. In the past I didn't do notes, but I had really well laid out tasks which included everything I want students to take notes on. These tasks would be organized in such away that they could review the important things whenever they studied. The act of deciding what things are important seems like an important academic skill, and by not expecting Read the full post...

One of the reasons I haven't kept up with blogging is because I always want to wait until I have the final, perfect draft before I post to my blog. But the thing is, I never have final perfect drafts of anything. So I have to get over that. What I do have is a lot of decent ideas and thoughts in the Notes App in my iPhone. Yesterday, as I pushed my five-month-old around the neighborhood, I wrote out 4 goals for this school year in my Note as she slept. Now mind you, this is a draft. But the beauty of sharing it before it's finalized is that I can get feedback from all the (zero) folks reading my blog. So what I have here are my goals and shorter “titles” for the goals. Neither is an expanded version of the goal, but if I wait until Read the full post...