NCTM 2016 – “Take Aways” and Questions

Posted on by Mrs. A

“Take Aways”

  1.  Multiplication IS NOT repeated addition.  Yes ladies and gentlemen, this goes against everything we feel in our bodies but accept it. See Kevin Devlin’s Article from Mathematics Association of America.
  2. Trying to teach students to pick out “key words” in a word problem to help them solve does not develop sense making structures for advanced learning.  Not all key words appear in all problems and they don’t always imply the same meaning.  How the words are used depends on the context.
  3. Learning Goals versus Performance Goals.  (Huinker)
    • Learning goals are what students will understand as a result of the lesson (Promotes Growth Mindset).
    • Performance goals are what students will DO to demonstrate understanding (promotes Fixed Mindsets)
    • Sentence frame that combines both:
      • I can ________ to show that I understand _______.
  4. To increase rigor for Which One Doesn’t Belong, have students come up with 2 reasons why one wouldn’t belong. (Stevens)
  5. Go buy the book The Classroom Chef by John Stevens and Matt Vaudrey. My favorites from the book:
    • “Preparing a lesson takes research and new ideas to push the learning towards the objective.  Lesson planning is the step-by-step nature of a given set of objectives.” (p.18)
    • Don’t say an answer is wrong, say it’s not correct yet. (p.42)
    • Bringing in the math when you need it will allow the math to serve the conversation.(after comparing mullets, they eventually used math to be more accurate with the mullets). (p. 79)
    • “Problem solving is what you do when you don’t know what to do.” (p.110)
    • Instead of trying to entertain our students, make them curious with the tasks you select to implement.
    • Allow kids to choose their own assessment.
  6. Teach the child, not the standard. (M. Burns)
  7. To pose purposeful questions, we need to know which type of questions we are asking: assessing or advancing?
  8. A high quality task with low implementation will still create a better learning experience than a low quality task with high implementation.
  9. School isn’t something that should be done “to” us.
  10. Collaborate around student understanding, the mathematics and the next instructional steps to keep the PLC focused and on the right track.
  11. The problems in the book won’t look like the problems in real life.  We need to “delete” the textbook (D.Meyer) by eliminating the question, values, and labels.  Make students curious and turn the math dial up slowly.

Questions for Professional Development:

  1. What should students learn first: concepts or skills? (MTSS pre-conference)
  2. How do we define learning versus doing when establishing math goals? (Huinker)
  3. How can I use the problem as a vehicle to teach math? (Seeley)

Questions I Still Have:

I attended many sessions where presenters spoke about completing interviews with elementary aged children.  I am intrigued by this idea.

  1. What would it look like in the middle school?
    • Since I have 138 students.
  2. How do you know which questions to ask in the interview?
  3. How do you know which students to choose?
    • May be a dumb question but I was thinking those with Ds and Fs?
    • Separating the can’ts and the won’ts
  4. What do interviews look like at the middle school level with in a 52 minute period?

Resources

12 math rules that expire in Middle Grades

13 Rules that Expire

Never_say_anything_a_kid_can_say