Model the Learning

One of my biggest learnings in my role as a board co-ordinator has been around mental math in elementary schools. To be honest, when I first heard the term, I assumed mental math had to do with memorization and just learning multiplication facts.  I now know it to be a procedure very rich in strategy, promoting flexibility of number, and the very important mathematical process  of representing  a problem. Being able to see the math not only contributes to the understanding of the question at hand, but also to assessing the reasonableness of the answer. Visualization and representation of mathematics does not come easily to me - I was the student who became good at math by memorizing procedures. I still have to put a lot of effort into picturing multiplication in an array or area model, or picturing factorization by splitting items into groups, or picturing what happens to fractions as they are operated upon. This past week, I had the opportunity to model the a...

Jonathan So ( @MrSoclassroom ) recently threw out an interesting challenge on Twitter for teachers: What are your top five, life-changing-as-a-teacher moments? His original post on his top five really got me thinking about what has made me stop, re-evaluate what I do, and change direction in how I teach. These are all fairly recent moments for me, so I'm guessing there's a little bit of memory bias in here, but here they are... :) In chronological-ish order of occurrence: 1) Flipping my Classes - Handing the responsibility of learning over to my students was definitely career-changing. I learned so much from my students in terms of how they learn (because they were each choosing to learn in their own way), and how they collaborate, and  I saw first-hand how the allowance of self-paced curriculum can reduce stress and deepen understanding. It was humbling as I discovered my lectures weren't a necessary part of the learning process (students mastered even some of the h...