Education with DocRunning

I couldn't wait for Math Mondays to return so that I could share this amazing project my students did this past quarter. In the words of one of my students: "It was epically awesome!"

First, a little background: even though my students work at different levels, we integrate big whole class projects. Projects offer the chance to take on some big real-world applications, to collaborate and to apply our different skills to broad topics. We have done business simulations, genetics and probability and statistical research projects, to name a few. Lot of my students had worked with geometry and trigonometry concepts, and I wanted to do a geometry focused one. I was mulling over some sort of urban planning project.

Ever have one of those days where a lesson just didn’t work as you thought it would? I have. I think the students are going to love it, and they don’t engage. Or I think the activity will take 45 minutes and it only takes 10 minutes. Sometimes the whole class vibe is wrong and what I thought was going to be a rousing debate turns into a series of long silence in between my prodding questions.

When a class falls flat, I like to be ready. Here are some of my favorite go to activities for filling or pivoting in class which require little to no prep:

I love using interactive notebooks in my secondary math class. We work with steps often in math. It is helpful for students to have a way for students to determine and organize the steps.

To build each notebook page is a multi-step endeavor.

Every year I have at least one student who tells me that social studies is irrelevant. After all, I sometimes hear, it's all in the past. While I can easily argue how the world of today is shaped by past events, the most powerful way I've found to link the past to the present is when the students make the connections. I like to use civil rights as the focus for these connections early in the year, and for those worrying about standards, civil rights lands smack dab in the middle of civics.

The beauty of teaching the civil rights is that it absolutely makes "history" relevant. Here's why:

Differentiated is a widely used term in education, but sometimes not well understood. Carol Ann Tomlinson, considered an expert in differentiated learning, stated "differentiation is classroom practice that looks eyeball to eyeball with the reality that kids differ, and the most effective teachers do whatever it takes to hook the whole range of kids on learning."
As a teacher, I aim towards this quote -to meet every student where they are, address their individual learning styles, and hook them on learning. This all sounds great in the theoretical but the implementation of a completely differentiated classroom is challenging. Some of my best strategies for differentiation in secondary math include:

Secondary Smorgasbord is back, and this month's theme is building a positive classroom culture. Below I share my top 5 ways to create a positive classroom. Be sure to scroll to the bottom to find the links to other tips from some of the best secondary teachers out there.

1. Build relationships from day one and all year long: it's easy to get caught up in content. There are pressures to "get it" all in and often it feels like there is no time to spend on "other" stuff. It's counterintuitive but investing in relationships actually makes the content part easier. So I spend the first month balancing content with get to know each other activities, many of which build skills that will help students in my inquiry-based class at the same time.

I love to use stories as part of my regular social studies curriculum and that means the inclusion of historic fiction. Although, I give students lots of choice, we usually have some whole class books that are an integral part of our studies. Depending on the class we typically read 3-4 novels per year.

Among my favorites are:

A Tale of Two Cities (French Revolution; Absolute Monarchy): Dickens is always a challenge, but his take on the French Revolution from the perspective of London and Paris is worthy of the investment.

There is very little satisfaction in just being given the answer. In some ways that is a negative trade off of the internet. You can always find the answer to a question (what's the formula for circumference of a circle or how to calculate the law of sines), but you don't get that same sort of satisfaction in having worked out the solution yourself.

There is great satisfaction as well as deeper learning in discovering the solution to a problem. This is why I love inquiry-based learning. As a teacher, it's hard not to give the answer. I know how to solve a system of equations. I could just show my students how, but then students would not discover and internalize the solution.

Getting started with inquiry-based learning in your class can be easy. Here's three quick strategies you can implement today:

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