While it’s easy to Google to find a worksheet, “easy” doesn’t mean “quality.” Explore these 5 quick shifts to move a worksheet from “meh” to “GREAT!”
Armed with Peter Liljedahl’s 2021 text Building Thinking Classrooms and the pain and frustration of the social upheaval and pandemic deaths of recent years, I set out to push the boundaries of my abilities to teach math and help students realize more of their true potential. In a whirlwind of change, I departed from the status quo. How did I fare? Did transformation take place?
Teaching the way I was taught wasn’t inspiring to my students. However, transitioning to a conceptual approach was a critical element in building strong foundational understanding and capacity for all students to succeed in math. Learners need opportunities to DO math, and in DOING, there is LEARNING.
I wanted to create a space where my students could make mistakes and be okay, where they actually liked coming to my class, where they felt “smart” in their own way wherever they were in their learning, where they would push themselves to do better than yesterday, where they could struggle with something and still be alive to tell about it.
Rather than regurgitate math procedures, I knew my students needed to be able to think and reason deeply enough to tackle any problem thrown at them in math, or even life.
An ambitious math teacher sees students as having the ability to make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. An ambitious teacher believes their students can make sense of new math ideas and use what they already know to solve problems.
If you’ve ever sat in on a professional development session with me, you’ve heard my spiel, “From here on out, you’re a math person. Even if you feel you have no connection to mathematics, you need to channel your inner actor or actress and become a math person.
“When are we ever going to use this?” The dreaded, yet inevitable, question that arises every year for math educators. With the abstract nature of many standards in the high school math curriculum, I can certainly empathize with the sentiment of this question.
Let’s face it, although we should, we don’t recommend teaching careers to our best and brightest. If you are believed to have the aptitude to become a scientist, engineer, or doctor, then that’s what people tell you, and that’s where you try to go.
We are trained as educators to be the content experts. We’re told in our pre-service preparation that we are the conveyor of knowledge, and our job is to impart that knowledge to our students. I would argue, after 30 years in education, that is NOT our job.