22 Powerful Closure Activities

10 Great Lesson Planning Templates And Resources Recently I wrote about ways to learn through writing lesson plans. Though I believe there’s no right way to write lesson plans, I think it’s helpful to include a few essential components: Objective/learning goal: What will students learn through this lesson?Time: Estimate how long each part of the lesson will take.Differentiation strategies: How will you support students who need extra help and students who need an extra challenge?Sequence: Describe what will happen during each part of the lesson.Assessment: how will you know what students have learned? edutopia Math used to be all rote memorization and pencil-to-paper equations disconnected from the real world, but more and more teachers are realizing the importance of making practical, relevant connections in math. We asked our audience of educators: How do you use the real world to teach math? We’ve collected some of the most interesting answers, ways teachers are connecting math to the everyday lives of their students.

6 Completed Lesson And Unit Plans Recently, I wrote a blog about 5 ways that we can learn through writing lesson plans. I also shared a resource collection of lesson and unit planning with 10 templates. We know that we can learn about lesson planning by writing out our plans and using templates, but we can also learn by reading the plans of other educators. Reading the plans of others gives us the opportunity to learn new ideas for great lessons. The resources in this blog contain tons and tons of completed plans to learn from.

Math Journals Math journals, or problem solving notebooks as they are sometimes referred to, are books in which students are often asked to record their strategy and thought processes, as well as solutions. While students learn how to "do" math, they must also learn how to articulate what they are learning. It is important to provide many opportunities for students to organize and record their work without the structure of a worksheet. Math journals support students' learning because, in order to get their ideas on paper, children must organize, clarify, and reflect on their thinking. Initially many students will need support and encouragement in order to communicate their ideas and thinking clearly on paper but, as with any skill, the more they practice the easier it will become.

Finland schools: Subjects scrapped and replaced with 'topics' as country reforms its education system For years, Finland has been the by-word for a successful education system, perched at the top of international league tables for literacy and numeracy. Only far eastern countries such as Singapore and China outperform the Nordic nation in the influential Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings. Politicians and education experts from around the world – including the UK – have made pilgrimages to Helsinki in the hope of identifying and replicating the secret of its success. Teaching & Assessing Soft Skills The career landscape is changing dramatically. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that the average worker currently holds ten different jobs before the age of forty. This requires a high degree of flexibility and adaptability. Students who leave high school with strong soft skills will work more harmoniously with others and be more successful tackling unfamiliar tasks. However, teachers must explicitly teach these soft skills in school. Teachers cannot assume that students know what it looks like to communicate effectively.

Addressing unfinished learning in the context of grade-level work As a teacher, I had an understanding of the grade-level math content I was supposed to teach and the belief that students’ new learning had to build from their prior understanding. But the harsh reality was that most of the students in my class were several years below grade level, and I only had one school year to try to catch them up. At the time, I felt like I had to choose between two pathways — to move forward with grade-level work despite students’ gaps or halt grade-level instruction to build prerequisite knowledge. Neither of these would provide equitable learning for my students. In my current role as Director of Math Professional Learning at the Achievement Network (ANet), I’ve learned that I wasn’t the only teacher facing this challenge. In fact, it’s one of the most widespread challenges we hear from our school partners.

What Does Student Engagement Look Like? Engagement. . .it’s another one of those words that’s regularly bandied about in higher education. We talk about it like we know what it means and we do, sort of. It’s just that when a word or idea is so widely used, thinking about it often stops and that’s what I think has happened with engagement. We know that engagement is an essential part of learning. For years, folks have correctly pointed out that the term “active learning” is redundant. When learning’s the game, you’ve got to be on the field, actively engaged.

Direct Instruction...Do We Need It? I thought that would get your attention! Now just hear me out. I want you to consider that there is really very little in math that students must learn through direct instruction, that is explicit instruction from a teacher. The engaged student vs. the compliant student The engaged student knows exactly why they are doing what they are doing while the compliant student is unable to connect the learning to anything meaningful. The engaged student is asking questions while the compliant student is simply receiving instructions and direction from the teacher. The engaged student is focused on learning while the compliant student wants to know how many points the activity is worth. The engaged student is able to track, monitor, and self-evaluate their learning while the compliant student is reliant upon the teacher to know where he/she is with their learning.

Two Common Misconceptions About Learning It's another semester with a new group of students. This semester, I have a class of elementary education majors (using Physics and Everyday Thinking). In the course, students build basic physics ideas after collecting data from particular experiments. Overall, this is an awesome course. How To Ensure Students Are Actively Engaged and Not Just Compliant Engagement is a crucial part of learning, but ensuring students are actively engaged is more complex than whether a student is paying attention or not. As technology has made its way into the classroom many educators describe how attentive students are when on devices, but a quiet, outwardly behaved student is not the same thing as one that is truly engaged. The kind of engagement that leads to learning is three dimensional. Too often educators look at engagement as a “yes or no” question: students are either engaged or they’re not. “That is absolutely not an appropriate way to view it,” said John Almarode, associate professor at James Madison University and co-director of the school’s Center for STEM Education and Outreach. “It is not a one-dimensional concept.”

Making Math Moments Matter With The Concreteness Fading Model Importance of Context and Concrete Manipulatives From Kindergarten Through Grade 12 During the first half of my teaching career, I would spend what seemed to be the first half of a math lesson teaching a new math concept by sharing definitions, formulas, steps and procedures. To make things more challenging for my students, I would simultaneously introduce the symbolic notation used to represent those ideas. Then, I would spend the remainder of the lesson attempting to help my students make sense of these very new and often abstract ideas. By the end of the lesson, I could help many students build an understanding, but there was always a group I felt who I would leave behind. Like many other teachers, I was just teaching in a very similar way to that how I was taught.

Why Students Forget—and What You Can Do About It Teachers have long known that rote memorization can lead to a superficial grasp of material that is quickly forgotten. But new research in the field of neuroscience is starting to shed light on the ways that brains are wired to forget—highlighting the importance of strategies to retain knowledge and make learning stick. In a recent article published in the journal Neuron, neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland challenge the predominant view of memory, which holds that forgetting is a process of loss—the gradual washing away of critical information despite our best efforts to retain it. According to Richards and Frankland, the goal of memory is not just to store information accurately but to “optimize decision-making” in chaotic, quickly changing environments.