If you think back to some games you have played, what can be more fun than an unexpected reward? Unexpected rewards can be fun AND motivating. On the day that I pass back the first exam, I walk around with a bag of plastic gold coins. I hand one to each student who earned the full 3 points on the exam. (That means they leveled up by meeting the performance benchmarks on each HW assignment and quiz, and also scored…
There is a growing pool of questions available inside Learning Catalytics. Some have been generated by the publisher, others have been generated by the community of instructors using Learning Catalytics. For my first Flipped Classroom I wrote my own questions (sample vs population, descriptive vs inferential, levels of data, …) and it was very easy to do. However, for day 2, I used 7 questions created by the publisher/author and the community of instructors and those questions were outstanding. The…
I took last semester off (bank leave), so Monday will be the first day teaching students in about eight months. What did I do during that time? I worked on the three R’s: resting, reading, and redesigning my classes. Resting I have taught a full load of classes every semester (and nearly every summer) since I started at College of Sequoias back in 1994. I did not think I needed a break because I did not feel the burnout that…
I was at a session at a small math conference last fall, and the presenter was going through their list of things students must do to learn mathematics. When the presenter said that students had to do things according to the instructor’s method (“They have to do it MY way!”), I am sure my jaw fell to the floor. In my experience you have to let students think and experiment in order for them to learn and understand mathematics. As…
After 22 years at my college I finally took a bank leave this semester. Although there has been a lot of relaxing and traveling, I used my time off to do some reading and thinking about how I wanted to improve my math and statistics classes. In particular I wanted to help my students grow, learn to think, and take away skills that they would find valuable outside of the classroom. One of my ex-students (who I respect a great…
Looking forward to my session on the importance of student discovery in developmental math at ICTCM this weekend in Atlanta. I will be sharing innovative approaches for getting your students involved in the discovery of material. When students are engaged and thinking the chances for understanding and success dramatically increase. The session is on Saturday morning from 9-9:30. I will be walking through Interactive Statistics in the exhibitor’s room from 10-10:30 on Friday morning. This is the new product I…
I’m in the middle of a one-semester leave, and in addition to working my way through Euclid’s Elements I have really cranked up my reading in anticipation of my return in Fall. I am currently reading Jo Boaler’s Mathematical Mindsets. I was happy to see that she supports my beliefs that student learning increases when students participate in the discovery of concepts as well as when students reflect on their learning. These have been two areas of emphasis for me…
One thing I like to do in class is end with a short assignment to see how well students understand the material from that section. There are a couple of short quizzes that are available in the 4th edition of my combined elementary & intermediate algebra textbook. First, in the Video Notebook (located for students inside MyMathLab) each section of the notebook ends with a 5-question self-assessment quiz that works really well for this purpose. I selected 5 problems that…
I wanted to share one of my in-class strategies for using the videos in my 4th edition combined algebra text. For the latest edition I created over 3000 short videos – conceptual, technology (TI-84), study skills, … In this article I am focusing on the videos I made that correspond to the examples in the textbook as well as the two associated Quick Check exercises. (Each example in the textbook has two corresponding Quick Check exercises.) Round One – Example…
In today’s class we ran into the trinomial This can be challenging for students just learning to factor because they are not familiar with the factor set of 208. Traditionally I recommend that students follow the 10-second rule: If you cannot find the correct factor pairing within 10 seconds, you should move on to listing all factor pairs of c. This would result in the following pairs: That means that students need to try 13 potential factors (1 through 13)…