Thursday, May 03, 2007

Reforming Mathematics Instruction

Each night that I connect with the edublogger world, I am overwhelmed at the amazing things that are happening in classrooms around the world. Thanks to Steve Dembo at teach42, I read about Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher in Santa Cruz, who shared his unbelievable media rich introductory lesson on graphing for his high school students in a recent post. He says of the lesson, "The total effect only intensified and grew more exciting with each new event. With scaffolding that precise and a visual connection that strong, even my weakest students were drawing eerily accurate graphs."
Throughout this year and continuing into next year, my district is striving to reform our mathematics curriculum and instruction to help students build deeper conceptual understandings. It was just this morning at our faculty meeting, where we were working in small grops discussing critical ways in which our thinking and methods of mathematics instruction would change to better develop students' mathematical understandings. Dan's lesson is definitely an outstanding example to show how it can be done. You can be sure that I will be passing it onto our math teachers.

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