David Curlette

Math...the class that everyone lines up outside classroom doors excited for the next lesson.  Wait, I have not seen this to be true for many math teachers.  Instead student arrive stressed and worried about the lessons taught in math classes.  Why?? Math instruction that is skill, drill, and lecture helps to create the stress and anxiety for students.   Instead of skill and drill defined as showing a student how to solve a mathematical problem then having students replicate this process for "leaning".  Math teacher should move away from this concept (have a paradigm shift in teaching) to teaching through asking students questions that engage them into the math lesson.  The questioning allows students to feel apart of the lesson and that they are all learning together.  Also, teachers should allow students to teach each other as well as to encourage (without forcing) students to demonstrate how to solve problems by co-teaching the class with the...

This activity will allow you to quickly assess how well your students are understanding the your material just by looking at their worksheets… Yes, it is just this easy.   How to assess this quickly and make it fun for your students? Imagine a typical matching worksheet with two columns and either drawing lines or writing the letter next to the problem number.   Now let’s create the matching activity where each question needs more than one answer such as a math question asking for the domain, range, graph, etc.   by having students cut out all of the possible answers of a worksheet and then pasting them into the correct places on the answer sheet.   I used this activity with my twelfth grade students and found it very effective as a formative assessment as well as very engaging for all of my students.

Play a ten minute activity that incorporates the entire class to participate, talk, and work together to reach the outcome or goal of the activity.   Students will have to solve problems, communicate with other students, and stay on task to finish the game in a set amount of time.   This activity works by placing an answer and question on an index card.   The questions have the phrase “Who Has” and the answers have the phrase “I Have.”   The answers and questions are not located on the same cards which makes the students have to ask “Who Has” to find the solution to their question and in turn calls on the next student to participate in the game.   I have found that this activity takes about 10 minutes to play depending on the difficulty level of the questions and how well your students communicate with each other.   Below is an example of the cards and how possibly to make out the problems.