SUPPORTING MATHEMATICS TEACHERS, FAMILIES, AND STUDENTS
A COMMUNITY OF LEADERS OF MATHEMATICS TEACHERS
SUPPORTING TEACHERS
Mine and curate resources and offer that information to reduce the time for teachers as they search for what and how to teach.
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SUPPORT FAMILIES & STUDENTS
Advocating for
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access to high quality mathematics and instruction
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ways to keep human connection
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equity when policy decisions are being made
JOIN US
Support teachers, families, and students in looking for reasonable and equitable ways to do everything they are be asked to do.
february 2021
We covered a lot of ground at our meeting this month! We discussed the new framework (tip: start now and break it into smaller manageable chunks, how to look at math in terms of mastery vs grade levels, and how good intentions can sometimes lead to inequity (check out Nice White Parents podcast). All of that and we still managed some collaborative math tasks and sharing of some great resources!
Special shout out to Gail Standiford
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Cooperative Jamboard Problems - A big thank you to Gail Standiford who is adapting these problems for a virtual setting!
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Esti-Mysteries - An amazing resource with new esti-mysteries every day of the school year! As you can imagine, there are a lot already available. For grades K-8.
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Math Task Bank - We've posted this before, but it's a great resource and popped up again, so if you missed it the first time here is a second chance to take a look!
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Slow Reveal Graphs - We this method at our last Saturday Seminar. Here is a link to some cool examples.
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Seeking Common Ground - Family Guides - This is a great resource for parents, or to share with parents to help them understand what their children are learning at each grade level and easy things they can do to support that learning.
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Share your thoughts about the new framework! - Break this into chunks for easier reading!
january 2021
This month we focused on what everyone was working on now that we're partway through the year and what questions or ponderings everyone had. This lead to more discussions than links, so we're sharing some of the items that sparked discussions, rather than links this month. Well, maybe we'll include one or two links!
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How can we build anti-racist capacity in our profession and our districts? (There are many resources for this, one that we discussed today was https://equitablemath.org)
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What might be our big takeaways from everything to do with this time?
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Detracking at the elementary level; how can we help teachers and admin see the difference between differentiation and tracking?
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High schools have been creating intercession opportunities for students that have been attending, but still struggling. Where else can we create these learning bridges?
Special shout out to Kyle Ferreira van leer, NBC's Teacher of the month!!
december 2020
We've all expanded our knowledge of technology this year. This month we all shared some of the latest tips and tricks we've learned that make life a little easier along with some math talk and sharing.
Special shout out to everyone this month!
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Want to keep students from moving things around on your jamboard? You can set the image as a background or just create a text box and extend it past the borders of your jamboard. They can move anything "above" the text box, but not below it!
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Want to duplicate an object without having the added steps of CTRL+C (Copy) and CTRL+V (Paste)? Just use CTRL+D (Duplicate!)
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Need a quick line drawing of a stop sign, or a cylinder, or a mouse? Go to autodraw.com and start sketching and it will create a set of images for you to pick from - fun to just play with too and no artistic talent needed!
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Deb shared two tools from some work she is doing adapting the Worthwhile Task Evaluation Tool John SanGiovanni shares in his work to go after content decisions. She turned it into a google form (find it here) and added a few characteristics. It's designed to help bring up conversations about what the characteristics truly mean, what teams of teachers can reach consensus about as they agree on tasks for students. The second tool is to reflect upon pedagogy related to 4 of the SMPs (making sense, reasoning abstractly, constructing arguments, modeling). It's related to the work of Hammond, SERP, The Equitable Math Pathways, and NCTM's SMP Lookfors. (find the document here)
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Student Shout-Outs aren't just for teachers, let students give each other shout outs as part of your next emotional check-in.
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Jamboard Series of MathReps for Elementary - Kindergarten, 1st Grade, 2nd Grade, 3rd Grade, 4th Grade, 5th Grade
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Number of the Day - K-2 Templates (Jamboard Version), 3-5 Templates
NOVEMBER 2020
This month we talked about the learning that we've been doing - sharing information from conferences or presentations that we attended, and ones that our fellow educators have led. We also discussed some of the challenges in assessments this year. We looked at the importance of keeping up with SEL and a new way for students to connect and give shout outs.
Special shout out to Those who have contributed behind the scenes -- Stephen Arndt, Van Lay, and Chelsea Mcclellan
october 2020
We asked ourselves if in-school learning was providing a better learning experience than distance learning, and if it was worth the risk. How can we determine that? In-school learning is not including partner nor group talk since all students are facing the same direction. This does not support our best knowledge about how students learn. Students are engaging on their devices, so the teachers have to find ways for them to interact through the devices. Also, some of us wondered about the impact of some schedules where students have some days when they are to do asynchronous work without engaging with their teacher--having seen some study showing that those days not to produce as much engagement by students.
We also made sure to save some time to talk math following-up on how new approaches were going now that we've had more time to test it out. Ways to do polling using google was discussed--perhaps by making draggables on slides and students could drag objects to choose A, B, C or D on the slide.
​We also went through all the links to left and played with some math problems.
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SCUSD Scope and Sequence for Priority Content was developed in the Spring, with greyed out areas not considered a priority.
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Jamboard Array's from Berkeley Everett for sense-making about multiplication
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Jamboards for Open Middle with moveable digits, a template created by Chelsea McClellan; so many open middles already made here!
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Blog from Deb Stetson about Kyle's classroom this year. Kyle gave us an amazing update on how this has been working so far including sharing how he is using a google form dumping into a google sheet for students to tell him they have submitted work on a standard. This way he only has one place to check what he needs to provide feedback for! He also shared a couple of samples of student submissions.
Special shout out to Lori Fury
September 2020
This month we took a little time to share what we actually liked about distance learning! Being able to visit multiple classrooms and teachers at different sites was a big one, as well as more sibling bonding time for those with kiddos.
There was also a lot of discussion on the potential for creating a Zoom co-host group to help teachers - hopefully we will have more updates on this next month!
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A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction is a great resource with a ton of content! One of the contributing authors is Dave Chun from our local SCOE office. There is also a webinar coming up on September 22nd, click here for more details.
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More Digital Images of Math Manipulatives this time from SFUSD
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Check out our blog for details on some amazing work by local SJUSD teacher, Kyle Ferreira van Leer. If you love what you see, you can also check out some editing that Deb did to Kyle’s portfolio to set it up as a template for teachers learning a new curriculum for a senior year math course (QRAT)
Special shout out to deb stetson
August 2020
Our meetings this month have taken place via email as everyone is preparing for school. Our helpful links this month include articles that are good to keep in mind as we work with students.
Lori Fury also has shared her digital images of math manipulatives for our community to use and share.
Special shout out to Lori Fury!
July 2020
There was a lot of discussion this month for being on “break”!
Our July meetings had a lot of discussion around equity as students return, learning pods, how to allow students to do and show work both virtually and in the “real world”, and some fun math problems for us to enjoy and test out this virtual environment.
Special shout out to Lori Fury, chelsea mcclellan and Kyle Ferreira van leer
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Autobiography and “Who We Are” Slide Deck Samples of slides that can be used to ask students to introduce themselves to the teacher or class.
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List of Manipulatives Picture of manipulatives kids would find in the classroom that are clickable links to virtual manipulatives. Problem of the day could be surrounded by different tools and each student can pick which one they want to use to show their answer.
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A Web Whiteboard (https://awwapp.com/) Whiteboard for use on a computer or touchscreen and allows you to import images and slide decks. Has a free and paid version.
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Graphing Whiteboards via Desmos including plain whiteboards and several kinds of graph paper spaces including isometric dot paper, and triangular grid.
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Geogebra Virtual space to create and manipulate geometric shapes. You can manipulate the lines/vertices/shapes but you can’t collaborate with someone at the same time. (Ex. https://www.geogebra.org/geometry/mu5fsn9s)
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Hybrid Teacher Survival Guide by Emma Pass Recommended by multiple educators in this group.
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Which One Doesn’t Belong? A fun math problem we tried out to promote thinking and play with virtual manipulatives.
June 2020
This month we did a little bit of “how-to” teacher-led portions on technology (Google Meets was a new one for our group to play with!) but our main topics were about onboarding in the fall to help teachers/students/parents get used to a virtual classroom and how to “catch-up” from the Spring. We discussed a session Chelsea led on moving forward to next year looking at things like learning targets and standard flows. We also discussed Social and Environmental Justice instruction and shared links to articles and lessons the group found helpful or interesting.
Special shout out to Chelsea Mcclellan, Jackie Booker, and deb stetson
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Flow Chart of Standards, color coded A page of all the standards where the one you select is GREEN. The Standards supporting that one are BLUE and the standards supported by the selected standard are RED. The darker the color, the more critical the standard is to supporting, or being supported by the selected standard.
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Useful tools for distance learning, categorized by purpose (Organized by Fawn Nguyen)
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Sara Van Der Werf’s Green Sheets We didn’t have time to discuss but it looked like an interesting topic and method of review with one page and 55 minutes (at once or spread out) to focus on prioritizing the important “stuff”
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Alternatives to “How Are You?” A blog post that offers alternative and more specific questions to ask to find out how people are really doing.
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Mathalicious (https://www.mathalicious.com/) A site with social justice math lessons
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High School BLM Lessons for all disciplines These lessons were compiled by another group in Google Drive
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Meet Anguish with Action - A short 6 minute video, the first of an ongoing workshop series.
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Activist Farmers Tell the Food System That Black Lives Matter
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YunSang Hwang's Visual Pattern #387 - This link will take you to a jamboard that has the visual pattern problem and how our individual breakout rooms processed the pattern and then how the whole group processed it together and debriefed. We found this problem on Fawn Nguyen’s twitter. Here is some additional visualization to explain the algebra we were thinking in looking at this problem. (Thanks for sharing Kyle!)
May 2020
Between exchanging news on what everyone's schools, districts, and county's were doing we discussed what Fall might look like, the importance of Social Emotional Learning, and found some relief in fun math games!
There was also some really cool discussions on progression of standards, which continued into June.
Special shout out to Fawn Nguyen, Jackie Booker, Chelsea McClellan!
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Social Emotional Learning and Math Lesson Integration (Thanks Stephen!)
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Universal Design for Learning delivered online is discussed in this video by Katie Novak and Tom Thibodeau in a "fireside chat" type format or read her blog post
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Squeeze Dice Game teaching place value, further directions and video are in the presentation notes of the slide.
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Looking to the Fall Part 1: Welcoming and Supporting K-5 Students is the first in a multi-part series.
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Supporting Math Educators in Determining Next Steps: Standards and Progression Documents a template/tool for grade level teams to reflect on what has been learned, what has yet been learned, and what has not been taught.
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“I Can” statements by grade and standard for reflection (could be done by teachers or students)
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Factris is a fun and engaging tetris style math game
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Estimathon - a link to what they are, how to run one, and templates
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Math Taboo is just like the regular game Taboo but more fun because, MATH!
Spring Archive 2020
Our first official meeting was on March 20, 2020! Looking back on the notes from the first two months of meetings are fascinating but are mainly discussions and aren't as relevant to our classrooms now.
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Same or Different? Is a website that provides elementary students opportunities to construct arguments when comparing objects, such as numbers or shapes.
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Math Choice Boards K-2 There are links to other grade level choice boards on Slide 4
Special shout out to all teachers that in the face of the adversity and unknown continued working harder than ever. We see you.