by Tom | Oct 10, 2022 | classroom practice, lessons
I had a delightful opportunity to join a planning meeting with a group of teachers from one of the schools we work with in Chicago. The team was working on a lesson for their 8-year old students about interpreting remainders in problem contexts. Here is how the...
by Tom | May 9, 2016 | classroom practice
A surprisingly difficult but critically important part of designing a lesson is establishing the learning goals. Many teachers write learning goals in the form of behavioral outcomes: “Students will be able to…” Frequently this is what their administrators want, and...
by Tom | Jan 8, 2016 | classroom practice
What?? you might be thinking. What else could the teacher’s job be but to teach? The teacher’s job is to ensure that students learn – all of them, we hope, though we know we will usually fall short. In Japan, most (elementary) math lessons are designed as...
by Tom | Nov 11, 2015 | classroom practice, lessons, math topics
I am looking at a lesson research proposal for grade 5 on division of decimal values by a whole number. The problem the team plans to use is 4.26 ÷ 3, and their goal is for students to discover that the same processes they use to model division with whole numbers...
