ECST Mathematics Department
Newsletter
February 27-March 1, 2023
Embedded Files
ACTIONABLE ITEMs
BTC Ch. 7 Check-Your-Understanding
BTC Ch. 7 Check-Your-Understanding
From the Building Thinking Classrooms Chapter 7 Summary:
Homework, in its current institutionalized normative form as daily iterative practice to be done at home, doesn’t work. Almost every teacher I have interviewed says the same thing—the students who need to do their homework don’t, and the ones who do their homework are the ones who don’t really need to do it. The research confirmed this. The problem, it turns out, has to do with who students perceive homework is for (the teacher) and what it is for (grades) and how this differs from the intentions of the teacher in assigning homework (for the students to check their understanding). By rebranding homework as check-your-understanding questions and positioning it as an opportunity rather than a requirement, we saw significant changes in how students engaged with the practice and how they now approached it with purpose and thought.
At the February 22nd math department meeting we discussed for all team members to try this with one of your classes...
Try to shift from “homework/classwork” to “check-your-understanding”. Give it to your students with the answers (not worked out solutions), and emphasize how this is an opportunity for them to see whether they have understood what happened in their groups. Do not collect it, or [grade] it, and the next day provide the worked solutions for them to use to check whether they truly did understand it.
Your experiences will be discussed at the March 15th department meeting.
If you were not able to attend the February 22 department meeting, here is a video summery of chapter 7. She is a science teacher who suggests how this transition to check-your-understanding will look in her classroom. Start at 3:30 for the suggestion.
ALSO.... Here are the summaries of all the chapters:
REMINDERS & IMPORTANT NOTES
FRI., MARCH 10 - INSERVICE WITH DR. ERIC MILOU (USING DESMOS WITH IM)
MARCH 14 & 15 - NJGPA (11th grade only)
WED., MARCH 15 - MARCH DEPARTMENT MEETING Please bring your book!
APRIL 7-14 - SPRING BREAK
WED., APRIL 19 - APRIL DEPARTMENT MEETING Please bring your book!
TUE., APRIL 25 - SAT School Day (11th grade only)
TI-Innovator Rover
TI-Innovator Rover
The Rover's will be in the buildings shortly. These are the math team members who will be providing "garage space" and support for the TI Rovers in your buildings:
WCT: Arenstein & Tanion
NT: Lucas & Tewelde
PT: Shin, Zimmerman, Vodrazka, & Lopez-Cassano
Getting Started on TI Innovator Rover
International Day of Mathematics 2023
International Day of Mathematics 2023
MATHEMATICS FOR EVERYONE
Celebrating IDM in 2023 presents a bit of a challenge as the NJGPA assessment will be administered to the 11th grade students on March 14-16. Because of the limited available time during the season of testing, ECST will celebrate IDM on Wednesday, March 29th. This will also be the day the we will begin the ECST math competition, MATH MADNESS. We will be using the Arete Labs platform which will simplify the time and location constraints. I will be meeting with Mr. Bevilacqua, Ms. Antoine, and Mrs. Lopez-Cassano to discuss the logistics of getting started. Information will be disseminated at the March 15th department meeting.
Building Thinking Classrooms
Building Thinking Classrooms
Questions to reflect upon before we discuss chapters 10-12 at the March 15th department meeting:
Ch10: What is the primary goal for consolidating a task, activity, or lesson in your classroom?
Ch10: Does the way you currently consolidate a task, activity, or lesson encourage or inhibit thinking?
Ch11: For the students who write notes, why do they do it? Who do the students think the notes are for?
Ch11: Does the way you currently have your students take notes encourage or inhibit thinking?
Ch12: If you teach more than one math course or one subject, how does the spectrum of what you evaluate differ between courses/subjects?
Ch12: Does the way you currently choose to evaluate encourage or inhibit thinking?
PROFESSIONAL/INSTRUCTIONAL RESOURCES WORTH SHARING
We have purchased the subscription! Stay tuned for more information on creating an account.
Document links
New! Slideshows with real-time scoring
//www.problem-attic.com/realtime
New! Scramble multiple-choice answers on PDFs
//www.problem-attic.com/pdf-scrambling
Support for interactive question types
//www.problem-attic.com/interactive-questions
Splitting and merging documents with My Database
//www.problem-attic.com/mydatabase
Shortcuts - Navigation Panel & Random Selection
//www.problem-attic.com/shortcuts1
More information about key features
Happy 2023! With the new year came an important milestone for Problem-Attic: it now has upwards of 350,000 questions! In this email we’ll highlight the new content, starting with titles which were already on the main Select page.
State Assessments. All questions released through summer 2022 should now be in the database. (If we missed something, please let us know.) This includes about 1000 new questions each from CO, MD and NC, and another 3000 from AZ, MA, ME, MS, RI, and PA and TX.
NY Regents and NYS 3–8. The database has all exams through last August, including Spanish translations for Algebra 1, Living Environment, and Earth Science. 450 new Spanish Competency questions are there, too. (Look in World Languages.)
NC Math Contests. For NC State, WCU and UNCC, we added about five years’ of questions, or 1500 total. We’re now caught up with all tests (pre-COVID), and a topical sort will follow soon.
On the main Select page in Problem-Attic, you’ll also see these new titles:
Illustrative Mathematics. We created a separate link in the top-right panel because the database grew so large! We added more than 8000 questions for grades 3–5 and high school, both lessons and practice. (Middle school was already there.) This is an excellent curriculum—math teachers, please check it out.
UT Austin Science Olympiad (ATXSO). This is the start of a big move into SciOly! We’ve got two years covered so far, 2021 and 2022, with nearly 6300 questions for Divisions B and C. They’re organized by level and subject.
NASA Space Math. These questions, about 3000, are for teaching applications of math through space science. They’re organized by original source or “booklet”. (A big thank-you to the main author, Dr. Sten Odenwald!) Our plan is to re-organize all or most of the questions by topic or NextGen Science Standards. If you’re interested in working on such a project, you can get details here.
There’s a new feature in Problem-Attic which is connected to the growing database of questions. It’s called Public Frameworks. Briefly, it gives you a way to customize the database for a specific purpose. Currently, there are more than 20 frameworks available for you to install—and you can easily build your own. We’ll tell you more about this in a separate email. But you don’t have to wait. There’s already a re-alignment of questions to MA, TX and VA science standards, New Visions Math (NY), and two math textbooks. See this page to get started.
Everything described above is freely available when you sign up for Problem-Attic. For teachers at subscribing schools, we’ll quickly mention two updates: the Pre-Alg to Pre-Calc database has roughly doubled in size, to about 19,000 questions; and, on the panel called Additional Math and Science, you’ll see a new title, IM Paired Practice Questions. It has about 4700 original questions to go with the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. To learn more, click the info button on the panel.
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