Differentiated Coaching for Educators

"I don't get it." How many seconds do your students spend thinking about a problem before you hear those words? So many think that "Fast equals smart." Therefore, if can't instantly come up with a plan of attack, students think they need to ask for outside help. As I work with teachers to instill the truth that, "Smart is what you get when you work hard," we have to develop perseverance as a habit of mind.

To this end, we've a rubric students will use to evaluate their work on rich problems. (more…)

Frequently, I lead mathematics teachers through a problem from the wonderful site, www.nrich.maths.org, designed to help students develop mathematical conversations skills and value cooperative work. The problem asked participants to solve equations such as 19*24; 227 + 198; 57.6/2; 101*16*4, and so on, and then work as a group to agree on the most efficient method for each problem. For the first one, teachers often use the standard algorithm for multiplication. However, some will multiply 20*24 and subtract 24. Much faster. THEN the rest of the teachers immerse themselves in finding elegant ways to do the rest of the problems. They begin playing with the numbers. My favorite method is changing the last problem to 101 * (2 to the 6th power). The teacher who came up with it said, "It's really not a fast way but I can't recall the last time I was so engaged with an arithmetic problem!" (more…)

I recently began reading, then frantically flipping through a major education publication on using multiple measures to assess student achievement. Every measure mentioned was basically a test of knowledge. I'm all for objective standards, but as I understand the real world, knowledge is the least important component of what students need to learn in school. Current estimates are that even the children leaving school with the highest test scores will have only 2 percent of the knowledge they need for careers in the 21st century. To attain the other 98 percent requires curiosity, critical thinking, the ability to ask great questions, and an imagination to consider possibilities beyond current reality. To summarize, what has become a trite phrase, "creating lifelong learners," needs to become central to education.

In fact, I think that the most important "multiple measure" might be student engagement--not whether students are superficially entertained in the classroom but whether they are interested enough to ask questions, dig a little deeper, or push to understand the relevance of a lesson to their lives. Why? Because curiosity creates the patterns of discovery that motivate lifelong learning. For many students, school is something they finish, not a place that sets up lifelong patterns. (more…)