Author: Bill McCallum

EDC course on the mathematical practices for high school teachers

/ Bill McCallum / Leave a comment

Here’s a note from Al Cuoco:

Friends,

For the past two years, we’ve been working with support from the MA department of education to create a course for high school teachers that helps them implement the Standards for Mathematical Practice. The approach of the design is to take examples suggested by the high school content standards—everyday, non-exotic content that is hard to teach and that causes students difficulty—and to develop that content in ways that are consistent with the practice of mathematics as it exists outside of high school, making the topics easier to teach, easier to learn, and more satisfying for everyone.

We field tested the course with over 100 teachers in two sessions over the past two summers at EDC. The a team of 10 colleagues (teachers who work with us) taught it in pairs in 5 sessions around the state at the end of last summer. All of this led to revisions, and we’re now publishing the course and offering it nationally. A sampler is at http://mpi.edc.org/dmp-hs-sampler

Grant Wiggins on Granularity

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Grant Wiggins has a great post about the dangers of breaking the standards down into statements of the finest possible grain size:

This problem of turning everything into “microstandards” is a problem of long standing in education. One might even say it is the original sin in curriculum design. Take a complex whole, divide into the simplest and most reductionist bits, string them together and call it a curriculum. Though well-intentioned, it leads to fractured, boring, and useless learning of superficial bits.

Read also his spirited defense of the standards a couple of days earlier.

To B or not to B

/ Bill McCallum / 9 Comments

Once every few months or so I receive a message about the following standard:

6.G.2. Find the volume of a right rectangular prism with fractional edge lengths by packing it with unit cubes of the appropriate unit fraction edge lengths, and show that the volume is the same as would be found by multiplying the edge lengths of the prism. Apply the formulas $V=lwh$ and $V=bh$ to find volumes of right rectangular prisms with fractional edge lengths in the context of solving real-world and mathematical problems.

See if you can guess what people think the problem is before reading on. Continue reading →

Draft progressions on high school Algebra and Functions

/ Bill McCallum / 13 Comments

I’m pleased to be able to give you the draft progressions on Algebra and Functions. These progressions are somewhat different from the K–8 progressions. Since the high school standards are not arranged into courses, the progressions are really more like descriptions than progressions; they are not in any particular curricular order. Furthermore, because each one covers a topic that occupies a large part of the high school curriculum, it gives less detail about how each standard might be addressed or how different standards might be arranged into various different curricular implementations.

Comments as always are welcome in the relevant forums: Algebra or Functions.

Illustrative Mathematics now plays nice with search engines

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One of the enhancements in the last release of Illustrative Mathematics was making the site crawlable by search engine bots. As a result, you can, for example, google “illustrations for A-SSE” and get direct links to the tasks that illustrate Seeing Structure in Expressions in the Algebra category. Googling “illustrations for 2.MD” takes you to the page in the illustration index which includes all the illustrations for 2.MD. Bing doesn’t seem to be working as well at the moment, but there is a bing bot crawling the site at the moment, so it may get better.

Improvements to Illustrative Mathematics

/ Bill McCallum / 3 Comments

The most recent upgrade to Illustrative Mathematics brings a number of improvements, the most visible of which is a searchable index of the illustrations, which is visible to all users, registered or not. In addition, registered can now add tags to tasks (such as “MP3” or “conceptual understanding”). These tags come from a predefined list at the moment; in the future we may allow users to create their own tags. And, the site now has a mock-up of what an illustration of a practice standard will look like, with a few sample materials such as videos, tasks, and slideshows. There are also lots of behind the scenes changes to make the site more useful for task reviewers and task editors.

New blog registration feature

/ Bill McCallum / 9 Comments

Now that I’ve moved the blog to a private hosting company, you can register to become a subscriber to the blog using the links on the right. This offers a bit more than the email subscription that has been available for a while. Becoming a subscriber means you can create a profile with some information about yourself, which will be available to people who read your comments (if you are logged in). It also gives you some (not many) controls over forum notifications. I may add more features as I discover them.

I will keep the current email notification feature for those who prefer to keep using that.

New forums

/ Bill McCallum / 6 Comments

If you have questions about the standards, please ask them in the forums (you can also always access this from the menu bar above). The old thread with questions is here, but it is no longer possible to add comments. Before posting a question, please use each of the search bars to the right to see if has already been answered.