Tag: organisation

Links Picnic #2

Links Picnic is an opportunity for us to share things from around the web that help and inspire maths teachers. Here are my picks. Please add yours in the comments section. You can leave a link to your own Links Picnic!

–A nice world clock that can be used between lessons or during registration. It includes world statistics that are continuously updating.

—WiseStamp for an interactive email signature.

–The $2 Interactive Whiteboard. I’m calling this the medi-whiteboard, since I already use mini-whiteboards.

–An article I’m reading by Alfie Kohn about homework, entitled Do Students Really Need Practice Homework?

–Some ideas for displaying student testing data in the classroom. How motivating is this, I wonder?

–I am looking for an app or program that helps me organise my to-do lists over my mac at home, PC at work, and phone (Android). Pocket Informant does look useful, but is just for my phone. Do you have a suggestion?

What links have impacted you recently?

“Expose the Scaffolding”

Students aren’t mind readers. They can’t hope to understand what I’m looking for in homework, classwork, or group work unless I help them. I’ve received some funny homeworks when I haven’t made my expectations clean; mostly tiny amounts of work that a student thinks is the minimum they can get away with. For example, a sentence when I was expecting a paragraph, or one calculation when I was expecting a whole page. And who can blame them, if they don’t know what to do or why they should do it.

A colleague lent me a booklet of photocopied articles he’s reading about student motivation. “Teachers should spend more time explaining,” one of the articles expounds, “explaining why we teach what we do, and why the topic or approach or activity is important and interesting and worthwhile.” This reminds me of the advice of Paul Muir, one of my first teaching mentors: always “expose the scaffolding”. Make clear to your students why you are doing what you do. For example, he advised me to explain my marking strategies. Or to say why you are giving homework and what purpose it will serve. Explain where the course is going or how today’s work will fit in. Paul said this over and over again–it has been engraved into my memory now.

If we let students in on our planning and organising secrets, they are more likely to complete tasks well. They will know what is expected of them and more often hit the target. And they will catch some of our enthusiasm when we talk about maths.

things that worked

It really works to have all the next week’s worksheets copied up the Friday before. What a difference this makes to the ease of planning, especially homework. And what a difference it makes to my sanity. I pushed on Friday to get it all done and it really paid off today.

Better planned lessons are easier to manage. Behaviour was easier when I was calm and not flustered.

Organisation is everything. Mum said this summer, “Money spent on organising is never wasted.” To this I now add, “Time spent on organising is never wasted either.”

Reading something different (or different-ish) at lunch and directly after school relaxes my day. Funny how I have learned so many strategies for keeping my emotions and energy constant during the day and week. Sometimes (often?) a successful day is judged by whether I have survived. I wonder when/if I will move on to evaluate success by how much students learn.

proud and aspirational

I am so pleased with having everything sorted in my classroom and I have effectively kept it that way for one day! Woohoo. So to ensure this continues I need to spend some time every day tidying up.

I have so many ideas for what I want to do this term. (These are only a few.)
Pay a bit more attention to my tutor group.
Keep on top of my marking.
Create some G&T resources.
Read articles from maths journals.
Read Lessons in Play.
Read and read some more.

God, help me to use my time wisely. I feel full of aspirations and I’m looking forward to accomplishing a lot. But I know myself and that I get sidetracked by other things (and often good things) and my own laziness. Please help me to learn balance and also to motivate myself.