One of the things I’d like to do this year is engage more students at their level. Perhaps try to have more class time where there are multiple activities/groupings simultaneously. The main idea behind this is that my one class, one-idea, one-option norm is almost guaranteed to miss the sweet spot for low and high learners. Daily I would think it means that someone in the room is spinning their wheels without traction.
So, I read The Differentiated Math Classroom and I’m picking through Differentiation in Practice: : A Resource Guide for Differentiating Curriculum, Grades 5-9. It was strange to go back to the old bound paper method of professional learning – most of mine usually takes place amongst you all on the internets. But, as far as I can see, the best resources for learning about differentiation are still printed, bound, and sold. They’re not yet offered up freely like so much of the great stuff folks are writing and sharing.
The first outcome from this is two simple documents that I drew up to provide a general overview of the units I plan to teach and the time frame in which I hope they’ll take place. The unit planning stage is where much of the thinking behind differentiation actually takes place, but this is a starting point.
Anyway, here are my year plans for Algebra and Geometry.
Scribd bug fix These documents showed up at lousy resolution for a long time. I wrote an email to scribd and had a response back in less than 24 hours (for a free service I’m impressed). Turns out that I had two lines in the latex code that were making the pdf tougher for the scribd reader to read. After deleting
\usepackage{emerald} %a package of free fonts
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} %font encoding to go along with the free fonts
The pdfs are back to high resolution, easiliy readable, scribd documents. To the other person in the world, if you’re out there, appreciating this solution: you’re welcome.
