Carson's Blog

This infographic summarizes the 3 most important points from Chapter 4 of How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures. In addition, a connection to Gura's ideas about a creative learning environment and suggested tools that will help implement this style into a classroom.  

 Authentic Intellectual Work is focused on students accessing a deep connection to the learning happening in the classroom. This is centered around construction of knowledge, disciplined inquiry, and application into the real world. This is very different from a typical classroom. In my experience in a math classroom specifically, the teacher says what we are learning, has us take notes on the topic, we do an example together and then we have time to do some on our own. The problems we are working on are just skill and drill types and there is little conversation about what the variables or numbers mean in these situations, let alone how this applies to our lives. Now that I am teaching math myself, I am using a problem based curriculum. This curriculum is focused on authentic intellectual work. Students are given a problem that could easily be translated to their real lives, and they have to work on how to come up with strategies or a solution on their own. They are encouraged to ...

Intro My name is Katie and I have been teaching for 7 years. My career started in Springfield, Massachusetts where I taught middle school math for a couple years, and currently I am teaching in New York City. I am currently teaching high school Algebra. My future goal is to move to Connecticut and continue to teach high school math. ISTE Standard: 1.5.b. collect data or identify relevant data sets, use digital tools to analyze them, and represent data in various ways to facilitate problem-solving and decision-making. NYC Standard: AI-S.ID.3 Interpret differences in shape, center, and spread in the context of the data sets, accounting for possible effects of extreme data points (outliers). Lesson Idea: To address both of these standards, students could work in groups or partners and create a statistical question that they would like to collect data on about the class. Then, they could collect the data for the question using their classmates. Using Excel, students could input the data u...