As you complete your grading for the academic year, consider whether your course grading system promotes a learning orientation or a task-completion orientation. Changing a course grading system to focus almost entirely on summative projects produced final grades that rewarded quality over participation and effort.

When students are engaged in project-based learning, the classroom becomes an active community.. Students are using mathematics practices, talking, and working together to solve problems and complete complex tasks. Students often think of PBL as fun, unaware of the intense learning that’s taking place. It’s necessary to purposely assess this learning during PBL instead of using traditional testing. By doing so, evidence can be evaluated by rubrics through PBL.

Talking in the mathematics classroom is an essential skill for students. But HOW do we get students to talk math with one another? What steps can we take to support discussion in the mathematics classroom?

In this blog, we explore some of the benefits of engaging students in PBL and provide practical advice for how to implement PBL successfully. We will focus on PBL in relation to mathematics teaching and learning and address transitional math.

Formative assessments take many different forms: exit tickets, quizzes, rough drafts of written assignments, prototypes for projects, and more. Whenever you have evidence of students learning, it can be used as a formative assessment. Even the summative test results can be used to see areas of strengths and weaknesses to inform the teaching of future classes.

I know that you’re giving everything you can to your schools right now, leaving very little time to read through emails and blogs. For Almy Education’s last February blog post, I’ve recapped all of our February communications (newsletters, blogs, emails, etc.), all in one centralized location.

The concept of the exit ticket is that students must turn in a ticket before exiting the class. They are quick to administer, only requiring the last two to three minutes of class and they can provide good information on where students are in terms of next steps. In this blog, we talk about these four main purposes and how these exit tickets benefit you or your students.

We cannot address data analysis without discussing how to represent data and communicate it clearly using graphs. Similar to the data analysis process, we usually tell students how to create a graph, but rarely let them try, and fail, to make an appropriate graph for themselves. This week, we’ll address how to teach students to make appropriate choices when it comes to creating graphs.

From Christmas to Hannukah, Diwali to Kwanzaa this time of year there are many celebrations in many different cultures. Why is this so? Explore the science behind this time of year and how different cultures celebrate this natural phenomenon.

In the last two blogs, we identified the magnitude of the STEM gender gap and some reasons why this gap exists. If the past blogs were a call to action to bridge the gap, this blog is the action plan.