While you deserve this much-needed break, it’s also an excellent time to catch up on items you missed during the year-end chaos. In case you missed my May series, “Redesign Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum” (videos below), I give practical information on buy-ins, funding, and impacted areas that will help you navigate your redesign.

Most of us will be going back to in-person learning in the fall, but we can’t go back to exactly how things were before the pandemic started. What are these lessons we have learned, and how do we use them when we see our students in person again?

Redesign always takes longer and is more involved than we first expect it to be. With many unforeseen components, those simple suggestions to “improve a course” or “enhance a placement policy” don’t stop there. Instead, they’re simply starting points. In this post, I give you practical information on the role of buy-ins, funding, and other impacted areas that will help you navigate your own redesign.

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.

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 April blog post, I’ve recapped all of our April communications (newsletters, blogs, emails, etc.), all in one centralized location.

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.

In a recent article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education president Brian Rosenberg challenges higher education to create real change while addressing the current crisis. His suggestion is, to begin with, the goal.

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?

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 March blog post, I’ve recapped all of our March communications (newsletters, blogs, emails, etc.), all in one centralized location.

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.