Have a penny with you and have it heads for when you call on a female student in your class. Make it tails when you call on a male. If it’s staying tails for a while then it’s time to call on a women. Or you could just call on a female student after every time you call on a male student. You also do not have to wait for a student to raise their hand to call on them. Several strategies by others have been mentioned. I used to have my students write their names on one side of an index card and leave the other side blank. Then I would randomly select from the cards to call on students to share out. It also worked for dividing students into groups and randomly calling on a student to share out from a group.

I was able to facilitate some workshops for the NCTM Winter Institute and learned about a fun strategy for collaboration from another facilitator, Alyssa Hoslar. A group of students has a problem or question that they have been working on or thinking about (possibly from homework or something else). The each write their answer on a post it note. Then they draw a circle or doughnut in the center of a piece of paper and have four line segments sticking out from the circumference of the circle or doughnut. Each student puts their post it note at the end of one of the line segments. Then students rotate the circle or doughnut so that they can all see each other’s answers and discuss and ask each other about the thinking behind each one. After students agree on one answer they write it in the circle or doughnut.

I am thinking of modifying a math class protocol I have used to help students solve hard problems together and bringing it to the climbing gym to use while working on a problem with my friends.

1. We all look at the boulder problem or route and try to notice and share anything that looks interesting
2. Anticipate where it might get hard or the crux
3. One of us give it a shot / everyone else watch what they do
4. What was interesting about what they did? What could they have done differently? Was anything missed? Where were they smooth and fluid?
5. Repeat 3 and 4 for everyone in the group
6. How do our strategies compare? Which ones might each of us decide to use? (We can agree to use different strategies to meet our individual strengths, heights, mood, etc.)
7. Keep going until we get it. If not share what we think is important so that when we tackle it next climbing session we are...

Protocols and structures can be a powerful way to help students do things with guidance that they might struggle to do at first and a good way to help meet the goals of a lesson or unit. They can be a stepping stone for both teachers and students to something more organic. I think protocols should be subject to modification to meet the needs of the students and the class. They can be thought of as evolving. Some protocols are developed by both the teacher and the students together. Those are my favorite because they become a structure and ordered way of accomplishing something owned by the community of learners in the classroom.

Here is a protocol to help students get started and go deeper in noticing things:

1. Display focal point of protocol (student work, math task, Do Now, activity, geometric figure, etc)
2. Write - Have students write down what they notice or wonder about the...

A powerful tool for helping a class to function more like a community of learners supporting each other is how guidelines and goals are established for an activity and then later revisited. This something that is good to do when an activity or task is done with the class the first time.

Establishing Shared Goals

A very general idea of one way to go about this would be to have an activity say, a math problem that requires students to work in pairs and then make posters and then share those posters. Before starting the activity the whole class can be asked what are some rules, guidelines, or norms (depending on your schools preferred lexicon) they think are important and they can share out and have them listed on the board. This should only take a few minutes. After that they can be asked how they can support and encourage each other and themselves in maintaining those rules.

During...

The number one common core standard of math practice relates to students persevering with productive struggle. Studies have been done showing the direct relationship between how long a student is willing to work on a problem before quitting and their eventual academic success in mathematics. So how can not only the teacher support students to stick with problems and keep at it, but also students help each other to increase this trait?

Some options in no particular order:

• Encouragement to notice everything they can about a problem. This can help students to see essential pieces of information they would not otherwise catch and can also help them make connections or think of it in a different way. This can be done collaboratively.

• Encouragement to share with each other all the strategies and tools they have to solve a problem.

• Opportunities for them to ask each other probing questions...

In his book, Embedded Formative Assessment, Dylan Wiliams devotes an entire chapter to “Activating learners as instructional resources for one another.” How does student collaboration mirror or compare to teacher collaboration? How can one practice support the other practice?

There are multiple reasons why good teacher collaboration can be powerful. One reason that might be overlooked sometimes for teachers to collaborate is so that they can work through and experience how to effectively collaborate themselves as a team and in that process help students do the same. It can be hard to get someone else to do something that they have not experienced themselves. Even if they have experienced good collaboration or group work it is important for it to be an ongoing thing still fresh in the mind. When I struggle with team/group norms and structures it helps me to think about how students...

In war even the most well laid plans are not built upon static elements. Things change in the heat of battle. There is randomness and numerous variables shifting. Even if all elements of a situation were to be stable and predictable there might be too many to catalog them all. Yet generals still send out scouts, use spies, pore over maps, look at numbers, assess results from skirmishes and battles. They gather as much information as possible to make appropriate plans and adjustments to those plans. They are not just passively reacting but rather proactively anticipating challenges and adjusting plans constantly.

“No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one.”
–Dwight D. Eisenhower

Effective math teachers map out the year, map out units, and have ideas for lessons. Yet at the same time effective teachers constantly assess what students are...

Math teachers simply taking time to do math together on a regular basis can be a beautiful thing. As I see it math teachers can do two types of mathematics together:

• math that is interesting and informative purely for the teachers’ benefit
• math that is meant to be given to students.

Both types have their benefits and sometimes there can be overlap.

What are some of the benefits of collaborating on math that they might not use in their own classroom with their own students?
There are several reasons for this, so I doubt I will be able to thoroughly touch on all of them. For teachers to experience again (and again) what it is to learn something fresh allows them to reflect on what helps them on their process and what actually helped them learn and grow. This in turn can help them in a pedagogical level. Doing it together can allow more insights and the opportunity to share...