Vrain Waves: Teaching Conversations with Minds Shaping Education

Dan Meyer: If Your Content is The Aspirin, How Do You Create the Headache?

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Episode 011: Dan Meyer, Desmos

Dan Meyer has been revolutionizing math instruction for years, and in this episode he shares with us the importance of mentors in his life, a few of his favorite teaching mantras, mathematics as storytelling, and how to notice and develop perplexity.

Connect with Vrain Waves

Twitter: @VrainWaves | Becky Twitter: @BeckyEPeters | Ben Twitter: @mrkalb

Connect with Dan Meyer

Twitter: @ddmeyer | Website: blog.mrmeyer.com | Desmos

Links & Show Notes

  • Math is a (usually poorly told) story (02:22)
  • Put students in a place to experience new learning through a need
  • Dan’s math journey & mentors (4:20)
  • “Be Less Helpful” (6:58)
  • Let students do the interesting, important work of the thinking about the problem
  • Thanksgiving dinner task example - by giving all the information necessary you’re making the problem less interesting, losing the opportunity for deeper thinking, and blocking some students out
  • Discovery learning in the math classroom (9:52)
  • You can always add, you can’t subtract (11:08)
  • Once you add information, you change the nature of the challenge
  • 3-act math (Dan Meyer’s spreadsheet; Dan Meyer’s ‘How-to’ / Graham Fletcher’s EL resources (12:39)
  • Bucky the Badger task / Blog write up
  • One 5th grade student: “While we were figuring it out, our ideas changed and it changed the question we were asking.”
  • Subtract stuff from the problems in your curriculum (18:38)
  • Popcorn container task
  • Benjamin Baxter (20:23)
  • “Never assume anyone even cares.”
  • Teach math as though it were an elective
  • Perplexity / Curiosity: Teaching as a science - reproducible (24:23)
  • “Developing curiosity in ourselves and capturing those curious moments and presenting them in curious ways for other people, that has to be an ongoing discipline.”
  • Benefits of being a connected educator (27:31)
  • Quick growth; posing open questions and semi-formed ideas
  • Memorization in math (30:26)
  • Driving analogy
  • Having as much as you can in your long-term memory makes more interesting work possible
  • Practice with purpose, mix frequently with purposeful activities (not memorization drills)
  • Offer them pictures of where their memorization will be used
  • Math assessment (35:07)
  • Break learning objectives down into smaller grains of learning and assess on each
  • Standards-based Grading
  • Talk to him more about this @ddmeyer
  • Desmos (38:04)
  • Free calculators
  • Polygraph game
  • If [vocabulary] is the aspirin, what is the headache?
  • Students solve problems created by each other
  • Teacher.desmos.com for more free resources
  • Dan’s TED Talk
  • tinyurl.com/vrainwavesfeedback
  • Lots of other videos of Dan’s keynotes, ideas, etc…
  • Sign up for Dan’s newsletter on his blog
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    Vrain Waves: Teaching Conversations with Minds Shaping EducationBy Suzy Evans, Shane Saeed
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