Blog challenge Day2: New Technology for Collaboration in PBL

For the past two years, I have been lucky enough (or unlucky if you are less inclined to use technology) to have classroom sets of iPads for my geometry classes and have been able to experiment pretty easily with some different ways of teaching – collecting homework electronically (that was a fail), using Geogebra and […]

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TeachThought Blogging Challenge Day1: Goals for this Year

 OK, so I’ve decided to try to blog more this coming year (like I don’t have anything else to do working at a boarding school) and I happened to run across the TeachThought Blogging Challenge the other day, so I thought I would try to see how many of the 30 days, I might be […]

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What does “making students metacognitive” mean? – answering “why should someone learn?” in Math

So I recently tweeted a nice article that I read that discussed “12 Questions to Help Students See Themselves as Thinkers” in the classroom (not specifically the math classroom   Nice article about helping Ss be metacognitive http://t.co/duD22w6RTu #PBLmath #mathed pic.twitter.com/JGA7dPv4wr — Carmel Schettino (@SchettinoPBL) August 10, 2014 and appropriately, Anna Blinstein tweeted in response: […]

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Six of one, half a dozen of the other…I think not

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(Sorry, this is a long one! and caveat: I am not claiming that Wikipedia is the be all and end of definitions!) So according to Wikipedia, PBL means two things (well, three if you count Premier Basketball League, but that’s neither here nor there). If you look up PBL on Wikipedia, the first hit is, […]

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Keeping the Dice Rolling: Questioning in PBL

Returning from a week-long conference is always invigorating for me – not for the reasons that many people think.  I do appreciate the great feedback I get from my “teacher-students” that I interact with during the week who are so extremely eager to learn about PBL – this truly invigorates me and allows me to […]

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Looking for the Teacher of Grit

I’m in the middle of working on organizing my courses for the Exeter conference in about a week and something I’m really struggling with is trying to articulate to teachers how they can impart to their students this idea of grit in the PBL classroom.  So I started doing a little research online (besides looking […]

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Finding Inspiration In All Sorts of Places

“Kids will never understand fully if you just tell them the answer.  They have to break it down and understand it, take it piece by piece ‘cause if you get it straight on you’ll never know what happened. Like if you’re building something you’ll never understand how it’s built, you can never build it again […]

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PBL at NCTM 2014!

One of my major goals in attending the NCTM annual conference this year was to see how widespread PBL had become in terms of mainstream education practices across the US.  I have to say that this year there were quite a few sessions that had PBL in the title or as the central theme and […]

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What I learned over my NCTM break!: Part 1

Wow!  What an amazing three days I spent at the NCTM annual conference in New Orleans!  I can’t believe how much I learned (which actually never amazes me and always humbles me – one of the many reasons I love going to these conferences.)  I also hate leaving and knowing that I missed at least […]

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Handouts – Front and Center

I always try to make it easy for people to find both my slides and handouts when I give a talk – so Here’s my powerpoint presentation from my talk entitled, “Change the Classroom, Not the Students: Creating Equity with PBL”  which I’m giving today at the NCTM Annual Conference in New Orleans – great […]

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