Youcubed: Ideas and tasks for back to school

youcubed.org
youcubed.org

By Jo Boaler, Stanford University
"Youcubed" Project Director


We are excited about the new start to the school year, we hope you are too. The chance to change student’s lives as ever, is one of the most important jobs in the world. To help you we have made two new posts for you. One of them called Back to School Messages includes a document we have spent some time on, with our new publishing software; we hope you like it. It includes what I think are the 7 most important norms to set in math classes, along with ideas on how to set the norms and resources to help you. In the same post we have included our favorite assessment for learning strategies that we chose with David Wees (thanks David!).

In the second post we have chosen 3 tasks that we think are perfect for setting back to school norms. We chose them as they all include students actively thinking about math and learning to reason and be convincing. We will keep adding to our database of tasks, so do keep coming back to youcubed when you would like some ideas.

As a reminder, we also think the student MOOC would be a really good start to the year. There is a teacher guide inside the MOOC which suggests that you get students to take 1 lesson each week. 30,000 students are taking the class now and from the thousands that have finished, 72% said they have a stronger belief that they can do well in math, which is a really good way to start the year. We hope that they are armed with the powerful math strategies that the MOOC teaches too.

Other reminders – on the right of the page under the teacher/administrator/parent or student tabs there are now groupings, of tasks, papers and the other resources on the site.

Enjoy the last days of summer if you are not back at school yet, and here’s to the greatest year ever, if you are.

Vive le revolution,

Jo
youcubed.org

http://youcubed.org/teachers/2014/back-to-school-messages/
http://youcubed.org/teachers/2014/back-to-school-tasks/