Engineering A Better School
Recently, in my bioengineering course, we were having a lively discussion about “ideation” - thinking of novel, crazy, outside-the-box solutions to problems in the world we saw as urgent. As I watched my students come up with solutions to their problems - a color sensor for burnt toast, a pressure sensor to detect fouls on the soccer field, low-cost motion sensors to detect speeding cars - I was struck with a question: Why don’t we do this type of “engineering design” more of
Knowing Your Audience
In my second day at graduate school, my education professor gave my class advice that was very simple but memorable. He said, “A great teacher is like a great entertainer, you need to know your audience.” Later that day while I was sitting on the Q train heading home after class, I thought about what my professor said and looked back at my experiences as a NYC public school student; I had several exceptional teachers in elementary and middle school, but when I thought back to
Problem Posing: Generating Questions for Exploration
Students are asked a tremendous amount of questions daily, and yet they rarely spend time crafting their own questions or answering questions posed by their peers. This is true in my own math classroom, where most math problems encountered by students come from textbooks, digital curricula, blogs and suggestions from colleagues at school and on Twitter. But lately, I have been asking students to pose their own mathematical problems, with much success. What exactly is problem