October New Ideas

Last month, I had the pleasure to attend the Los Altos Ed Summit, which was a professional development day for teachers in the Los Altos School District. Rather than asking individual district administrators to lead workshops to teachers in separate staff rooms throughout the district, their leadership team brought all teachers together, inviting them and colleagues from other nearby communities to lead sessions that teachers could choose to attend.

After sharing some of my work around digital portfolios, I was able to attend two sessions led by Dan Meyer. Dan is a former secondary math teacher and current graduate student in math education at Stanford. His focus is using real-world problems and inquiry to make math more engaging and accessible for all students. He calls his lesson structure "The Three Acts of a Mathematical Story," and he has provided resources so that other teachers can replicate and build on his process. I hope that you will check out a video of him leading a group of teachers in a math lesson.