I find that going to professional conferences like Illinois Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Metropolitan Mathematics Club of Chicago (MMC) to be really useful. I always always always learn something that I use in my classroom the next day. I also get to meet other professionals and share best practice. I think it's really important and I've met some really wonderful people so far.
The problem is that any day I get to go to a great professional development day, my students miss out because I'm not in the classroom. AND it's a ton of extra work creating sub plans the day before. Last year, I started to prepare a few students to "take over" if I knew I was going to be gone beforehand. I would take two of my strongest students to lecture, give quizzes, or anything else I would have done if I were absent. This year, I'm at a new school and we have block schedule. At the last ICTM conference, I knew that one of my classes would be very behind if I wasn't there. I decided to prepare two of my students outside of class for what I would have covered. They were used to the norms of teaching each other and respecting each other's voices in the classroom. They're still working on this but they've done this enough that it wasn't such a huge transition. I told my two students to give them a short quiz at the end of the period. Not surprisingly, many of the students did well even though some of the material covered was based on the lecture my two students provided. I think I'll do this more often
0 Comments
|
ms. eugooglesmathematics teacher Archives
September 2016
Categories
All
|