I’m baaaaaaack. My last post on this blog was six months ago, and that’s a shame. I’m shifting my “writing bucks” from the photo180 blog over to this blog. Some posts will feel a little photo180-y, but most will be more “fully featured”. 

Removing friction from the learning cycle in a classroom is super important. Whiteboards, group work and overall positive classroom culture geared towards taking risks and helping each other out can go a long way. Dan Meyer recently blogged about the classroom move of rough-draft talk. Although it was a small change to my normal classroom routine, it paid off quite well. I asked the students to make a rough-draft of a trig graph that we were working on. This was still early days with trig graphing, but after a four minute rough draft session, the students were ready to talk about the graph. Every graph in the room had things to build off of, and every set of students had a productive conversation about what to draw. They were all coming from somewhere positive. This is a classroom routine that I think will stick with me.