Collaborative Learning at the College Preparatory School in Oakland

Thanks to Pam Patterson at La Jolla Country Day School for sending me to read this.

Falling in Love With Boat Building

Why I teach.

(A speech I gave to the Cum Laude Society at La Jolla Country Day School, later published in LJCDS360, a Country Day promotional publication, in Summer 2010. )

Collaborative Investigation and the Flipped Classroom

Introduction
My first year of teaching was in 1995 at an innovative, elite private high school in San Francisco named Lick-Wilmerding. The math department at Lick-Wilmerding employed a method of teaching which was unfamiliar to me and to most teachers at the time. Students worked in small groups of 3 or 4, exploring geometric relationships on a shared laptop and reporting their findings in documents written as if they were lab reports. Studying algebra, students used graphing calculators to explore functions dynamically and again, report their findings in written form accompanied by detailed examples and analysis. Students would receive direct instruction when necessary, but for the most part questions were explored and answered by members of the groups themselves. I adapted hesitantly to this new structure, as I myself had been taught by teachers and professors using lecture combined with repetitive homework. Over my subsequent years of teaching in the states I explored a range of methods tailored to the various cultures of the schools at which I taught. This included straight lecture and homework, a mixture of lecture and independent class work, and collaborative group work supported by a traditional textbook. Finally, now at the American School of Valencia, I’ve developed a suite of collaborative investigations which allow my ninth and tenth grade math students to explore mathematical concepts much as they explore scientific concepts in laboratories. This is supported by online resources which include videos and extra practice problems.

When are we ever going to use trigonometry?

In the summer of 1994 I worked at an outdoor education center in Montana. We lived in crumbling Forest Service barracks on the north fork of the Flathead River. The Douglas Fir forest swarmed with deer, at night we heard mountain lions. Every week a bus would ramble up the dirt road and empty a rabble of fifth graders versed enough to recognize a bull trout but still thrilled to see otters riffling the river, and recoiling in nervous delight from binoculars when they spotted a grizzly on the adjacent huckleberry mountain. Teaching kids about the outdoors in a place so wild was like teaching art history in Le Louvre.