Please visit https://thebeardedmathman.com/podcast to find show notes and other episodes.  E21 is about being creative and adapting the delivery of your message to students.  We cannot change our standards, but can change our support and approach.

To change the classroom dynamics and over all performance is a tricky thing, especially after the start of the school year!   Every classroom has a peer leader (often more than one).  While you're the teacher, the peer leader plays a powerful role and has great influence on the educational outcomes of all students in the class, even those that do not follow that person.  These leaders influence you, you must respond (good or bad), to their behaviors and actions and that has an impact on all students. https://thebeardedmathman.com/podcast/E20

What do you do when a group of unwilling participants struggle to perform depends largely on how you view your role.  In this episode we discuss two camps of thought, and a current predicament faced in my classroom as a result of my philosophy. https://thebeardedmathman.com/podcast

What works for classroom management varies greatly from teacher to teacher.  It also changes from teacher to class and from teacher to year.  The point is, there are not fast and hard rules (specific ones anyway), that work for everybody, all of the time.  Teaching is largely about the interplay and relationship between people.  That is highly dynamic, so the structure must be flexible, yet rooted strongly in a correct philosophy, in order to be effective.

Studying, done with purpose, is the best thing outside of the classroom a student can do to improve their learning.   Studying, done without purpose, is largely a waste of time.  In this episode we dive into how students can discover purpose in their studying, and how you can guide students in discovering and defining that purpose. Please visit:  https://thebeardedmathman.com/podcast/E17

A few excellent outcomes result from allowing student work to guide and drive discussion.  First, you end up teaching students, instead of covering material.  Second, you promote what needs to happen in order for learning to really occur:  discussion about confusion.  The third, and may most important thing that happens is that students take ownership of their learning and begin to develop the traits we desire of educated people. Please visit:  https://thebeardedmathman.com/podcast/E16 for the shownotes.

Are you about to start a unit that you know students find difficult?  By starting off with an over-arching question you give students both a lens, through which to evaluate the new information, and a scale that helps them evaluate the importance of each new piece of information. An over-arching question is a question that you would hope a student could answer at the end of the unit.  It's not a problem to be solved, or a technique to be used, but instead a question you may ask another math teacher about a topic.  By posing such a question to students at the beginning, and then expecting them to answer it by the end of the unit, it puts students in a new role as learners. Visit: https://thebeardedmathman.com/podcast/E15 for the show notes and the resources mentioned in the podcast episode.

Rational exponents, conceptually, are quite similar to multiplication by a fraction.  We will explore how multiplying by a fraction asks a question about repeated addition.  That will be tied into how a rational exponent asks a question about repeated multiplication. For more information and the show notes, please visit:  https://thebeardedmathman.com/podcast/E14

In this episode we discuss how to teach exponents conceptually and in a way that encourages the development of mathematical literacy.   For access to the materials described in the podcast, please visit https://thebeardedmathman.com/podcast/e13  Use promo code "exponents4free" to receive a 100% discount (FREE IS FAVORITE)!

Cambridge IGCSE is a fantastic college readiness program, and it is just breaking into the US market.  Their mathematics curriculum, for 9th and 10th grade students, is absolutely wonderful. In this episode we discuss why it is wonderful, and what it means for you, potentially. For more information, please visit:  https://thebeardedmathman.com/podcast/e12