I have had the pleasure of working with Sheridan County School District #1 in Sheridan, Wyoming. Check out this view!
I could just drive down the road, look at mountains and the country and take in the views! I am on my second year working with two great schools: Big Horn Elementary and Tongue River Elementary/Slack School. We are working on “Making the Shift” in teaching 21st century math. I do some of our training virtually via a webinar, then I come to visit 2-3x a year and do some fun classroom coaching. The most rewarding part of this experience is seeing the growth of the teachers and walking through each building seeing students fall in love with math!
When I do job-embedded coaching at schools, teachers can pick from the following menu to apply concepts learned in our training.
1.) Modeling (I will model a concept with their students to show how to integrate)
2.) Co-Teaching (The teacher and I will co-teach a lesson together)
3.) PLC Work (Grade levels meet with me on a focused topic)
4.) Reverse Coaching (A teacher does a lesson where I observe and we reflect)
Out of 6 years of coaching on our project in schools, I have had two people choose option #4. One of those teachers is Joey Kozlowski, a third grade teacher in his second year teacher at Tongue River Elementary.
When Joey is in my training, I can literally see his mind processing the information and thinking ahead to how he can implement the strategies learned with his students. He even sent me this great video showing, after our last visit, how he got his students to apply the 8 SMPs and introductory multiplication concepts with the commutative property.
Click HERE to see the movie.
Introducing the Game: Uni-Slide…It was no surprise when I came for my visit in September that Joey wanted to show me a Math Anchor Task that he created to help bring in the 8 Mathematical Practice Standards. I told him I would love to help him take his idea and make it into a board to help share with other teachers his idea of getting students to start to problem solve.
Check out the game board HERE!
Here are some teachers during one of our training sessions trying out the Uni-Slide game board!