cvonrenesse's blog

Blog Posts by Dr. Christine von Renesse

 

A Perfect Presentation has Mistakes

I have seen in the classroom how students’ conceptual understanding grows out of getting lost, feeling confused and making mistakes. Yet at the end, I still tend to “tell” students to not make mistakes anymore or at least not to repeat mistakes. How? By assessing their learning with presentations, tests, written homework, and final exams using rubrics that give the highest score to the work that has no mistakes... So how can I avoid sending mixed messages and create better rubrics and assessments?
 

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Neurons in the Brain, Image 1

Mindset and Brain Science

Changing the mindset of our students, helping them understand how our brains work, how we actually learn is incredibly important for any mathematics class, from Kindergarten through graduate school. Since there is a lot of wonderful material, including blogs and videos, already published about this topic, I will use this blog to just present some of the main resources.

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Brian Katz: A Case for Teaching Inquiry

In this blog, Brian Katz is connecting beautifully the issues of equity and teaching using inquiry. He also promotes a special edition of PRIMUS which focuses specifically on inquiry-based teaching and learning.
 

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An Aspiring Teacher Learns about Inquiry by Videotaping a Semester of Calculus

In this blog, guest writer and aspiring teacher Lauryn Zaimes describes her insights into the intricacies of teaching with inquiry gained while videotaping a semester of Calculus. I hope that reading her experience will motivate practitioners like you to ask students to video tape your class sometime. While Lauryn clearly learned a lot from her experience, I learned at least as much!
 

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Mathematics of Maypole Dancing

This Fall (2016) the 13 students in my honors mathematical explorations class embarked on the journey of understanding some mathematical ideas behind maypole dancing. In this blog you can find some videos about maypole dancing, student work proving our conjectures and a beautiful writing project by Sarah Dunn about mathematics, running and maypole dancing.
 

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