Matt Schaeffer
mschaefferedu.bsky.social
Matt Schaeffer
@mschaefferedu.bsky.social
60 followers 170 following 6 posts
He/Him | Math Educator 🧮 | Building Thinking Classrooms 🧠 | Dog Dad 🐕🐕| #Smashville Hockey Fan 🏒
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I've been trying to put into words the shift I've been trying to make in my teaching. This one sums it up perfectly.
It is a job of mine to figure out how to engage students in the content. It is NOT my job to make content engaging.

There’s a difference and a lot of administrators and evaluators don’t know that.
Also wanted to start strong on Thinking Classrooms (@pgliljedahl.bsky.social) work after some struggles last year. Very grateful for @fawnnguyen.substack.com's piece on giving yourself permission to go off-script. Kids especially enjoyed the Chicken Nugget Task and showed so much thinking! 3/3
we filled up our class jars of Math-y activities. Ended up leading to a great moment of pointing out that we have succeeded in Math, even if we didn't realize Math was happening at the time! I was able to snap a photo of one student's Jar that captured some of the positivity of the lesson. 2/3
New school year is into full swing, so most of this is now several days old, but I wanted to show off some of the great things my students have been doing already. One of the things I knew I wanted to start with this year was some Math Therapy (@themathguru.bsky.social) so in our second class... 1/3
There was some apprehension at first, but after a week they are loving it! So many good conversations and ideas I never would have expected!
Inspired by @themathguru.bsky.social's session at Calgary Teachers' Convention, I've been starting every Math class with low-stakes Math Talk question. Here was today's -How Many Do You See? (Dice Talk image via Dave. Martin)