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When asking for answers, an equitable way to include all student thinking and reasoning.  You can also go with good old-fashioned popsicle sticks.

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What To Do Under Quarantine?

You'll have to take our word for it that the wheel landed on Phone an old friend. Your browser cannot display the wheel of choices. Please upgrade to a newer browser that supports HTML5 (most new ones do). Wheel Decide would normally show a wheel right here with choices that you can set (lunch, games, dinner, anything!). You can spin it to get a random decision. Make your own wheel of dinner, wheel of fortune, wheel of lunch, wheel of whatever you want now!

What's Wheel Decide?

Wheel Decide is a free online spinner tool that allows you to create your own digital wheels for decision making, prize giveaways, raffles, games, and more. Browse through our wheels and spin to randomize your life and make the decisions that have no wrong answers.

Decision Making

Let the wheel decide. Save your energy for the big decisions

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Can't decide? Wheel Decide for you! Set your own custom choices and then spin the wheel to make the random decision of lunch, movie, or anything! Make your own wheel of dinner or whatever now!

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Helping students to develop growth mindsets.

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Jo talks about brain pathways during Walk the Graph activity

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Stealing form Language Arts class?

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When math lessons emphasize collaboration and exploration over performance, students become more engaged and confident math thinkers.

Barrie Fanton / agefotostock / Alamy Stock Photo

Writing, discussing, and revising rough drafts is standard practice in language arts classes. But to Amanda Jansen, a junior high math teacher, author, and professor at the University of Delaware's School of Education, "rough draft thinking" is also a powerful tool for making the math classroom an inclusive, engaging place of shared exploration where students feel comfortable thinking aloud as they problem-solve.

Producing rough drafts of math problems, and discussing them in class, is "liberating for students because they can start to see how they're contributing to their colleagues' learning in a lot of different ways," Jansen says in an interview with KQED's MindShift. "After the initial shift, [students] start to get more excited, like, 'Wow, my ideas actually matter.' Everyone feels included in that kind of environment."

When the focus of math class evolves from emphasizing right or wrong answers-and the frequently public judgement that accompanies that high-stakes style of learning-to a collaborative environment where kids feel motivated to explore and take risks, students respond by becoming more engaged and confident about sharing their ideas. "[Students] show up with this sense of just feeling happy to be there," says Jansen. "They are more likely to just put something out there, whether it's in the group work or coming up to the document camera to share their thinking. They tend to feel proud."

Putting rough draft math into practice

When Christine Hubbard, a math teacher in Middletown, Delaware, uses rough draft thinking with her seventh-grade students, she defines the process briefly for her students and then moves directly into a number talk during which she explains the lesson-in this case: visualizing how to chunk sets of dots to make sets easier to count. Then Hubbard briefly shows her students a domino-like figure and asks them how many dots they see.
Courtesy Stenhouse Publishers
"I want you, in your mind, to be thinking about how many dots there are," she says to the class. All her students report seeing eight dots.

Hubbard steers the conversation toward examining students' strategies with questions like "Can anyone be brave enough to share and justify why they think there's eight dots up there?" On a whiteboard-or using Google Slides during synchronous learning-one student draws a set of five dots, like the side of a dice, plus a group of three dots; another student draws two horizontal lines of three dots and an additional two in the middle; and yet another draws a shape that loosely resembles a diamond composed of six dots.
Courtesy of Stenhouse Publishers
Students discuss what to call the diamond-like shape: maybe a "thingy," suggests one student or a "weird rectangle," says another. "Yes, you could describe it that way," Hubbard encourages. Finally, a student suggests that because the shape has two pairs of parallel sides, it could be a parallelogram. Hubbard confirms that yes, it is indeed a parallelogram. Guided by Hubbard, and with multiple students contributing ideas along the way and engaging in the type of verbal exploration that helps learners absorb and connect mathematical concepts, the class arrived at the "correct" answer.

Rough draft thinking can engage more students

Incorporating rough draft thinking into an existing math curriculum can feel like a big lift, but Jansen says the investment pays off: the practice winds up becoming more efficient over time as teachers become more adept at building in revision expectations and experiences.

Getting frustrated students to re-engage with mathematics, after all, is "not as simple as making problems relevant, or connecting them to the real world," writes K-12 math and science coordinator Matthew Beyranevand. "To get students interested in math, we need to provide opportunities for students to authentically inquire. We want kids-not the textbook or the teacher-to ask the questions."

That's where Jansen says framing math as a shared exploration comes into play, giving more students a chance to contribute to collective problem-solving and communal understanding of mathematical concepts. When "everyone's ideas have strengths in them and the teacher points out what's valuable about the drafts, and [students'] peers start to point out what's valuable, then everyone is seeing each other as having some mathematical strengths," Jansen suggests.

It also provides teachers with the opportunity to be more intentional about helping students, who are often riddled with math anxiety and lack confidence in the subject, see themselves as mathematicians. Math is "plagued by stereotypes and many students think math isn't for people who look like them," writes high school math teacher Dylan Kane. "As a math teacher, it's my responsibility to offer counternarratives that help students see themselves as mathematicians and expand what they think it means to 'do mathematics'."

Keeping track of who is being called on in class is critical here so that teachers aren't inadvertently creating new equity dilemmas by positioning the same group of students-girls or Black or LatinX students, for example-as only capable of presenting work that's rough, versus others being consistently recognized for work that's more developed. Refined and brilliant thinking, Jansen says, can come from any student. "We need to make sure not only are [diverse students] having a voice, but their strengths are being really looked at," she says.

For shy, quiet kids who might prefer to keep their math thinking to themselves, Jansen gently challenges them to share in class. She also likes to offer opportunities for writing-usually when the class is working on revision-as a low-stakes way for introverted kids to participate. "Every time we're being asked to articulate our thinking, we make new connections or crystallize our ideas just by trying to put them into words or into writing," Jansen says.

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Rough Draft Thinking Can Make Math Class More Inclusive

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When math lessons emphasize collaboration and exploration over performance, students become more engaged and confident math thinkers. Barrie Fanton / agefotostock / Alamy Stock Photo Writing, discussing, and revising rough drafts is standard practice in language arts classes.

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Great problems for discussing different approaches and making connections.

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Explore these patterns with your students and watch their natural tendencies to see patterns morph into powerful algebraic thinking and reasoning. It’s an ideal routine to foster mathematical practice #7 - look for and make use of structure.

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Fantastic strategy for showing that mistakes are an important part of the learning process.

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Super fun and really tap into creative problem solving and thinking.  #unitchat on Twitter

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Topics: Mental math, numerical fluency; argument & critique
Materials: White board or projector
Common Core: Variable, but especially MP3, MP1, and NBT

Counting with respect to different units.

Unit Chats are one of the great openers developed in the last few years. The emphasis is on different units within the image. Students can answer "how many" with respect to the different options of units presented by the picture, and also relate the units to each other to build the framework for a deeper understanding of multiplication, division, and fractions.

Truly a knockout opener.

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Topics: Mental math, numerical fluency; argument & critique Materials: White board or projector Common Core: Variable, but especially MP3, MP1, and NBT Counting with respect to different units. Unit Chats are one of the great openers developed in the last few years. The emphasis is on different units within the image.

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Love to use this when introducing a new topic or module. Start with questions !

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Developed by the Right Question Institute, the Question Formulation Technique, or QFT, is a structured method for generating and improving questions. It distills sophisticated forms of divergent, convergent, and metacognitive thinking into a deceptively simple, accessible, and reproducible technique.

The QFT builds the skill of asking questions, an essential - yet often overlooked - lifelong learning skill that allows people to think critically, feel greater power and self-efficacy, and become more confident and ready to participate in civic life.

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What is the QFT? - Right Question Institute

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The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) is a simple but rigorous step-by-step process designed to help […]

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Use classwork and mistakes to understand student thought processes.

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The ultimate Growth Mindset approach!!

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Having high expectations for ALL students.

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Mistakes offer an opportunity to learn.  It helps to drive the lesson. 

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Mistakes offer an opportunity to learn.  It helps to drive the lesson. 

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I want to use some of the strategies that get students up and learning, using group processing, seeing things in a different way.

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I love doing this with my seniors. It gets students talking and trying different strategies in a low stakes environment. I also have students "spy" on other groups to see how they are making the different shapes.

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Grade: 9 - 12

This is one of our favorite team building activities. Students work together using a rope to create 3-D shapes. The teacher plays the role of the skeptic and asks students to justify how they know their shape satisfies its defined characteristics. Students will need everyone in their group to successfully build these complex shapes and provide a convincing argument.

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This is one of our favorite team building activities. Students work together using a rope to create 3-D shapes. The teacher plays the role of the skeptic and asks students to justify how they know their shape satisfies its defined characteristics. Students will need everyone in their group to successfully build these complex shapes and [...]

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Have students write math goals that are of a positive mindset that they can revisit often. Post a class goal. Poll students often about their feelings about a particular concept.

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Numberless Word Problems

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If we are not making mistakes, we are not learning. We can learn and grow from a mistake. We can analyze where we went wrong then take steps to correct it.

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I will use questioning to help students discover the know how instead of just modeling

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Always have extension activities ready

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When the discussion gets off topic, sometimes its ok to just go with it.

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I will rephrase comments into questions.

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Being creative on how we teach can help the students in looking other perspectives in how to learn and solve problems

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Being creative on how we teach can help the students in looking other perspectives in how to learn and solve problems

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Have questions prepared but also have ways to communicate or sentence starters ready for students. Take time to teach how to talk math.

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For depth understanding always focus on the meat instead of the sides. Once students have grasp an understanding then you can add. 

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For depth understanding always focus on the meat instead of the sides. Once students have grasp an understanding then you can add. 

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Reward when someone points out my mistakes, which are sometimes intentional.

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Discussions, performance tasks

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question more instead of direct answers. "I believe in your ability"

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TEACHER WISE: This will help the teacher to identify how much the class undertsand the lesson, and will enable the teacher to classify them in groups to devise a differentiated instructional plan and activities.

STUDENT WISE: This will help students to see how much they know -accompanied with teacher's questioning techiques and individualized support to students will help students to think more and figure out things on their own - This will enable them to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. LEARNING FROM MISTAKES!

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Learning from your own mistakes can be so memorable in the learning process.

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Have students do test/quiz corrections and explain their mistakes.  When students do this they tend to remeber the technique in the future. 

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Have students do test/quiz corrections and explain their mistakes.  When students do this they tend to remeber the technique in the future. 

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Encourage to ask questions in a safe place. Have students use post-its to add questions to the parking lot so that shy students can ask without being scared or embarrassed.

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students share work and different ways to a soltuion

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I will use the unit chats as “thought starters”

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Ask more intentional questions.

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Great idea for analyzing misunderstandings as well as embracing the struggle of it all

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Great idea for analyzing misunderstandings as well as embracing the struggle of it all

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Concrete foundation will be built on depth.

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Concrete foundation will be built on depth.

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Very engaging and starts a great opportunity for Number Talk/sense

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Correct practice/s helps to achieve perfection 

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Correct practice/s helps to achieve perfection 

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Play the Question Game from Whose Line Is It Anyway?

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Play the Question Game from Whose Line Is It Anyway?