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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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Tons of strategies and techniques for implementing cooperative learning in your class

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kagan publishing teaching catalog teacher resources school supplies music games cooperative learning differentiated instruction educational products esl ell foreign language posters multiple intelligences textbooks math books science literature social studies

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Kagan's FREE Articles - Kagan Structures: A Miracle of Active Engagement

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Read Dr. Spencer Kagans provocative and insightful articles on Kagan Structures and how they have the power to transform education. Cooperative learning, multiple intelligences, the brain, character development, Win-Win Discipline.

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I often point out when my grade level students are doing the same things my advanced students are doing. 

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I often point out when my grade level students are doing the same things my advanced students are doing. 

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https://youtu.be/75GFzikmRY0?feature=shared

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Growth Mindset Introduction: What it is, How it Works, and Why it Matters

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When I make mistakes and my students point it out we talk about that and I celebrate that with rewards.

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When I make mistakes and my students point it out we talk about that and I celebrate that with rewards.

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Use whiteboard markers on VNPS so students feel ok to make mistakes (they can easily be erased) and discuss process.

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Notice and wonder. Also, stop the class sometimes and have a student who has a great question share it with the class and see if I can get other kids to respond/answer it.

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Notice and wonder. Also, stop the class sometimes and have a student who has a great question share it with the class and see if I can get other kids to respond/answer it.

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Giving students the resources they need in order to highlight knowledge. (Use of calculator, multiplication table, highlighting the process and not speed)

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I have seen teachers classify the answer part of the problem as boring and spending almost no time on it.

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I have seen teachers classify the answer part of the problem as boring and spending almost no time on it.

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Use different teaching strategies such as Connecting Representations to have students justify connections between representations.

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"A wrong answer is always better than no answer"

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"A wrong answer is always better than no answer"

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Connect content with projects that help show real world applications. Asking students to solve open ended situations that will require them to be creative and apply their math skills.

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Comparing and contrasting patterns from tables, graphs, and equations. Finally though, have them write about or share with a partner those similarities and differences.

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Comparing and contrasting patterns from tables, graphs, and equations. Finally though, have them write about or share with a partner those similarities and differences.

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Ep210: How to Develop a Growth Mindset In Your Math Class - A Math Mentoring Moment

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Video about how to ask more powerful questions

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Video about how to ask more powerful questions

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Interesting take on asking effective questions.