On the move

At a recent academic seminar, my principal asked us to reflect and share on a success we had experienced. I chose to share about how our student equity team was started. My idea for a student equity team started after I had attended professional development on racial equity in education. I first attended a racial equity training in our district called Taking It Up. This inspired me to continue to grow and be challenged in this area so I participated in the week-long  Coaching for Educational Equity experience. While I was there I made a goal to establish a student equity team at my school. As an adult, I knew I could work to make changes to our system but I wanted our students to be empowered to resist oppression. I was not exactly sure how to start a student equity team, especially in an elementary school. There was not a model for one in our district. I had discussed this idea with my administrator and he agreed that we should try it. I recruited a staff member of color to help m

This blog entry was authored in collaboration with 6th-grade students exploring the connection between robotics and mathematics. Robotics makes math fascinating. Using robotics creates amazing opportunities to learn about geometry, measurement, and data. An example of learning about measurement is programming the robot motor to run for 3 seconds, stop for 3 seconds, and then run again for 3 seconds. To measure the accuracy of this program, we timed ten trials. We compiled the data and then analyzed it for the mode, median, mean and range. Learning about these mathematical ideas from data that we generated made the data more meaningful to us. This program also taught us about the importance of attending to precision. Initially, we incorrectly thought the program would always run for 9 seconds, but we found out something interesting. After 10 trials we realized that there was variance in how long the program ran. Another massive mathematical idea that we have learned through roboti