Leveraging Learning

This academic year has been busy. Thanks to a colleague and time spent over the summer, we've worked through five units of math. That means 5 sets of essential questions, 5 sets of enduring understandings, 5 projects, 5 rubrics, 5 opportunities to hit the sweet spot of content and project design. Each unit was far from a home run, but I was particularly proud of the way kids started to evidence their math in each of the projects. It was work and it took encouragement, but it was there. Then, a convergence of events created the conditions that it made it impossible to begin Unit 6. The quarter ended, EduCon happened and Unit 5 ended before Unit 6 was ready to go. I was once the kind of teacher who would stay up all night and solve that, but I'm too old to pull all nighters and they don't generate good results, either. Instead, I planned a Gap Week. We had just covered operations with fractions and multiplication of mixed numbers was particularly weak. Likewise, we n