Leveraging Learning

"How do you get the kids to not want a worksheet?" It's a fair question. I used to think that it would be just a Year One problem, but the problem has lingered. Each year, I have the hope that kids will gleefully ditch traditional learning and wholeheartedly embrace a more conceptual, more open ended way of doing math. And every year, I find that I'm still fighting the pull of traditional learning in math. In the past few days, I've been pondering these questions. How do you get them to ditch worksheets? And this afternoon a colleague stopped by asking simply, How do we get them to try? These questions are separate, yet related. The textbook and the worksheet are compelling in their comfort - they are straightforward and, even if the math is hard, they are easy for our brains to figure out. Doing something different is difficult - not just for students, but also for the teachers who craft learning experiences. While there are abundant tasks and learnin