Life in Intervention (or: I’m leading a PD session)

So – fun fact: over the last 2 years, I’ve fallen into a curious niche called ‘math intervention’. I teach an ever-changing curriculum where the only real overriding theme is ‘help students get better at math’. I get the students who’ve failed math their whole life and, if things go well, they start to get better.

Apparently, I’m doing a good enough that I was invited to present an hour-long session of my strategies and thoughts and tricks at a local Math Educator conference here in Tucson. The feedback was pretty good, but I know it could’ve been better – mainly: I wish I had more time, and I wish I had anticipated my audience a little better.

Well, soon I’ll have a chance to try and fix both of those issues: I’ll be presenting a 4-hour session on Teaching Math Intervention at the University of Arizona on March 7th. The link to register is here.

I’m designing the time for high-school math teachers who are currently teaching some kind of support or intervention class, which I guess is becoming more common than I had expected. I plan to talk about some curriculum things I do (like how I teach integers or basic algebra to students who ‘should’ know it already), the way I structure the class in terms of assignments and grading (spoiler alert: its SBG based), how I encourage the ‘growth mindset’, how I deal with difficult students, and how I work with my administration to find the right students for the class. Honestly, most of the things I plan on talking about were instigated on this blog, which has made planning for this a really interesting jaunt down memory lane.

So – if you or anyone you know are looking for strategies for some kind of intervention class, maybe this is something that’ll help them; again, the link to register is here. Also feel free to contact me with any questions – my email is somewhere on this blog.