David Wees

davidwees.comDeveloping Creative Commons Curriculum – The Reflective Educator

Who would like to participate in a webinar to learn more about this? #mathchat #mathed #edchat

David Wees@davidwees.bsky.social

I’ve made some progress on my curriculum project! I have a post outlining the work I have completed so far, and what remains to be done. davidwees.com/content/deve... Please share this, so we can find people who might have time to get involved in some way. Thank you! #mathed #mathchat #edchat

davidwees.comDeveloping Creative Commons Curriculum – The Reflective Educator

Here is a graphic showing my progress so far.

23 Sept

I have always wanted to build a curriculum with (nearly) no strings attached. No resources trapped in PDFs! Permission given explicitly for making changes. I’m putting out a call for early contributors to an open-source IB Middle Years Programme math curriculum. davidwees.com/content/open...

15 Sept

At one of these events in Hong Kong. #teachmeet

21st Century Learning@21cl.bsky.social

Leave with something new to bring back to your learning community. #21CL #TeachMeet #21CLTeachMeet #Networking #InternationalSchools

davidwees.comHow Humans Are Smarter Than AI – The Reflective Educator

9 Aug

I did some exploration this morning with a couple of free AI models to see how well they can make sense of Fawn Nguyen’s Visual Patterns. I had mixed results. (1/3)

davidwees.comHow Humans Are Smarter Than AI – The Reflective Educator

9 Aug

I wrote a new blog post about that investigation here: davidwees.com/content/how-... (2/3)

9 Aug

The tl;dr: Not surprisingly, the two AI models I tested are not yet as good as middle school students in seeing and making use of visual structure. #mathchat #mathed #edchat #genAI (3/3)

I’m putting out my shingle again as a math education consultant! I’m particularly interested in leveraging my experience as a curriculum designer and designer of professional development to support schools and school districts with their math curriculum.

5. Your implementation is good, but what do the results look like? I have deep experience working with data analysis of student performance data to check for gaps in curriculum and instruction. 📈

Let’s work together! Check out my additional services here: davidwees.com/services/ and get in touch with me here: davidwees.com/contact/

3. You’ve got well-organized curriculum. Congratulations! Now, how high-quality is that curriculum? What opportunities for advancing student learning might you be missing? I can audit existing curriculum to ensure that your school is maximizing their instructional time with students. 🎯

4. You have written curricular resources, but what do they look like when teachers use them? My experience with professional development and curriculum design will help ensure that great curriculum works for teachers and students. 💡

1. Do you have curricular resources for your teachers? If not, I can help you get started. 🚀

2. Are your curricular resources well organized and easily accessible? I can support your school’s development of a system to manage curriculum. 🗂️

19 July

New blog post: We need an education system davidwees.com/content/we-n... Excerpt: “[Professional learning is] like a race with people running in different directions and there’s no baton in sight.” #edchat #mtbos #edtech

davidwees.comSchool Culture and Math Teaching – The Reflective Educator

New blog post: School Culture and Math Teaching davidwees.com/content/scho... #mathchat #edtech #edchat #mtbos

Reading "The Art of Coaching" by Jenny Bird & Sarah Gornall, and am struck by this observation: "Be alert for third-party coaching; remind the client the only person they can change is themselves."

Bird and Gornall have filled their book with diagrams to help convey meaning, which I really like.

Here is another reminder for me of how language is filtered by our experiences and the medium of communication.

Reading "The Art of Coaching" by Jenny Bird & Sarah Gornall, and am struck by this observation: "Be alert for third-party coaching; remind the client the only person they can change is themselves."

What Bird & Gornall mean by this is that when coaching someone, if they bring up someone else, we have to remind ourselves that we can only focus on our actions, and not those of absent third-parties.

Apparently a career 200 hitter just got 12 consecutive hits in a row, and a bunch of people are freaking out over how unlikely this event is. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM5I... for example. This is incorrect probabilitistic thinking. (1/9)

With these updates, the results are below. Parameters: N = 15,461,292, p = 0.261, k = 12 -------------------------------------------------- Exact Probability (Matrix Exp): 0.68074470 Poisson Approximation: 0.68074461

This means that the 12 hit streak is actually really likely to have occurred, although perhaps not with a player hitting 0.2.

This issue points to a common misconception in probability. The probability of rare events goes way up when we include all of the events, not just the string that led to the rare event. (9/9)

There have actually been 15,461,292 at bats all time in baseball. Also, the average for all players overall is more like 0.261 instead of 0.2. Turns out these both make a difference!

5% means that we don’t really expect to have seen such a streak, it’s also not completely impossible to have occurred. It’s much different than the 1 in 244.1 million being reported though! (7/9)

My code is here in case someone wants to check my work: docs.google.com/document/d/1... I could easily be wrong, and I don’t have an easy way to double-check my work, except my intuition. (8/9)

I wrote (with help from Gemini) a script to calculate this for me, and it resulted into two answers; one an exact value and one an approximation. (5/9)

Parameters: N = 15,000,000, p = 0.2, k = 12 -------------------------------------------------- Exact Probability (Matrix Exp): 0.04796356 Poisson Approximation: 0.04796359 Both agree within many decimal places. That means the probability is in the order of about 5%. (6/9)

According to www.baseball-almanac.com/hitting/hiat... there have been roughly 15,000,000 at bats. (3/9)

If we make the assumption that every at bat had a 0.2 chance of being a hit (which is also an error, but probably will result in a lower estimate than the true answer), then the probability of a streak is much higher. (4/9)

While their calculation of the probability of 12 hits in a row is correct, they are forgetting that this event occurred with a whole lot of other at bats. Instead of “what is the probability of this streak”, we should calculate “the probability of this streak” given all at bats in baseball. (2/9)

15 May

Here are four ways kids divided 2 brownies fairly with three people. What do you notice? What do you wonder? #mathchat #maththinking

15 May

A child is given 150-118 to solve. Why might they say this is 92? #mathchat #maththinking

15 May

I heard this exact answer while observing a class, and was stumped on why they might think this. I assume that this mistake is not random, it is the result of some hard thinking by the child.

davidwees.comTeacher Evaluation or Teacher Growth? – The Reflective Educator

21 Mar

New blog post: Teacher Evaluation or Teacher Growth? How might your school look different if everyone had a shared vision of where they were trying to go as a school and had the time to plan how to get there? davidwees.com/content/teac... #edublog #edchat #blogger