Who We Are
The overarching objective of Cate School’s academic program is to promote the greatest growth possible for each student and teacher. As members of the Cate Mathematics Department, we continually strive to become better teachers for our students. We work to ensure that all of our students learn the math content that will enable their success in college and in the professional fields of their choice, and we help our students develop the problem solving, collaboration, and communication skills that they can transfer to any real-world 21st century context.
Cate’s school wide initiatives on assessment, inquiry-based learning, and culturally responsive teaching provided opportunities for the Math Department to consider how to refine our teaching practices and our curriculum so we can better serve all of our students. With over 10 years of experience teaching one course using a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum, the department was familiar with the ways in which PBL employs strong assessment, inquiry-based, and culturally responsive teaching practices. So in December of 2016, the department decided to scale up our PBL offerings, and to adopt a 3-year problem-based learning curriculum for our honors program. With the generous support of the EE Ford Foundation, three math teachers were given release time during the 2017-2018 school year to lead the department in this work.
As Cate math teachers, we take great pride in the culture of sharing ideas and collaboration that we enjoy in our department. We hope to extend that invitation to share and collaborate with a wider audience through this blog. Here we will reflect regularly on our classroom experiences, successes, and challenges as we develop our Cate PBL curriculum, and we will share resources, questions, evolving ideas, and perhaps occasionally some answers about assessment, inquiry, and culturally responsive teaching in our PBL and our more traditional math classrooms. We are extremely excited about this work and grateful for the opportunity to delve into it.
Cate’s school wide initiatives on assessment, inquiry-based learning, and culturally responsive teaching provided opportunities for the Math Department to consider how to refine our teaching practices and our curriculum so we can better serve all of our students. With over 10 years of experience teaching one course using a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum, the department was familiar with the ways in which PBL employs strong assessment, inquiry-based, and culturally responsive teaching practices. So in December of 2016, the department decided to scale up our PBL offerings, and to adopt a 3-year problem-based learning curriculum for our honors program. With the generous support of the EE Ford Foundation, three math teachers were given release time during the 2017-2018 school year to lead the department in this work.
As Cate math teachers, we take great pride in the culture of sharing ideas and collaboration that we enjoy in our department. We hope to extend that invitation to share and collaborate with a wider audience through this blog. Here we will reflect regularly on our classroom experiences, successes, and challenges as we develop our Cate PBL curriculum, and we will share resources, questions, evolving ideas, and perhaps occasionally some answers about assessment, inquiry, and culturally responsive teaching in our PBL and our more traditional math classrooms. We are extremely excited about this work and grateful for the opportunity to delve into it.