Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting Blog
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Educational consultant specializing in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and real-world problem-based learning. I do this while continuing to work full time for a K-12 school district in Southern California as a mathematics teacher specialist.
Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting
8M ago
This blog post is for education leaders who wish that educator conferences were more equitable. For perspective, if everything was perfectly fair, when you go to an educator conference and looked at who was speaking, the keynote and featured speaker demographics would be representative of the people living in the areas they’re pulling from. You’d also hope that race and gender would not matter when determining how much compensation speakers received. Unfortunately, it isn’t that way in reality. Conferences keynote and featured speakers have historically tended to be very white and very male. Y ..read more
Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting
1y ago
I was beyond fortunate to have the opportunity to provide professional development to math(s) educators in Australia six times over twelve days in late November and early December 2023 in Brisbane, Melbourne, Bairnsdale, and Sydney. It was one of the best professional experiences of my life and I will cherish every moment.
I realize that this is not an opportunity everyone will have, so I wanted to share what I learned.
I have three big goals for writing this:
I want to reflect on and process my own experiences in a place where I can come back and read.
I hope that Australian educators might ..read more
Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting
1y ago
Educators keep lamenting how conference attendance is down. This is only partially correct. Attendance is down at some conferences while at the same time, other conferences have thriving attendance numbers. For example, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) annual conference used to have over 20,000 people. At the latest conference, there were closer to 4,000. At the same time, the latest Get Your Teach On (GYTO) national conference had over 6,500 people.
To better understand this changing dynamic, I attended a GYTO conference earlier this year and wrote about it here. I highl ..read more
Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting
1y ago
When I first started doing paid professional development work in 2012, I was ecstatic to be asked at all. I had no idea how much to charge or how much others were earning for similar work. Fast forward more than ten years later and I’m very aware that educational consultants get drastically different payments for speaking at the same event.
At first, this might seem perfectly reasonable because presenters have different skill and experience levels, so perhaps what they get paid is correlated. However, if I asked you to rate five presenters according to your perception of their skill and experi ..read more
Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting
2y ago
I am deeply fascinated by the leaps that artificial intelligence has made in the last few years. When I studied artificial intelligence at UCLA in the late 1990s, chat bots were about as sophisticated as AI got. Nowadays, it can make nearly unfathomable things.
Artificial Intelligence Can Make Images
As a silly example, you can use a free AI program like Dall-E 2 that generates images from text. For example, I typed a phrase for an image that surely did not already exist (“A cartoon drawing of a fluffy kitten jedi with a green light saber made out of an eggplant”) and got these images i ..read more
Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting
2y ago
On September 30, 2022, I presented at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual conference in Los Angeles, California for my co-presenter Rosalba Serrano (who was unable to attend) and I about 5 Struggles Your Foster Students Wished You Knew. This was a passion project for us because we both came through the foster care system.
We had originally intended to present together in September 2020, but the pandemic had other plans. So we recorded Rosalba’s part as well as added in Jessica Jones’ perspective. We recorded and are sharing this presentation with the hope that it could live ..read more
Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting
2y ago
I have been a math educator for about twenty years and Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics by Peter Liljedahl has more potential to improve the way we teach mathematics than any other book I have ever read. These are not words I say lightly. This book is an absolute game changer for all math educators and everyone needs to read it.
I am writing this blog post for two purposes:
to convince you why you should also read and implement what you learn from the book
to have the many profound insights I noted in one place for me to come back and read again
What Is The Book About?
Pete ..read more
Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting
2y ago
A group of math educators came together to experience what teaching math in the virtual reality metaverse might look like. We tried out two Open Middle math problems and reflected on the experience. We recorded the whole thing and I wanted to share some of the highlights so you could get a feel for what it might look like.
FYI
For those interested in the details, we were all using the Meta (formerly Oculus) Quest 2 headsets and the Horizon Workrooms app. Our experience with this app ranged from this being their first or second time to about fifteen uses (so consider how many times it to ..read more
Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting
2y ago
I must begin by giving a huge thank you to everyone at the Extended Reality Initiative at Kent State and especially to Karl Kosko who has patiently answered my countless questions. While I had dreamed of a future with 360 degree classroom video being used in professional development, I thought it was still years away. I had no idea that they had already been doing this since 2019 and had many resources to share. I would still be dreaming and not doing if it wasn’t for them.
Why 360° Video?
Watching 360 degree video makes you feel as if you were actually there. Whether it’s scuba diving ..read more
Robert Kaplinsky - Glenrock Consulting
3y ago
Have you ever been excited about something like a fun lesson or a conference you wanted to attend? Then when you told your colleagues about it, you hoped they’d be excited too, but instead they were less than enthusiastic.
When I worked as a teacher specialist for Downey USD, I often found myself in this situation. For years, I thought I could win people over with sheer enthusiasm, but the reality was that often I didn’t get anywhere and had limited success.
Sharks and Minnows
If wasn’t until my former boss, John Harris, shared a metaphor with me that the path forward became so much cle ..read more