Rebekah Sjoberg, a 7th-grade teacher at Mt. Nittany Middle School in State College Area Schools (PA), has been named the Open Up Resources 6–8 Math Teacher of the Month for April. Sjoberg is being recognized for her outstanding work in her classroom and ongoing support of teachers across the country as a member of the Open Up Resources National Professional Learning Community.
Sjoberg’s work with Open Up Resources 6–8 Math makes her one of the most innovative teachers in the country. The Open Up Resources 6–8 Math curriculum inspires a new way of teaching math by transforming classrooms into hives of activity focusing on discussion, questioning, debate, and the deeper conceptual learning of mathematics that follows.
Throughout the 2019–2020 school year, Sjoberg has been praised for her work developing EdPuzzle lessons and YouTube videos that correlate with Open Up Resources 6–8 Math lessons. She has freely shared these in a collection of Community-Created resources so that all teachers and students can benefit from her work.
Sjoberg recommends that, to get started in changing your classroom instruction and student understanding of mathematics, teachers try a unit of the curriculum. She shares, “Try a unit with your class and teach it with fidelity. The lessons focus on deep student understanding and have a high degree of rigor.”
When asked about her favorite moment of teaching, she happily told the story of her students connecting that Pi was actually just a constant of proportionality. “After one unit on similarity and another on proportionality, we moved on to the circles unit,” she tells.
“Students were blown away when they discovered that Pi (this mystical, magical, infinite number) was the constant of proportionality between a circle’s circumference and diameter!”
Open Up Resources is a non-profit on a mission to increase equity in education by making excellent, top-rated curricula freely available to districts. You can learn more at www.openupresources.org. Learn more about our National Professional Learning Communities here.
