Model the Learning

This year, in response to feedback we had received from grade 7-12 math teachers that they would be interested in after-school professional development opportunities, we launched our Mathtastic PD series .  Our Mathtastic homepage Our goal was to offer quality professional development to teachers on a voluntary basis, on topics chosen by our math teachers. A quick poll of educators at the beginning of the year gave us an idea of the top five most-wanted PD topics: 1) Digital tools for teaching math 2) Coding in math 3) Triangulating assessment; Addressing needs of students with LD in learning math  (tie) 4) Creating visuals to support learning mathematics 5) Spiralling math curriculum While our initial goal was to have one session per month throughout the second semester, due to changes in schedules we were only able to have three afternoon sessions between February and the end of May The three workshops we were able to offer this year were: Introduction t...

One of my goals this year is to work with math teachers to better track observations and conversations in their classrooms, to better triangulate their assessments. I find this is a big jump for many who have been teaching for a while - we are very comfortable with marks on pencil-and-paper tasks, but we're unsure how to assess and track what we see and hear on an ongoing basis.  Just this past week, though, we've been playing with new ways of collecting data that I'm pretty excited about! (To try and wrap my head around this last year,  I asked kindergarten and primary teachers how they best track what they see , and got lots of great ideas!)  At one of our schools, we are implementing new strategies for improving numeracy skills. How can we track this?  We created a paper checklist that can be used by teachers or observers in the moment to track when and how students are demonstrating good numeracy skills: Our "good numeracy skills" checklist, base...