Model the Learning

Last week, I was fortunate enough to attend three days of workshops with Cathy Fosnot ( @ctfosnot ) in North Bay. This was a great opportunity to see so many constructs in person that I had previously only learned about through her books, or the podcasts with #notabookstudy and #themathpod. It was amazing to see "math congress," "mini-lessons," and "gallery walks" come to life! Also last week, I wrote about how math teachers can change how they ask questions in order to probe for concept development, rather than probing for just the answer. Inspired by what I had seen in North Bay, I wanted to try out this different style of questioning first hand. While working with different learners this week, I tried going past just getting the answer, and encouraged them to show me how they got their answer, or to draw a picture, or to explain their thinking in words, or tell me how they know their answer could be right. The results were disastrous. Learners be...

Our final question in The Math Pod (#themathpod) twitter chat this past week ( see the archive here ), was built on Cathy Fosnot's challenge for us in the first podcast: What is the difference between questions meant to guide students to a specific answer vs. questioning to support development as a mathematician? So in the chat we asked: What kind of questions can we ask to support development as a mathematician? What would you actually say to your students? Here are some of the answers from the participants in the chat: What kind of questions can we ask to support development as a mathematician? What would you say to your students? Tell me about what you're doing. What do you wonder? Tell me more? How did you know that? What if i change this? Really??? (especially when they're right!) Can you explain what she just said? What made you think of that? How did you figure that out? What does this remind you of? Have you seen what (anoth...

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...