Model the Learning

This post was featured in an episode of  This Week in Ontario Edublogs (July 11, 2018), beginning at 34:42 . Over the past week, we have been piloting diagnostic questions with students to get an idea of their understanding of equivalence. We gave students a series of questions, all having to do with the understanding of what the equal sign represents. One question, though, really challenged my idea of what "higher order" strategies we were hoping to see in our students. Here's the question: If 4x + 8 = 52, what is 2x + 4? Take a moment to figure it out. What is your answer? How did you come to that answer? If you're like my colleagues and myself (and most of the students of whom we asked the question), your instinct might have been to solve for x using the first expression, ...and then substitute that value for x in the second expression: So in this case, 2x + 4 = 26. As students advance to higher order strategies when learning math, we

This past week, I took part in a discussion on Twitter about how to best curate and provide math resources for teachers. The Mathtastic PD series I wrote about in response garnered a little bit of interest, partially because it was delivered in a blended style - each session was designed around engaging participants both in-person, as well as remotely, at the same time . In the original post, I mentioned how it was important to us to create GOOD, effective, remote PD.  As someone who lives in a somewhat rural part of the province, and a two-hour drive from my board office, I have been on the receiving end of a lot of virtual presentations. And there's nothing worse than a fuzzy, poorly-mic'ed presenter whose slides aren't legible because of the camera angle. Well, maybe that one time I joined in the conversation via my Google Hangout connection and spooked the facilitator, because it was forgotten that I was even "there." So, at the risk of just stating co

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 to Digital