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...

This past fall, we continued a series of cross-panel co-teaching days with some of our grade 7/8/9 math teachers. In addition to co-designing and co-teaching a lesson in a grade 9 classroom, we also spent part of the day dedicated to digging a little deeper into a continuum of concept development for proportional reasoning. Ahead of time, we asked each teacher to give the following task to their students. Calculators and manipulatives were allowed, and the question could be read to the students, but no instruction or guidance was allocated. The point of the task was two-fold. First, we wanted to introduce teachers to the idea of how students develop proportional thinking. In upper elementary grades and in secondary math courses, we often jump right into the more advanced concepts, without looking back to see how students learned the basics (or even if they have learned the basics). Second, we wanted to give teachers a chance to see how their students would fare on a question...