Model the Learning

This post was featured in an episode of  This Week in Ontario Edublogs (Sept. 4, 2019), beginning at 35:54 . In Ontario, students need a minimum of three math credits to graduate high school, one of which must be at the grade 11 or 12 level. For students who are not pursuing a post-secondary path that requires mathematics, and/or who really struggle with math, the grade 11 college-pathway math course (MBF3C) is often the last mandatory math course they need to take to graduate. Teachers of this course face several challenges, such as the range of student abilities, range of student interest (particularly if a student is only in the course because they need it to graduate), and also the wide variety of topics in the course curriculum. Last year, we offered new support for MBF3C teachers in our board. At our first session with the teachers, we had round-table discussions on what they most wanted in the way of resources to help their stude nts succeed.  One of the...

In 2015-2016, I was fortunate to be involved with a TLLP team that looked into flipping the classroom: transferring the focus of our courses away from the teacher and on to the learners. Once we had successfully flipped, we became interested in how we could deepen our students' educational experiences, specifically through rich assessments. In 2016-2017, our same team took on a second TLLP project, which is just finishing up now, that had us digging deep into Rich Tasks. While the first project was very successful for us - everyone in the group was able to flip their courses in different ways and we were seeing success with the students - the second project was a much tougher go.  The learning curve was steeper, and it seemed the more we learned, the harder it was to implement GOOD rich tasks. We kept coming back to: what makes a rich task RICH? We came to an understanding that an ideal rich task should be broad , but have personal components; it should challenge the stud...