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...

Students often come into grade 9 faced with a number of transition challenges ( I previously wrote about these here ). Teachers, too, face challenges in preparing to teach grade 9 math, not the least of which is determining the skill level of students coming from a variety of backgrounds and experiences, all with different identified strengths and needs. The more information we can gather about our students, the better we can serve them. As our team of math co-ordinators works with teachers to determine how we can help our grade 9 students that need the most help, there is always a lot of talk of determining benchmarks in math. With respect to math skills, at what level are our students now?  Where do we want them to be?  And then how can we get them there? This year, we decided to design a new diagnostic assessment to compliment the existing  EduGAINS gap closing resources , and help us mark those initial benchmarks, as well as help us measure growth over t...

I'm currently reading Start with Why: How great leaders inspire everyone to take action, by Simon Sinek.  It was a book I picked up at the beginning of the summer when my position this fall was still unknown. After a year as the Renewed Math Strategy Co-ordinator for my board, I was set to rebound back into the classroom. However, there was still a possibility of my board bringing me back as a co-ordinator (which is what ended up happening). Regardless of my position as a teacher or co-ordinator, I was hoping this book could help me lead learning, be it with students or with colleagues. I'm about half way through it now, and giving serious thought to my WHY. What drives me? What makes me want to push myself? Why did I choose this as a career? Through what lens am I viewing my role(s)?  Why find my WHY? According to Sinek, if I want to motivate, if I want to be trusted, and if I want to make a difference, I have to be authentic to my WHY . The more clarity I can brin...

Jonathan So ( @MrSoclassroom ) recently threw out an interesting challenge on Twitter for teachers: What are your top five, life-changing-as-a-teacher moments? His original post on his top five really got me thinking about what has made me stop, re-evaluate what I do, and change direction in how I teach. These are all fairly recent moments for me, so I'm guessing there's a little bit of memory bias in here, but here they are... :) In chronological-ish order of occurrence: 1) Flipping my Classes - Handing the responsibility of learning over to my students was definitely career-changing. I learned so much from my students in terms of how they learn (because they were each choosing to learn in their own way), and how they collaborate, and  I saw first-hand how the allowance of self-paced curriculum can reduce stress and deepen understanding. It was humbling as I discovered my lectures weren't a necessary part of the learning process (students mastered even some of the h...

This fall marks four years since I started blogging.  At the time, I was just getting ready to completely revamp how I was teaching: moving away from teaching through lecturing, and toward technology-based, student-paced, and student-led learning.  I remember trying to come up with a catchy name for the blog, and settled on BYOD, ASAP . My goal was to flip all my courses that year; I was working hard to get technology into the hands of my students (hence, BYOD) while fostering equity and modelling responsible usage. While it may not have been "As Soon As Possible," I took an all-or-nothing approach to the flipped classroom and jumped right in. Most of my posts were about my trials, tribulations, and triumphs in implementing new ways of delivering content. But now, as I move into my second year out of the classroom as our board's Renewed Math Strategy Co-ordinator, my focus is no longer on equitable access to technology in my classroom, or on delivery of content to m...