I’m taking X.MTHED-404: Effective Practices for Advancing the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics (K-12).
Here are my notes from Session 2, Talk Less and Listen More, with Zak Champagne.
Notice the piece of art at the top of my sketch and compare it to what I found the next day at Spotlight on Art.
Notes from previous sessions:
How might we learn and grow together? How do we connect ideas and engage in productive, purposeful learning experiences (aka professional development) around common mission, vision, and goals? What if we model what we want to see and experience in our classrooms?
Continuing to work on our common goal, Maryellen Berry, Rhonda Mitchell, Marsha Harris, and I facilitated a half day learning session for base classroom teachers.
In August, we introduced our goal for teacher-learners and began our work and learning with the faculty.
Throughout the semester, we have been working with teacher-teams in many ways. We hope our faculty notice how we are modeling be together, not the same taught during Pre-Planning. We have worked and learned with teams to design and implement common assessments and analyze the results to understand what students know in reading, writing, and mathematics.
Based on our observations and conferring with teams and individual teachers, we know that we are ready to move to the next level of our work. Here is a copy of our plan:
Goal:
We can design and implement a differentiated action plan across our grade to meet all learners where they are.
| 9:00 | Intro to Purpose: Instructional Core: Relationship between content, teacher, student
|
| 9:30 | Movement to Grade Level Teams and spaces |
| 9:35
15 min 40 min 45 min |
Analyze Student Work Together (a la Norming Meeting)
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| 11:25 | Q&A and transition |
| 11:30 | Closure: Planning, Reflection, Next Steps |
Here’s what it looked like:
As we learn more about our learners, we are better equipped to help them as they learn and grow.
Based on outcomes from today, Maryellen, Marsha, Rhonda, and I will adjust our pacing guide and plans to find more time for teachers to do this important learning.
We can design and implement a differentiated action plan across our grade divisions to meet all learners where they are.
Strong teams regularly self-assess how well they function within their norms – the hopes and dreams for how they are when together. As we learn and grow together, we pause to reflect, revise, and recommit to strengthen our teams by reviewing our community norms.
How might we strengthen our team? What if we review, reflect, and recommit to our hopes and dreams of how we are?
We need to give students the opportunity to develop their own rich and deep understanding of our number system. With that understanding, they will be able to develop and use a wide array of strategies in ways that make sense for the problem at hand. (Flynn, 8 pag.)
Let’s say that the essential-to-learn is I can subtract within 100. In our community we hold essential I can show what I know more than one way.
Using our anchor text, we find the following strategies:
What if we engage, as a team, to deepen our understanding of subtraction?
Deep learning focuses on recognizing relationships among ideas. During deep learning, students engage more actively and deliberately with information in order to discover and understand the underlying mathematical structure. (Hattie, 136 pag.)
In his Effective Practices for Advancing the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics class last week, Mike Flynn highlighted three advantages of using representations to deepen understanding.
What if we, as a team, prepare to facilitate experiences so that learners can say I can subtract within 100 by deepening our understanding with words, pictures, numbers, and symbols?
Context: Annie had some money in her “mad money” jar. Today, she added $39 to the jar and discovered that she now has $65. How much money was in the “mad money” jar before today?
Can we connect the context to each of the above strategies? Can we connect one strategy to another strategy?
If we challenge ourselves to “do the math” using words, pictures, numbers, and symbols, we deepen our understanding and increase our ability to ask more questions to advance thinking.
How might we use Van de Walle’s ideas for developing conceptual understanding through multiple representations to assess comprehension and understanding?
Flynn, Michael. Beyond Answers: Exploring Mathematical Practices with Young Children. Portland, Maine.: Stenhouse, 2017. Print.
Hattie, John A. (Allan); Fisher, Douglas B.; Frey, Nancy; Gojak, Linda M.; Moore, Sara Delano; Mellman, William L. (2016-09-16). Visible Learning for Mathematics, Grades K-12: What Works Best to Optimize Student Learning (Corwin Mathematics Series). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
Van de Walle, John. Teaching Student-centered Mathematics: Developmentally Appropriate Instruction for Grades Pre-K-2. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Print.
I’m taking X.MTHED-404: Effective Practices for Advancing the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics (K-12).
From the website:
This primarily synchronous online course is designed to connect educators from across the country and around world to learn from some of the educational leaders in the Math/Twitter/Blogosphere (#MTBoS). Each class session will feature a different lead instructor who will guide us in exploring an effective practice for advancing the teaching and learning of mathematics. During these sessions participants will work collaboratively on mathematical tasks, analyze student thinking, explore instructional methodologies, and prepare to apply their new learning within their own practice.
Here are my notes from Session 1, Using representations and contexts to enhance sense making in K-16, with Mike Flynn.
We explored how the use of representations and contexts can give us insight into the conceptual understanding of ourselves, our students, and our colleagues. We also considered how these tools can help us uncover underlying structures in mathematics (MP7).
As we begin the second part of our school year and as the calendar changes from 2016 to 2017, we review our goals.
The leaders of our math committee set the following goals for this school year.
Goals:
Our latest action step works on scaling these goals in our community. The following shows our plan to build common understanding and language as we expand our knowledge of numeracy. Over the course of two days, each math teacher (1st-6th grade) participated in 3-hours of professional learning.
Our intentions and purpose:
We started with a number talk and a number string from Kristin Gray‘s NCTM Philadelphia presentation. We challenged ourselves to anticipate the ways our learners answer the following.
We also referred to Making Number Talks Matter to find Humphreys and Parker’s four strategies for multiplication. We pressed ourselves to anticipate more than one way for each multiplication strategy to align with Smith and Stein’s 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions.
From our earlier work with Lisa Eickholdt, we know that our ability to talk about a strategy directly impacts our ability to teach the strategy. What can be learned if we show what we know more than one way? How might we learn from each other if we make our thinking visible?
After working through Humphreys and Parker’s strategies (and learning new strategies), we transitioned to the number string from Kristin‘s presentation.
The goal for the next part of the learning session offered teaching teams the opportunity to select a number string from one of the Minilessons books shown below. Each team selected a number string and worked to anticipate according to Smith and Stein’s 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions.
To practice, each team practiced their number string and the other grade-level teams served as learners. When we share and learn together, we strengthen our understanding of how to differentiate and learn deeply.
Deep learning focuses on recognizing relationships among ideas. During deep learning, students engage more actively and deliberately with information in order to discover and understand the underlying mathematical structure.
—John Hattie, Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey
As we begin the second part of our school year and as the calendar changes from 2016 to 2017, what action steps are needed to reach our goals?
Hattie, John A. (Allan); Fisher, Douglas B.; Frey, Nancy; Gojak, Linda M.; Moore, Sara Delano; Mellman, William L. (2016-09-16). Visible Learning for Mathematics, Grades K-12: What Works Best to Optimize Student Learning (Corwin Mathematics Series) (p. 136). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
Humphreys, Cathy; Parker, Ruth (2015-04-21). Making Number Talks Matter (Kindle Locations 1265-1266). Stenhouse Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Norris, Kit; Schuhl, Sarah (2016-02-16). Engage in the Mathematical Practices: Strategies to Build Numeracy and Literacy With K-5 Learners (Kindle Locations 4113-4115). Solution Tree Press. Kindle Edition.
Smith, Margaret Schwan., and Mary Kay. Stein. 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2011. Print.
