At Trinity, we run weekly sessions around best practices in mathematics education. Embolden Your Inner Mathematician is a course designed to deepen the practice, pedagogy, and assessment of mathematics.

We commit to curation of best practices, connections between mathematical ideas, and communication to learn and share with a broad audience. We know that providing multiple pathways to success invites diverse learners’ ideas to the conversation.

Tonight, I offered a synchronous session for teachers:

Free PD for Math Teachers:
Embolden Your Inner Mathematician:
Be both author and illustrator of mathematical understanding

At Trinity, we balance product and process. We are process oriented and want our students to learn the practice of mathematics as well as the procedures. If I am to tell the whole truth, we want our students to be strong practitioners of mathematics first and foremost. We expect our students and teachers to build procedural fluency from conceptual understanding.

In tonight’s session, we worked on the following mathematical practices.

I can look for and make use of structure.

I can look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

I can use appropriate tools strategically.

We used Pattern 4 from Fawn Nguyen’s Visual Patterns.

Can you see how we anticipated ways that students might see and show their thinking? We connected structure to regularity in repeated reasoning by intentionally making our thinking visible and noticed what changed and what stayed the same.

Most of what was done was not new in content. However, there were some intentional teacher moves that were new to the teachers gathered this evening.  We used quick images instead of showing all three figures at once. We discussed different ways of seeing the 5 in figure 1. Next, we shared the same and new structures noticed in figure 2 and again in figure 3. Only then did we look at the growing pattern.

We used the table as a strategic tool. It is easy to notice regularity in repeated reasoning when we see student thinking in addition to the figure number and the number of orange squares.

I then shared a way our 6th graders approached this task that did not come up in our group and challenged the group to work through how the structure informs the regularity in repeated reasoning. How might we perservere in making since of our students’ thinking?

And, in the last few minutes, we extended this thinking solving quadratic equations.

Teachers are learners too…

After teaching synchronous sessions, planning and recording asynchronous lessons, offering feedback to students on submitted work, and meeting with their team to forecast plans for next week, this group of teachers found joy in gathering to learn together.

#CountItAllJoy

#ThankYouTeachers