First Day of School

I am going back to the classroom next fall and I must be quite excited since I find myself sitting here in June anticipating the first day in September.

Anyhow, I am looking for suggestions for first day activities/student surveys/videos, etc. If anyone has anything interesting to pass along, I would love to hear about it!

Math Content vs. Math Pedagogy

Lately, I have been a part of many discussions around the need for rotary math in our system. A colleague of mine, Gina, suggested I take a look at a webcast by Dr. Deborah Ball found on Curriculum Resources Canada (CSC) website, curriculum.org.

Dr. Ball argues that being an affective math educator is not necessarily dependent on knowing higher mathematics, but rather, it is dependent on knowing the level of math that you teach deeply. The webcast is definitely worth checking out. Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching with Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball.

Feeling so good about Bansho.

Today, along with 3 other teachers, I co-delivered a lesson we had co-planned around multiplying fractions by whole numbers. The group consisted of two gr.9 teachers and one gr. 7 teacher (whose classroom we were in). We had decided to give bansho a shot as we were interested in seeing the range of responses we would get from the students.

The problem we posed to the students was, "At the end of the party, we noticed that there were 3 pitchers of lemonade on the table and each pitcher had only about 3/5 of its capacity filled with lemonade. If we were to combine all of the leftover lemonade, how much would we have in total?"

We had anticipated 4 degrees of responses and sure enough, the students' responses seemed to be in line with our thinking. We posted student examples of the 4 different responses at the front of the room. The class then got into a discussion around the advantages of each of the methods used. The students were able to clearly identify strengths of each of the examples. The student who submitted what we had considered the "entry" into the problem looked up and smiled as the class talked about how his sample created a great visual to understand the problem more clearly. (I think he would agree it was a good day in math class today.)

An earlier diagnostic test (PRIME) had indicated that a majority of students in this class were still relying on a concrete understanding of fractions. The symbolic understanding was still uncomfortable for most. When students were invited to post their sample in line with the method they thought was most like theirs, we had instantaneous agreement with our PRIME diagnostic results. The teacher's daily goal is to try and bridge this gap. Bansho helped him see who is still struggling with this gap and whether progress is being made.

What made me so impressed with the bansho though was the fact that the student who had only been able to show the most basic concrete solution, then proceeded to work in the next "level" that we had determined along the continuum when it came time for the consolidation practice work. I am still pretty new with using Bansho as an instructional strategy but if that is what helped close this gap for this student... I'm sold.