MIT 2018 @ KPMG: Sharing progress in our thinking

It was wonderful to reconnect with our fellow Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers today at our first session at KPMG's head office to further challenge our thinking in relation to our inquiries: As we have faced the reality of the cohort of learners (and teachers) we are spending 2018 with, how has the thinking you developed ... gelled when ‘the rubber hit the road’?

My thinking, ponderings and wonderings returned to my identified problem: the need to lift the achievement in Maths for all students in Years 1-13 within the Manaiakalani Community of Learning.  What does this mean for my inquiry? Am I on the right track?  What is the most effective way of getting our waka to move through the water faster?

While getting to know my learners and gathering data for my target students, it has become evident that the language of Maths needs building up in order that learners can express and explain their mathematical ideas and thinking appropriately and clearly.  For example, when asked to find a quarter of a set, two of my target students asked "What is a quarter?"  In answer to the same question, another explained that the answer is 4 because a quarter is written 1/4.  These examples have thus caused me to return to the problem and progress my thinking by choosing to focus on four areas, the first of which is the language of Maths:























This focus on the language of Maths will also build support for our school-wide Teaching As Inquiry.

Now that my thinking has progressed and clarified, my next step in the inquiry process is to prototype a digital framework to support my learners acquiring the language of Maths.

Learning to create with Keynote

At this term's Learn Create Share staff meeting, Dorothy Burt enthralled us with some really clever tips and tricks in Keynote to enhance visual presentations.

Here is the result of my upskilling: a visual representation of Room 11's class description!  How much easier to understand at a glance than the written version!

Visible Teaching and Learning enables accelerated shift

At Pt England's Manaiakalani Staff Meeting this afternoon, we were urged by Dorothy Burt to celebrate the accelerated shift of one learner.

As we approach the end of the year, it is timely to reflect on  the visibility of our teaching and learning and the part this played in achieving that accelerated shift.

Teaching As Inquiry 2017: what have I noticed?

Today we each shared our latest Teaching as Inquiry wonderings and reflections within collaborative groups. It was empowering to listen to Pt England's CoL teachers provide an insight into their hypotheses, hunches and thinking as part of Collaborative Inquiry Meeting #5.

Such sharing has gifted me the knowledge that I face many of the same teaching and learning challenges and opportunities in Maths as other teachers at Pt England - and that all opportunities to collaborate further to unpack and explore would benefit all of our learners. 

It particularly resonated when Rob Wiseman commented that students do not always demonstrate that they have fully understood a new concept or strategy when completing follow-up tasks independently. When learning strategies to solve number problems within levelled ability groupings, I have also noticed that students are mostly able to explain clearly how they have used an efficient strategy to solve a particular problem. They are able to do this using materials and appropriate language based on our learning intention and seem ready to move off and complete follow-up tasks independently. However, their full grasp of the strategy is not always evident in their completed follow-up tasks.

How can I do my best to provide students opportunities to create their own meaning in order to enhance their mathematical understandings? 

1. Create rewindable opportunities for learning.
Dorothy Burt recently shared her wisdom that creativity empowers learning with Pt England staff. A next step for my inquiry and my target learners is to plan for them to be creative, to make their own meaning using a SISOMO approach to explaining their problem-solving strategy and mathematical thinking. My hunch is that the benefits will be twofold. Those learners creating a screencast or video will affirm their own mathematical thinking. Their peers will have access to authentic rewindable resources to support learning any time, any place, anywhere.

I have created a first Maths tutorial, explaining subtraction by breaking up a number, as a starting point for such creativity to empower learning:



2. Teaching and learning using rich, worthwhile Maths tasks.
At our most recent Maths PD session with Jo Knox, she gave us practical advice about integrating Number and Strand in a fun and collaborative way using the NZ Maths unit, Giant Mystery. As well as planning opportunities for creativity, it is time for a rethink about the types of learning tasks used for teaching and learning within my Maths groups. By providing groups of learners with rich, open-ended tasks in a collaborative setting, will they be able to make their own meaning and retain those conceptual understandings? To begin to answer this question, I will need to reflect upon how I organise my Maths groupings and the flow of a typical Maths session.

Creativity Empowers Learning

The wonderful Dorothy Burt shared her expertise with Pt England staff today to remind us how students are empowered and their learning enhanced through planned opportunities for creativity. 

 


She was emphatic that "create" is not completing a writing task that forms part of "learn". Creativity is about learners using sight, sound and motion (SISOMO) to embed and share their understandings about what they are learning or have learnt. In novel ways to suit the task, students are thus able to show that they are "creators of content, not merely consumers". It was remarkable viewing how learners at Pt England have been given multiple opportunities to create such novel content over many years.