Planning a Maths Programme

Day 3 in the Mathematics Practice Intensive was all about Planning a Maths Programme.  Not, here is what you need to do, now go and do it but here are all the options and resources, choose what is best for you and your students and go and do it.  

It's amazing after each day of this intensive learning in maths how my thinking and reflecting on best practice is altering and my list of what I would like to change or freshen up, as we keep saying, is swirling around in my head.  I have that slightly annoying quality that really makes me want to freshen it all up immediately and be doing it as perfectly as possible (What would that look like...different in every teaching space around the country!)  I have to be sensible and change it bit by bit and mold it into a maths programme that I am happy with and is ensuring engagement and success for my learners.

Today we covered The Joys of Timetabling, Grouping, Planning for a Rich Task and Follow up Learning.  Structuring your maths week so you are fitting in workshops, oral language, rich tasks in flexible groupings and then some investigation tasks just seems to hit all the right targets for me.  

Moving forward I am going to continue to tweak my Task Board to include some more of the learning from today, mostly around the follow up tasks and basic facts resources that are available.  I will also move towards introducing a rich task and I like the idea of doing this on a Thursday because I could structure my workshops around the mathematical skills and strategies that could be useful to solve the problem.  Thank you to Sarah, who is on this journey with me, for suggesting that you could tell the group the problem and then the answer so it becomes about the best strategies to use to get to the answer, rather than the fastest person to solve the problem.  I am hoping that the injection of real contexts, rich tasks, more talking and investigations will switch my learners from feeling ok about maths to thinking it is pretty cool!

Right, I am signing off for now and will be checking out the resources above to create a Rich Task to share for homework:)

Know our learners as mathematicians

Day 2 of the Maths Practice Intensive was all about knowing our learners as mathematicians.  I have to keep reminding myself that it is called 'Intensive' for a particular reason!  We work through a lot of material in a relatively short space of time but I know that I will digest and revisit over the next three weeks before our next session and it will all start to sink in and make sense as more and more of the course is delivered to us.  One of my big take-aways is the fact that I am being delivered all of this research based material and I can pick and choose as to what will suit me and my class at this point.  Speaking of which, how fantastic do these slides look?  I am very keen to be working towards my planning for my students to be as enticing and interesting as the examples that we are having shared with us.

If this is the learning that they are being invited to be part of, then I will easily be motivating my learners to engage with the curriculum, know what their next steps are and to negotiate with them the best ways for them to reach these goals.

The wealth of knowledge we have at our fingertips through the assessment that we do is waiting and ready for us to use.  We just need some knowledge on how to use this.  Today we started creating our own Teacher Workbooks which will become a collection of data, next steps, learning intentions, and resource ideas.  This will be one of the areas where I will need to look at what works for me and build onto this as and when needed. 

I am off to have a go at creating a task board that I can start using tomorrow.  I think I need another long weekend...😄😄

What kind of mathematician are you?

As part of the MPI first day homework I got each of my Year 5 and 6 students to carry out a survey on a variety of questions about their attitude towards maths.  It was a quick and easy activity to carry out but has brought a wealth of information about their attitude to maths out in the open for us to work on.

My initial thought is that I need to think really hard about how I am presenting the maths curriculum to my students to ensure I can move some of my students' attitudes towards things like how confident they are, how often they get to discuss their ideas and strategies, what really helps them learn and how often they feel like they are getting feedback from me.

The question about how often they practice maths at home was very interesting and it was the question which saw most of the students rate themselves on the lower end of the scale.  I do wonder if they know that maths can be other things than just online apps etc.  I need to revisit the first blog post I wrote after my first MPI Day and look at what connections I can start making between maths topics and concepts, and also between maths and everyday life.

A question we are debating is if we find maths a bit challenging can we still like it?  We will keep you updated with what we decide.😃

2024 MPI

 Day 1 : Maths is Core to Learning

The first cohort for Mathematics Practice Intensive launched today!  We had a very full day learning about how maths is core to learning and getting a good understanding of where we are headed in this professional learning adventure.

We began our day with introductions and learning a little bit about each other.  Due to the fact that it is a Manaiakalani initiative and I am in my fifth year of teaching in a Manaiakalani school, some of the names and faces were familiar.  Dorothy shared some of Manaiakalani's Kaupapa and Shared Pedagogy, which is always a good reminder of where this all started and how lucky we are to be on this journey together.  Something that has stuck with me from this is the fact that we need to get these students learning, we need to find out how to do this in the best possible way and we need to do it now.

We started with thinking about what the profile is of a good mathematician.  The attributes were then shared with us which included wonderful vocabulary such as creatively, critically, logically, structure, organise, processing, investigate, understand and the list goes on.  I was thinking about how lots of these are how we could describe what we want from all areas of the curriculum.

Looking at Mathematics across the Curriculum was very interesting.  A wee bonus was finding out that all along on NZ Maths there have been resources, lesson plans etc. that are well thought out series of lessons that do just that - link maths across different curriculum areas.  This will definitely be something I will revisit as I get the big picture of where I am headed sorted.

We had several texts shared with us to choose one to read.  I chose to read Making Connections Strengthens Learning/Mathematics Framework. 

Unless we focus on making connections, “students may view their learning of maths as the accumulation of unrelated and discrete ideas.” (Project Math).

So essentially we need to be helping students make connections between not only maths topics and concepts but also between maths and other curriculum areas, and maths and everyday life. (This reading also included some really simple ways to make connections.)

As I head away to digest the day's material I am very excited about the rich and informative content that we have had shared with us today.  

Looking back at MIT 2023

This year I was very fortunate to be a part of the Manaiakalani Innovative Teachers 2023. I was one of five other teachers from around New Zealand to take part in this project this year. 

We began our journey in Omaha, getting to know each other and starting with a Design Thinking Process to help us make a start and to work out what we might want to work on for the duration of the year.  We achieved so much in these couple of days and we felt excited and ready to get started on our projects.  Each term we met in Auckland at KPMG to share our progress and work through any issues we were having with our fellow MIT colleages. 

At the beginning of the Term 3 holidays we headed to the Bay of Islands to present our projects to the Bay of Islands Summit attendees.  Then a few weeks after that we were on stage again, this time presenting at the Principals' Wānanga.

My project was focused on oral language and my tool is called Talk the Talk and includes lots of ideas for oral language activities that can be used in the classroom. 

Click on the speech bubbles to look back at my journey and to also see my Talk the Talk tool.

Bay of Islands Summit 2023

The summit, where we would present our projects, had seemed almost like a surreal, something in the very distance, event.  Then all of a sudden it was the end of Term 3 and we were all travelling to the Bay of Islands to be part of the Bay of Islands Summit and present our projects to the world...well at least to the summit attendees! 

We were lucky enough to travel to the Bay of Islands on the Saturday and stay in Paihia, which was very central to everywhere that we needed to be.  We did a bit of sightseeing as well as helping with some administrative jobs for the summit.  We also had a run through of our Pecha Kucha presentations.  A Pecha Kucha is a presentation where your slides automatically change every 20 seconds so you have to be pretty direct with what you are sharing, no waffling!

We were also able to attend some of the workshops while at the summit.  I attended Creating Animations in Photopea with Hannah and Kelsey, Getting Creative with Mathematics and Statistics with Donna, DFI Reboot : Media with Vicki, He pepeha matihiko with Makaore and He aha Mahimaina?/What is Minecraft? with Vivian.  The pepeha workshop with Makaore really stuck with me and I am going to use what he shared with us at the beginning of next year.  Another way for students to represent themselves, their pepeha and places important to them.

On the Monday afternoon you could choose a visit or activity of some sort and I selected the visit to Waitangi.  Wow!!  It was such a valuable experience and I feel very lucky to have been able to do this.

Day 2 of the summit was the day for our presentations.  We were all pretty nervous but excited that the day had finally arrived where we could put our public speaking to the test.  Matt had ensured we were very well prepared and rehearsed.  It was something that was outside my comfort zone but I do feel pretty proud of myself for having achieved it.  There were such lovely attendees at the summit and we received such a lot of positive feedback, so that made it so worthwhile.  You can view my presentation here if you are interested.

Thank you to the Manaiakalani Network for the experience that comes with being an Innovative Teacher.  It has been such an amazing journey and I have loved it.  Next stop the Principals' Wānanga in Auckland where we do it all over again! 

KPMG Hui #3

It's the highlight of my term, meeting up with my Manaiakalani buddies once again.  Our usual meet up at Lawn Cafe for our breakfast before heading to KPMG for our Term 3 session.  As usual the lovely Justine caters to our every whim, with cheese scones and coffees, followed by a delicious and nutritious lunch.  

This session was a bit of an exciting one, where we learnt the details for the Bay of Island Summit being held in the next school holidays.  The other side of this was thinking about the fact that we would all be presenting our Pecha Kucha at this summit!  

We began with our usual feeding back and sharing where we were at with our project, had we been using it yet and what challenges we had faced.  I was feeling a little bit behind due to unexpected travel for personal reasons.  

We spent the rest of the day finding out what a Pecha Kucha is (20 slides that you speak to, 20 seconds for each slide, the slides move automatically so you can't get behind, you have to plan pretty much exactly the correct amount of chat for each slide...no pressure!!) and then beginning to draft it out.

Bring on the Bay of Islands Summit 2023!!

Here is the link for my Talk the Talk Oral Language Tool if you are keen to see what I have included in it so far and feel free to let me know what you think.