Math - Where To Start? (Blog 1 of my math inquiry)

This year I have started working for McHugh at CHEO. It is a job that is very unique in comparison to my other 22 years of teaching experiences. This job excited me as I was entering a whole new level of supporting mental health and academics. An opportunity to continue to learn and grow as an educator. What I didn't expect to find was my math phobia. 

As an elementary teacher I loved teaching math. I loved helping students find various ways to understand math and to see math in the world around them. I loved guiding and questioning students to see cross curricular connections and real world applications. And then I started working at McHugh CHEO. Where the student consistency changed, the math was now high school level and I was unprepared for my own self doubt and anxiety around teaching math. 

Now, let me just give you a clear idea on how our classroom is different than the average classroom. In our classroom we work with students for a short period of time, anywhere from one day, a few days, to possibly, and not often, a month. Students are usually working on curriculum that is planned by their home school classroom teacher.  So, they can come in working on any subject and any area within that subject. So, math can be any grade level and any area of math on any given day. Unlike teaching a consistent group of students that you get to plan and implement the curriculum for, I am working on the fly. So, it is essential to have a comfort level in grade  9-12 math that can allow me to be adaptable. That is my journey.....

I decided that working on math was an essential area as I had the least amount of flexible thinking in this area due to, 1. lack of prior math knowledge. 2. anxiety over getting the math wrong, and  3. being under pressure to know the concepts now in order to support the students. So here I am, starting this journey.

Math -Where To Start, became the title of my blog, because I had to take a personal reflective journey on my math level and experience in order to get my math inquiry started.  I had to let go of the idea that I can learn this by reading a book, or by working with the students, but to start by honestly identifying what grade level my math skills become uncomfortable. (A humbling experience). I needed to admit that the work starts with me. I realized I needed to go back to grade 8 math. 

So, I started my journey working my way through understanding multiplying and dividing fractions with like and unlike denominators. If I am honest, it was driven by the fact that I was working with a student who required a lot of math support and I had to work through my initial fear in order to support his learning. I started by allowing the student to know that I had to work it out with him as I was learning along with him. (This sounds easy, but it feels very vulnerable to admit you do not know to a student). So, I used what I am good at, which is being resourceful and finding solutions to problems, and I found videos that covered the concepts we were learning. (I am thankful for the vast amount learning videos online now. They are like having another teacher in the room). 

I found I learned the concepts quickly as it made more sense to me because I had real world experiences to connect to the learning. Which then freed me up from my anxiety to support the student who needed more time to understand the concepts. I could then offer more than one way to teach the concepts in hopes that one way would connect to the student learning.  I felt like I had approached step one to eliminating, or at least decreasing, my math anxiety. 

Now I have set myself the goal to use MathSpace to work my way through the grade 8 Ontario Math Curriculum starting with understanding integers and moving onto understanding exponents. While learning these concepts I may discover other math concepts I need to understand. I would also like to challenge myself by working through math problems that require me to practice various math concepts in one problem. Challenge accepted......

My next blog will document the good, the bad, and the ugly, as I continue on my math learning journey.

Reflective Check-Ins

As an educator going on 22 years, I have had a lot of time to reflect on my own practices, the practices across the school system and the vast changes to education across the globe. I have reflected on my personal experience as an educator and the learning I have taken from each student with whom I have had the privilege to work and learn alongside. Through my experiences with colleagues and how we are an educational ecosystem. I have  also had experiences that allowed me to reflect at the macro level around the practices being implemented across a school board and the assessment and curriculum that have become catalyst to the types of educational practices that we see across the province. 

Each experience has provided me the privilege to question, wonder, seek continued knowledge building, collaborate with colleagues to delve into learning together, to be open to life long learning and to the fact that learning is not about always getting it right, but about taking time to reflect on our impact. It is through this questioning and wondering that I have been able to challenge status quo in order to move learning to another place. It has allowed me to seek out comrades who are willing to come on a pro-active learning journey with me and to push my thinking and open myself up to understanding my personal biases.

I like to call these moments, "reflective check-ins". They are essential to my growth not only as an educator, but as a developing human being. Each check-in offers me an opportunity to ensure I have what I need to continue on my journey. They can be personal needs, work related needs, relationship needs, parenting needs, and the list can go on. They can be driven by those moments when something isn't quite feeling right, making sense to me, is a clear struggle or can even be moments when I feel all is moving along  the right path and may not feel I need to reflect on anything. Yet, each reflection offers some form of growth.

Therefore, reflection is so embedded into how I learn and grow as a person, that I can't imagine it not having an essential role in all educational practices. Every individual learns from authentic and in the moment reflection and from an environment set up to be a safe place to voice thinking about personal reflections.

When you enter a classroom where each person understands the importance of authentic reflection and that they are safe to voice thinking, beliefs and wonderings, you see true learning come alive. It is what Daniel Pink refers to in his article, The Principles of Change - The Stories of Learning and Leading, 

"Yet we too often focus on external “motivators” to be the driver for change or even learning.  One of the biggest shifts in my own thinking in the past few years is how learning is such a personal endeavour, yet we try to package it up and decide the paths and passions for others. Stephen Downes summarizes this sentiment nicely:

 “We have to stop thinking of an education as something that is delivered to us and instead see it as something we create for ourselves.”

One such classroom has been set up by a phenomenal educator in our Ottawa Catholic School Board, Rola Tibshirani. When you enter this space you see visual representations and hear oral discussions evident of  student thinking. You see explicit opportunities for students to reflect on themselves as learners and an openness to learning from and with each other. Rola herself  opens herself up to working alongside colleagues to develop her own practices and to co-learn with her students and colleagues.

Yesterday, I got to become a co-teacher and learner with a group of grade 7 students that Rola Tibshirani teaches. We wanted to provide explicit moments of social and emotional development as students worked collaboratively in groups. Anyone entering the classroom during this time could easily think that all students in these groups were all contributing to the thinking about environmental issues.They were sitting together, no distracting behaviours were being manifest and visual representation of relevant learning was being put onto the chart paper. 

 

Each student wrote a personal reflection 

But, on closer inspection, through "reflective check-in", each student was given a sticky to identify if they had a challenge working collaboratively. They did not have to identify which group they worked in, the purpose was to develop purposeful self reflection, or as we call it through social emotional learning, self-awareness.  It was evident that although all groups had ideas written down, it wasn't without challenges. What was even more important was that there was more than one reason why the students had felt these challenges. We had hit the "reflective check-in" jackpot, as we were now hearing true student voice, experience and opening up moments for whole group reflection and awareness. 

We took each reflection and put them into themes to use during discussions around strategies to support challenges.

Being true to the authentic learning moment we asked the students to reflect upon the collaboration challenges that the students had expressed feeling. Then they were asked to come up with possible solutions to each of the challenges. 

Rola, continued today with open class reflection on how they were going to ensure that all student voices were being documented during today's group work. Students chose strategies from yesterday's list of ideas and implemented them with success today.




This kind of explicit instruction allows students to see how content learning requires  effective collaboration and listening skills. It also offers opportunities to explicitly address SEL skill development, in this case, self awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship skills. All of which evolved when opportunities were given for "reflective check-ins".