I began the morning with a nice conversation with Rik Rowe, a math teacher from Marlborough High School. I asked him what he thought were the most important ingredients in a successful math program. He replied that relevance, relationship, regular assessments, and the opportunity for students to review, recall and essentially make meaning out their learning. A theme of the day for me was to think about how we might make more time for students' effective practice and study. Rik agreed with me that offering extra help and working with individual students is one of the most powerful ways to boost learning. We also discussed the value of question driven practice and learning--approaches that draw students into the learning in meaningful ways.
Next, I attended Marcie Abramson's terrific presentation, "Engaging and Math-Motivating Differentiated Instruction Tasks for ALL Learners." Marcie's quick-paced, concise, interactive, and timely presentation was terrific leaving me with a number of wonderful activities with which to build students' math knowledge and the math practice skills. I especially liked the fact that her activities led us away from dull, repetitive practice to more collaborative, creative, and active ways to learn math and solve open response problems that every child can access. Later an educator at the conference shared with me Jim Matthew's hand-out of engaging open response problems. Rick is a professor at Siena College where ATMIM will be co-hosting a summer conference at the end of June.
After that I attended the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's presentation, "Engagement Through Mathematical Rigor: Resources of Elementary and Secondary Education." The state's resources are plentiful and up-to-date. I want to give this presentation a careful review in the days to come. Ian Stith, the presenter, also introduced us to Massachusetts' documents related to the Math Practices which I also want to review with greater depth.
Then it was my turn to present. I led a conversation about the what it means to practice math with the premise that practice makes better. We discussed the fact that just right practice looks different depending upon the child, the content, and the context of the math program and math students. Stories of successful practice illustrated the important role of repetition when it comes mastering the standards, and the fact that children's working memory variability impacts their learning and is an important factor related to good practice opportunities. The game "Oh No 99" was mentioned as a particularly helpful game. Sum Dog and Prodigy were shared as math sites that children enjoyed using to build skill. The need to establish positive routines came up as well as the potential that tutoring in school, time on task with students, gaming, and more independent and collaborative learning than passive listening or following holds for students' math success.
The final presentation I attended introduced me to Graspable which is a terrific tool for teaching and learning algebraic equations standards. I'm looking forward to exploring this tool more with students to help them understand the many ways to evaluate mathematical expressions and understand and work with related properties.
It will take some time to digest all the ideas shared today and think about how I might embed these ideas in math lessons and experiences to come. The conference demonstrated once again that our access to wonderful teaching/learning tools and resources is amazing at this time, but our ability to integrate those resources is challenged, in part, by school structure, roles, and schedules. I think we can do a better job pooling our resources in schools to better meet the needs of all children in ways that matter. That's something I'll be thinking about as I review this material with greater focus in the days ahead.