Professional Learning Goals

Our math department at Glebe has been actively sharing current research in math education among its members and teachers across the province. We are inspired by Jo Boaler’s ideas in the Stanford course on “How to Learn Math,” Carol Dweck’s book on growth vs. fixed mindset, Sandra Herbst and Anne Davies’ work on co-creating criteria and finally Peter Liljedahl’s ideas on how to create a learning environment which promotes critical thinking. Our professional learning goals are to facilitate sharing of rich activities, increase student engagement, and continue to improve our assessment and evaluation strategies for the MHF4U course.

Activities and Resources

First we started with activities we had already created or gotten from other teachers.

We met as a team to create activities. One teacher tried the activities in her classes and reported back to the team. Modifications to the lessons were done as needed.

We created a website to share the course plan with activities and references to borrowed activities. The website can be found at:

https://sites.google.com/a/ocdsb.ca/spiralling-in-mhf4u/

Unexpected Challenges

One challenge was timing. We expected to receive the funding earlier in the year when the four initial team members were all teaching MHF4U. We only started meeting at the end of first semester. It would have been nice to get the funding earlier so that we had more time to meet. A second challenge related to timing lies with the fact that only one of the four teachers taught MHF4U in second semester. The other three teachers had less time to dedicate to the course as they had other ones to consider for the new semester.

Enhancing Student Learning and Development

The idea of spiralling in a course is very important to student learning.  Traditional unit/chapter-based course plans require students to learn and be evaluated on one topic then put that one aside and move onto the next topic. In spiralling, evaluations touch on multiple strands and overall expectations from the course.  Students do not forget material from one strand because it comes back several times throughout the course. This also allows students multiple opportunities to show their understanding in a strand.

Activity-based learning is much more engaging for the students. With specific ties to curriculum content, rich activities can drive student learning. Using non-permanent vertical surfaces also increases student engagement as they have no choice but to participate at the whiteboard. They cannot sit passively and watch someone else do the math for them.

Sharing

We shared our project in five ways:

1. We invited another teacher from Glebe to join us as she expressed interest in being involved.

2. We created a Google site to share the whole course plan including the activities and lessons. We shared the link to the Google site on Twitter.  Here is the link:

https://sites.google.com/a/ocdsb.ca/spiralling-in-mhf4u/

3. We presented our project at the annual Ontario Association of Mathematics Educators in Toronto.

4. Two other teachers from different schools in our board asked to join the project as well so we will be expanding our collaboration with them.

5. We have received requests from teachers in other boards to find out more about our project. Next year, we will be hosting teachers and math consultants from different parts of the province as they visit our classes and share in our discussions.

 

Project Evaluation

Our project was successful in that we created a course plan which we shared with teachers from across Ontario. We have implemented many of the activities already. For next year, we will be using this new course plan from the very first day.

We would have like to spend more time on assessment and evaluation.