Professional Learning Goals

• Team effort in which everyone felt invested and comfortable being open in their discussions about their practice
• Made a plan and designed ways in which you could determine the effectiveness of Number Talks
• Ideally made a plan that spanned the course of at least one year
• Assigned specific book chapters to each PLC date to give us a framework
• As professionals, the most important piece that was understood through this experience was that change takes time, and some days we will have great Number Talks, while other times they may fall flat on their face… and that’s okay

Activities and Resources

• Build an understanding of what Number Talks looks like in the intermediate classroom
• Try various strategies to implement Number Talks
• Develop a routine

Unexpected Challenges

• Not having enough students actively participate, or only having the same three or four students share their thinking
• Finding enough time to implement before the actual lesson took place
• Interruptions (school-related)
• Having a related Number Talk to the current lesson

Enhancing Student Learning and Development

• Helping improve confidence in every learner, especially the students that are reluctant to participate
• Accountability for students to participate
• Enhance computational strategies and spatial sense

Sharing

• We shared our findings, strategies and next steps at a board-wide professional learning community
• Sharing our project with other intermediate teachers
• At divisional meetings, we can talk about improving upon our thinking, and what we can do next time to improve our Number Talks

Project Evaluation

We believe that although professional learning did take place, this project will be more successful at the beginning of the school year. Classroom routines are imperative to this mathematical process. Implementation in February, without prior routines established, posed a difficult strategy. True data is listening to the students, whether it be via a live Number Talk or one that has been recorded. This “data” could take many forms: teacher observations of what they see and hear in the classroom, and connections teachers see to the Curriculum for Mathematics.

We were able to design quick, formative assessments to use with students as they progressed through the Number Talks. It would be interesting to see how students thought about problems before beginning Number Talks as Number Talks are being used more often in primary/junior classrooms. We reviewing these assessments at our TLC meetings to generate amazing discussions.

We feel that most of our learning goals were met, however, the late year start and limited amount of time to develop a year-long plan needs tweaking.