Professional Learning Goals

• Developed a common understanding of spiralling with activity-based lessons in mathematics
• Understood the elements of a good learning activity
• Understood what personalized “teacher moves” aid in the unfolding of the activity to ensure student learning
• Reflected on what resources could encourage teachers to take a step towards activity-based learning
• Reflected on why an activity-based approach can allow us to be responsive to students’ strengths and needs

Activities and Resources

Our team met on a bi-weekly basis. Our time together evolved in the sense that our work changed as we started to create our own knowledge of the use of activities in mathematics. We initially had many discussions that centred around:

• Creating group norms of understanding of activities and what makes a good activity
• Co-creating activities that are collectively owned by the group, where ownership resides with the group

In-between meeting times, we worked with the ideas developed together within our respective classes and returned each meeting to debrief the activity, to share observations and to inform ourselves as to the effectiveness of the activity for student learning.

As our time neared an end, we realized how individualized the activities became as we understood that it was necessary to be responsive to our students. Our blog was created as a means to honour both our initial “big” idea with each activity, as well as our individual reflections and insights to the activities with our own students.

Unexpected Challenges

Although overall we feel we met our learning goals, it was difficult at times to focus our discussions into action. In an attempt to focus ourselves, we did try to use the Learning Conversations Protocol to structure our conversation. Although there were merits to having a structure, its use ultimately seemed to slow us down a little bit.

Enhancing Student Learning and Development

We feel our project is directly related to enhanced student learning and development as the nature of our final product is a result of understanding the need to be responsive to the students in front of us. What we hope we can share with other teachers is the potential for richness that arises with using learning activities as a vehicle in the classroom. Through learning activities, students are able to make personal connections to concepts. We have seen that using activities can strengthen student conceptual understanding that we feel ultimately creates a strong foundation for further learning.

Sharing

Our sharing will be done through our blog:

https://mfm1p-activities.blogspot.com

Our target audience is teachers who are new to or interested in using activities in Grade 9 applied mathematics. Our hope is to provide a resource that will not only provide some activity ideas, but to share our thought process behind the instructional decisions we make to allow the activity to unfold. In doing so, we hope to better equip teachers to use and develop their own activities for their class.

Our next step in using the blog is to create a space where teachers can also submit their own activity ideas and allow for others to share their individual experiences with and modifications to the activity. We recognize the effect the classroom context has on how an activity unfolds.

Project Evaluation

Our learning goals:

• To develop a common understanding of spiralling with activity-based lessons in mathematics
• To understand the elements of a good learning activity
• To understand what personalized “teacher moves” aid in the unfolding of the activity to ensure student learning
• To reflect on what resources could encourage teachers to take a step towards activity-based learning
• To reflect on why an activity-based approach can allow us to be responsive to students’ strengths and needs

In relation to our goals, we feel we have met these goals. As we reflect upon our choice for a blog as the venue of our project, we fully see how its choice was in response to what we have learned about learning activities. Although the idea behind an activity can be easily grasped, it is how we unfold the ideas for students to uncover that is not universal. However, it was sharing our individual perspectives and how we respond to students that helped us build common understanding of what is required to understand the activity. The blog we created seeks to honour this common understanding that there is no common understanding, but, through sharing our response to student needs, we can continue to evolve in using activities in the classroom as a mode of learning.