Thinking And Mathematics

Over the past two years our school has been focusing our attention on how students think and learn mathematics.  It has been a great opportunity for our staff and students to explore new ways to learn and new ways to  In the past, and certainly when I was growing up, math was something that you learned by memorizing formulas, times tables and spent hours learning long division.

Our journey started three years ago when our junior teachers participated in a professional learning opportunity that focused on teaching through problem solving.  The students were given many opportunities to solve a variety of problems and the students created their understanding through the small group work that they did to solve the problems.  The teacher turned over the learning and became a listener to the thinking that was being done by the students.  It was in this important shift that the student's voice had been given a more significant role in the learning process.  Once the student's understanding of a concept was heard without being controlled by the teacher, there was an opportunity to hear some of the misconceptions that the students had in their understanding.  Once the misconceptions were apparent, it was then the time for the teacher to work with students who had similar misconceptions and supported them as they built a better understanding.

Our learning is beginning to have a positive affect on our students achievement.  Our primary students results on their final report cards, along with our Grade 3 EQAO results are very encouraging.  Our struggle has been in the junior division and the increased expectation to communicate their understanding and be able to describe their thinking. This increasing requirement to explain their thinking is our next challenge.  A challenge that must be met with a targeted plan.

Each year we plan our school improvement and we spend time during staff meetings and our professional learning opportunites addressing the ways that we can reach the goals that we set out in our plan.  This year we have agreed that in order to address our need to increase our student's ability to communicate their thinking we believe that we need to give our students the opportunity to do this more frequently.  Math research on teaching says that the most effective math program has students in small group and guided groups for half of their math time.  Working in a small group on math problems and doing work in a small group with the teacher are examples of these effective strategies.  Our goal is to reach this 50% level in all of our math classes.

Throughout this year we will be monitoring our progress and discussing how we can reach this goal and make our math program more successful where student voice becomes more frequently heard and our students have the opportunity to become better communicators of their thinking.