First Post

Question 1

The main reason I joined Cohrt 21 was because I was very inspired by a teacher I had the pleasure of working with named Kourtney. She joined SHS in February of 2022 and she sadly left the school by the end of the year in June. To me, her tenure at my school was like shooting a star, if you’ll allow the metaphor. Her teaching was awe inspiring, it was brilliant, and it simply did not last long enough. 

If I were to begin to describe her teaching style, I would have to start with the term student-driven. She worked in the student resource room (we call it the AST which stands for Academic Success Team) where students who were having a hard time working independently would get the opportunity to work in small groups run by Kourtney. Typically, teachers in this position would lead small group discussions and lessons and then allow the students to work together in a fairly standard or a more traditional style. However, Kourtney was different. She had these amazing centres set up every single time she had her group come in. Students went from being excited to go to the AST room to being excited to see what centres Kourtney had set up for them on that particular day. Some of the centres were based on the learning target of the day, others were based on core math concepts and others were mainly just for fun. This had a very positive impact on her group and over time the students not only made gains in their math learning, but their motivation, independence and confidence increased as well. I was blown away and ever since the end of last year I’ve been wondering how I can capture that lightning in a bottle and have that type of impact but on the scale of an entire classroom. 

Now that I have met my students, I can see that there is a group of fairly high achievers in math who need a challenge. I can see there’s also a group who are meeting expectations but I feel can be nudged towards achieving at a higher level. Lastly, there’s a smaller group who are not meeting expectations, who don’t particularly like math and who have low confidence in their math abilities. I would argue that this is fairly typical of any math class at any level of education. Having said that, one goal I have for this year is to create a centres-based approach to teaching math that motivates, builds confidence and is highly effective in teaching students math concepts this year. So far, my focus is on math as I feel that I should only experiment with one subject at a time. I’m so excited to leverage the knowledge of the group to generate ideas on how best to set up this system moving forward. 

 

Question 2

The strand that I gravitated towards when deciding whether or not to join Cohort 21 this year was “How might we best engage, support and assess our JK-6 learners?”. As I mentioned, I had a bit of a difficult time reaching students who had a fixed mindset in math. These were the students who came to my class with preconceived notions of low aptitude in math which ultimately became a self-fulfilling prophecy as they disengaged with the material. Last year I felt like the students who fell into this category had low motivation which was linked to low confidence. I tried a few different strategies to support these students such as gamifying certain lessons, adding in extra help sessions before or after class, and pairing these students with students who were having success in math class. On the flip side, I also saw a group of students who needed a challenge in math. These students managed to go so far through the year without a challenge and without getting a single question wrong. Therefore, my goal is to produce and implement a classroom system that both challenges my high achievers in math and addresses some of the concerns surrounding fixed mindsets and low confidence in math. 

I did actually create a centres based system where students could work on math work asynchronously and I implemented it during the second unit of our math curriculum on whole numbers. I introduced the system to the students through a Google Slide which I have linked here. The slides were colour coded so students knew which content was there to support their learning, give them practise or give them a challenge. When students complete a task, they show it to me and I update their math passport. Where the motivation comes in is if the class collectively completes 50 tasks, we get an extra 15 minutes at the end of the cycle. One AHA moment for me was after I introduced this system, one of my students who has low confidence in math and would dread the start of every math period said, “When is our next math class? I want to keep working!”. It was at this moment that I saw the value and power of this system. 

Reflecting on how the unit went, I would say that I created more content than the students were able to complete in the given time. Therefore, when I tweak this for our next unit on angles, I will try to create less content and also make it more specifically differentiated. One of the interesting things I learned through our Cohort 21 Zoom meeting was one teacher in our group labels different work and makes it a “choose your own adventure” style. She labels it “mild” for students who need more practice with the concepts, “Medium” for students who are comfortable with the concept, and “spicy” for students who need a challenge. I think this will help with engagement and support.