This blog began in Room 52 at Alexander Muir/Gladstone Ave Junior and Senior Public School in 2011. I am now a former Toronto District School Board (TDSB) educator on a new journey at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
So, while I may never find myself in Room 52, the blog's name is an homage to one of the school communities, central to my development as an educator and person.
I am so hyped by the enthusiasm and passion displayed by Greta Thunberg but there are other voices out there that can be overlooked. CNN has profiled some of these young activists on their page.
Before I begin, if you don't already know, I enjoy taking photos with my phone and those shots may end up in a post.
One of the key things in the role of being a Student Success Teacher rests with the abilities to connect with students and have them engaged with their learning. Key to this is having them talk and make sense of things.
At Ryerson PS, one of the first learning experiences I had was with a group of Grade 8 students who were preparing for speeches for the Student Parliament elections.
I can't quite remember all of the details of the lesson but I remember playing a game, as a mind-on exercise to activate some ideas around Speeches and then spent some time looking at samples of Speeches from YouTube. As they did this, they had this placemat to jot down their observations.
It is not my intention to post all of the videos we looked at but here is one that really stood out.
It became an example of what we should avoid doing.
I know that my colleague at Ryerson will be assisting with the Student Parliament speeches this year and will be using Greta's Thunberg's powerful speech as an example of what could be done to fashion a powerful and engaging speech.
As a class, we went through the placemats and each group was able to generate what they thought were the most important aspects for writing and delivering a speech. The goal in mind was to develop a Success Criteria chart to help guide the students.
On one side, were the rough notes after our discussions and debriefing and then the final chart, in its polished form.
As I skim through some photos from last year, I will come across another lesson that I feel is worthy of sharing and engaging with. This process also serves as a reminder of what I need to remember, when supporting students the students I do.
In my role, I am exposed to a lot of learning. EQAO results will be released soon and I believe the trend continues where there is a province-wide decline in how our students are doing in Mathematics. In the video I have posted below, Jo Boaler outlines an approach to Mathematics which really resonated with me.
I have always been interested in the brain, its workings, and the relationship to learning. In a screenshot from the video I encourage you to watch, you will see the parts of our brain that can be activated, once we change up and differentiate the way we deliver Mathematics instruction.
I made a note to myself to look up the difference between the two visual pathways, so I could have a more comprehensive understanding of them. This is from the Wikipediapage.
"The ventral stream (also known as the "what pathway") is involved with object and visual identification and recognition. The dorsal stream (or, "where pathway") is involved with processing the object's spatial location relative to the viewer and with speech repetition."
The green is where and the purple is what
I bring this up because this information came rushing back to me while I was supporting some students in a Grade 6 classroom. There was an EQAO-like problem posed to the students which involved a fair bit of thinking. In the following photo, you can partially see the question. I will have to take a better photo, so I can comment on it more in-depth.
It was a great question but it was hard to understand and required the use of some reading comprehension skills. In other words, the questions, before any Math was attempted, needed to make sense. It required, to my mind, some annotating. This might involve asking questions about the statements in the question or highlighting important aspects of the question; it might even involve drawing visual representations, in order to deepen the meaning of the question.
(But that will have to wait for another post because I am getting distracted from the original point!)
As I stood with the students around the chart paper, I realized that simply relying on a piece of paper and a few pencils were not enough to concretize and make sense of the question. For Jo Boaler, some of her ideas for promoting Math Success (yes, I capitalized that), rest with using the visual, physical, symbolic, and verbal modes for learning.
The original question and initial paper response
To add a physical and symbolic component to the question, each 100 block represented 100kg in the problem.
Once we talked more about the question -- the verbal-- this student realized that 10x100 Base Ten items equal 1 large Base Ten cube.
I was not able to follow-up with the taking up of the question with the whole class. This would be key to deepen the understanding of the 2 students I worked with and for the whole class. In a subsequent post, I will get a hold of this question to highlight some possible annotation strategies that could be used to deepen the challenges that often accompany Math word-problems. I will also make it a point to open up a conversation in the classroom about different ways we can support students' understanding of Math by using the different pathways available in our brain.
