MPI - Day 3

Today we looked at planning our program. We looked into grouping students different ways and timetabling each week. We were given a huge quantitry of tools, resources and sites today, and whilst a little overwhelming, I found this incredibly helpful. Moving forward from here I plan to simplify the taskboard I made previously so that it works better for me, and extending the use of my board to a fortnightly cycle rather than weekly.

It was good to see a number of examples around yearly curriculum overviews and breakdowns. This is something I feel we do individually at our kura but could benefit from doing a school overview.

I enjoyed looking deeper into rich tasks at a whole class level, breaking into small groups/pairs, and then coming back to share and extend with the whole class in a number of ways. I like my own strategy of giving students the answer at the very beginning, and getting students to focus on and share strategies rather than being answer driven. I find this works very well for students at all levels. I plan on increasing and structuring this more so it happens every Friday in my classroom next term.

Moving forward, I plan on explicitly exploring Mathigon, nrich, youcubed and eAko along with math fact lab in my programming for next term.

Nurturing Healthy Minds - Neurodiversity

I was fortunate to be able to participate in the Life Education PD around neurodiversity and creating positive environments for neurodiverse students within our classrooms. The PD was hosted by Cat Levine, and came with sound science backed research, some great discussion around these learners and what the world looks and feels like for them, and some practical strategies to help make my classroom a space where all students are able to feel comfortable, confident and supported.

MPI - Day 2

Today we focused primarily on knowing our learners as mathematicians. I am really looking forward to exploring some helpful websites that were shared throughout the day such as Banqer, MathVentures and SSDD. 

Our workbooks were shared to us today and it was good to have the time to start filling my data into this and get to play with that. I am looking forward to further exploring the use of the learning intentions and the matching relevent success criteria. It was good for me to look at the idea of success criteria not always being explicit before a lesson begins, but rather that it can be co-constructed or revealed throughout.

I really like the task boards that were presented to us this session. It was fun to explore these deeper and I would like to challenge myself to create a taskboard that works well for me and use it in my class. It is something I have not yet done as it has felt like a lot of initial work to set up, but I can see that it is really not much more work than the current timetable rotations I already use. 

I found the reflection slides for each student really good at the end of some of these activities, and think this will be a fantastic way to get constructive feedback from my setudents, while also promoting their self reflection, in a reasonably low stress way. 

Another full on, useful and information packed MPI day!

MPI Day 1 Homework

 As part of the homework assigned for the MPI day 1, I completed the attached survey with my class last week. It was interesting to see both their survey answers and their interpretations of the data from the survey. As a classroom teacher it was great for my own personal reflection to see both their attitudes in general, and some definite space for my own improvment in my teaching practices.

My students were forthcoming with reflections and next steps for our class and my teaching, including more visual learning, how students dont like the maths to feel impossible in its difficulty, and how they find it enjoyable and helpful to be able to discuss their understandings with a partner.