WHAT’S NOW
- What specific actions have your NorCan school team of students and educators taken as a result of the May Ontario visit?
WHAT’S NEXT
- Thinking ahead to the fall, what next steps will your NorCan school team take?
- With whom in our NorCan community will your school be collaborating?
- What will this collaboration look like? (initial thoughts)
Please share your "What's Now / What's Next" with our community by responding to this discussion thread....tusen takk!
Replies
WHAT’S NOW?
Getting back from Ontario, we were all enthusiastic and full of ideas on what we wanted to test out in our own classes. Having talked among ourselves, we realized that what had impressed us the most was how Tecumseh Vista worked with student voice in mathematics. We decided to develop the project plan even further and to create a Math Council here at Molde Upper Secondary School. Of course, a lot of questions immediately presented themselves. Which teachers and which teams should take part? Should all be invited? Consequently, we invited all math teachers and all first year students (11th grade) to a meeting where we, i.e. the teachers and students who had been to Ontario, told them about what we had learned, but with a particular emphasis on student voice and the Math Council. At this meeting it was important for us to get a feeling as to the interest of establishing a Math Council here at our own school. After meeting the students, they answered the following questions (in groups):
WHAT’S NEXT
We are very much looking forward to the visit from three Oshawa teachers in August. Mona Røssland is coming as well. In other words, we are now planning a meeting with her and the three Canadian teachers where we among other things will discuss what is good math teaching, evaluation/grading and documentation.
Today (at this web site), I found The Math Council Guidebook from Tecumseh Vista and Craig, thanks a lot! I am really looking forward to reading it. I am convinced it will help us a lot when we are establishing our very own Math Council this fall.
What's Now?
Just like Craig, I feel that the more time we spend together, the more amazing things I hear, and the more I feel we need to learn and do! Hearing about the Math Council was inspiring! It made me see that we need to be more transparent in sharing with our students how we use the student voice that we have been listening for so carefully. We have been using voice to drive our professional learning and classroom activities, but not really letting students know that they are the reason why we are working to change and grow. I think that this is a pretty important point because it will deepen the co-learning relationship that we have with our students and perhaps even make them feel more empowered in the classroom. I think that a Math Council at our school will definitely be a step in the right direction.
What's Next?
We were really disappointed that we didn't get to travel to Windsor in April to meet with our Ontario friends, so we hope to be able to do this very early this fall (if our Tecumseh Vista friends will have us!). We are wondering if this would be a good chance to get the students involved as well, and possibly bring them along with us to Windsor. We will be connecting with our Windsor friends to get their thoughts on this.
In August, members of our team are travelling to Drammen and Molde to meet with the teams there. We are continuing to explore effective "assessment of learning" practices, but also working to create better tasks. Our school has been discussing trying out a full-day Friday schedule at some point next year; we think that this will give us the time, support and motivation we need to create and facilitate richer, more engaging tasks that would increase student engagement. We are looking forward to learning from our Norwegian colleagues in August and planning for year 2.
What's Now? Only a million things. It seems like the more we get together, the more we make each other think about what we do in our schools and classrooms. At Tecumseh Vista we received much feedback about our math council and student work study. I can't really comment on student work study as that is Brenda's area of expertise, but I can comment on math council. Many of you asked for assistance/documentation in setting up your own math council. We started putting something together with plans of posting it shortly after you left but somehow the documentation grew. Your presence alone made us think about the whole process and we realized that we didn't do as good of a job of documenting the process that we would have liked. So we have been going back through our files and talking with teachers and students. Bottom line. A document that we hope will accurately cover the whole process will be coming out very shortly.
What's Next? I honestly don't know where to begin. Your visit got so many things rolling for us. Ok, for starters we have been in contact with Jessie and Mike at Monsignor Fee Otterson and Linda at Ranvik to discuss some alternative assessment methods. Our grade 6 teacher is busy mapping out our school's dimension and I know this is something that we talked about doing with Monsignor Fee Otterson. In terms of honouring requests we had from our visit, we are in the process of creating documentation that makes sense for any schools wishing to set up a math council.
We are also planning on visiting all our Albertan partners in October as well as presenting some of our work at a math conference in Alberta. Some discussions began on the Ontario visit about things we would like to do that Alberta is already doing that we would like to piggy-back on. Of course, we are also looking to forge out new partnerships with our Norweigan colleagues.