Effective Practices In Mathematics

Today at our staff meeting we had Professional Development with our Mathematics Facilitator, Sue Pine on Effective Practices in Mathematics-warm up-Building number sense.

Useful resource: Good questions for math teaching By Lainie Schuster, Nancy Canavan Anderson
Below I have included some of the things that we talked about at our Professional Development Meeting.

1. Choosing/setting a goal for the lesson is a priority
2. How can we design a lesson so that they have an understanding of our concept. 
3. Collaborative problem solving and collaborative planning.
4. Similar maths goals and developing problems together to support maths goals. 
5. Using thinking maths books to write their thinking.
6. How much think time to give the children depending on the purpose. 
7. Important part of planning- Anticipating stage- What might it look like? And when working with the children what it would look like? What would the misconceptions be/look like. 

Using Numeracy planning sheets from NZMaths as a guide.

5 Effective Practices:

1. Anticipating-Anticipate the different ways a mathematical task can be solved. How students interpret the problem.  Doing the problem as many ways as possible.  
2. Monitoring-Paying close attention to students mathematics thinking and solution strategies as they work. Circulating around the classroom while students work either individually or in small groups.Monitoring involves more than just watching and listening to students.  Teachers should ask questions to give teachers opportunity to refine or revise their strategy before launching a whole group discussion. 
3. Selecting-Teacher selects particular students to share their work with the rest of the class to get particular pieces of the mathematics on the table. 
4. Sequencing-By making purposeful choices about the order in which students work is shared, teachers can maximise that chances that their mathematical goals for the discussion will be achieved. 
5. Connecting-Teacher helps students to draw connections between their solutions and other students solutions as well as the key mathematical ideas in the lesson. 

Noticing and responding- asking open ended questions to create critical thinking. 

Giving children open ended problems which has many different solutions. 

The meeting was very informative, especially the 5 effective practices. I believe that that these 5 effective practices can be applied to other curriculum areas as well. 

In regards to Mathematics, being able to anticipate the children's responses and misconceptions can inform our teaching and we can actually critique our teaching to be able to meet the children's needs. 

As a reflective teacher, I believe that it is really important the types and quality of the questions that we ask our students.