NCTM Conference- Salt Lake City
I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have attended the NCTM regional conference in Salt Lake City. This experience helped me grow so much as an instructional leader and it is one I will never forget. I attended 5-6 sessions each day and am highlighting my favorite ones over two blog posts.
The overall theme I kept hearing throughout my sessions was to increase student opportunities for number sense and working with numbers and patterns. Students reasoning should come out though exploration of situations that are based on number sense and reasoning. Estimating appeared throughout the middle and high school sessions I attended and I have been interested in increasing estimation at the secondary level since then. In my experience, students are so used to grabbing numbers from situations and “plugging” them into a formula or equation. They are not asked enough if their solution is reasonable and how they know. They are not asked enough to predict what their solution will be before they solve the problems. I am guilty of not having students reason enough in the classroom. I was inspired by several sessions that promoted student discourse, student problem solving, and increased rigor.
The first session that motivated me was lead by Fred Dillon and ______________. While this session focused on coaching new teachers, they showed ways of using notice and wonder in the classroom. I have used notice and wonder in professional development session but not in my own classroom. Through the notice and wonder they used poll everywhere to create a word cloud of what we noticed and then a separate one for what we wondered. I have already taken this concept and incorporated it into a unit training for next week. This is an engaging way for teachers to quickly assess prior knowledge or student observations about a graph, terminology, a topic, or even an equation or formula. While notice and wonder was used in several sessions I attended, this seemed to be a new twist on using this in the classroom. This session reminded me of the emotions behind being a first year teachers and what I had sought out in mentors at my campus. It also encouraged me to fill that role for teachers who feel they do not have a mentor at their campus or someone to help them through the year. Being a first and even second year teacher is very difficult and can be a struggle. If you can offer any consistent support to a beginning year teacher I highly encourage you to do so.
Another session that brought forth students reasoning with numbers was Splat! by Steve Wyborney. While Splat! Focuses mostly on elementary it can transfer into middle and even high school. Steve mentioned several times “the one who does the talking does the learning”. Splat! and his other resources, such as Estimystery, hook students to discussing their reasoning, working with number sense, and problem solving. It engages all levels of learners through the teacher questioning. Mr. Wyborney emphasized the most important question to ask is “Can you find another way?” Can you solve it in another way?” I have been thinking on ways to incorporate this type of reasoning at the secondary level while keep the engagement as high as Splat! does. It reminds me of instructional strategies I have used before, such as a strategy harvest and gallery walk. I plan to combine these strategies with Splat! to give every student a voice in the classroom and display their reasoning. I encourage you to head to stevewyborney.com for all of his free resources and ways to incorporate them into your classroom.
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