My #NCTMBoston Takeaways

I had the great pleasure of presenting at the Annual NCTM Conference.  For those of you interested, you can download my presentation on my other website www.MathematicallyMinded.com. This year it was held in Boston and I got to take a tour of Fenway Park!!  I even got sucked into the excitement of game day and went to a game.

But the best part of the trip wasn’t what I did in Boston, it’s what I’m taking away from Boston:

Friends

This was the first year I’ve ever been to any NCTM conference where I didn’t feel “on my own.” I’m quite an introvert and I would always go to the conferences and learn, but never felt connected.  The moment that started to change was in 2010, when I met @DrMi at the NCSM Annual in San Diego and got to know him more that week (well, I really just stalked him) while attending NCTM.  With Dr. Milou’s help these past few years, along with my venture into blogging and Twitter, I had so many people I was connected to this year.  Every day of the conference I was getting hugged!! Special thanks to, of course @DrMi, but also @robertkaplinsky, @mr_stadel, @gfletchy, @MathRack20, and @tracyzager. The community that is out there online is so welcoming.  Which brings me to my 2nd takeaway.

A learning community

Some people that I met at NCTM I’m just starting to get to know in person but it felt like I knew them already via the #MTBos aka Math Twitter Blogoshpere.  The MTBoS is a group of educators who connect via Twitter and/or writing blogs.  There are so many great math educators out there and it has been amazing this past year to learn from them.  If you are looking for a way to connect with other educators, consider participating in the MTBoS Challenge that started last month (don’t worry you can still join in the fun).  It’s a series of activities designed to get more educators online, because like @robertkaplinsky always says, “The group is smarter than the individual.” I encourage you to join in and make sure to follow these people on Twitter and via their blogs/websites:

#Shadowcon15 might prove to be another way for teachers to start connecting with each other.  It was a fabulous way to end the first day of the conference.  The speakers all energized the crowd.  Each presenter gave a short talk followed by a call to action.  A video of each talk will be posted at www.shadowmathcon.com along with a spot for people to converse about how they are implementing the call to action.  Go check the videos out (they will be posted one at a time, and the first one is already up!!!), and then report back on the website about how it’s going.  It could be another great way to building the online community of math educators….but you have to get in there and participate.

A theme for my year:

You attend LOTS of session while at an NCTM conference, but three of the ones I attended really stuck out and all of them seemed to be telling me the same thing: Have A Plan and Keep it Consistent

Dr. Eric Milou got the whole crowd going with his request to question the status quo (especially around the standards and assessments) during the Ignite session.  He demanded that we start a conversation and let our voices be heard about the things we don’t feel are good for our students.

Karen Karp did an amazingly funny presentation on Response to Intervention.  She said that her ideas for RtI were NOT something to buy, it is something to TRY.  Too often we buy a program that is supposed to fix our struggling learners.  Her message was that instead we need to fix the instruction to keep it consistent for all students.  Think of how confusing it can be when a teacher in the lower grades shows one way to model a problem but then in the upper grades their teacher tells them they can’t do it that way.  Or how about when we tell kids a ‘rule’ and then later that rule doesn’t apply anymore.  For example, “You can’t take a larger number from a smaller number (like 7-9),” but then in the upper grades they do.  Karen encouraged the attendees to get everyone in their school on board with creating common Language, Models, and Notation:

Karen recently wrote the fabulous article 13 Rules That Expire and is a co-author on the Teaching Student Centered Mathematics books (aka My Math Bibles) with John van de Walle, et al.

I have to say this about Ruth Parker before I talk about her session; she and Kathy Richardson were the first educators to begin the idea of Number Talks (check out her new book, Making Number Talks Matter).  OK, on to her session….The whole hour she presented at NCTM was full of wisdom.  It was the only session I typed the entire time!!!  I was so busy typing I didn’t stop to take pictures of her fabulous slides.  Thankfully while I was there typing away, right next to me @tracyzager was snapping pics like this and posting to Twitter (I gotta get better at that!):

I am taking away 8 Guiding Principles for Teaching Mathematics from Ruth Parker:

Guiding principles are for teachers and teachers of teachers.  If you teach teachers just replace ‘kids’ with ‘teachers.’

Guiding Principle #1: All kids can learn math.

They just need: Safe learning environment, time to learn, sense making at the heart, challenging & engaging tasks, freedom from high stakes assessment

Guiding Principle #2: Meaningful tasks that reveal “soft spots” in understanding should front load a unit of study.

6-8 units of study through the year…stop looking lesson by lesson, start looking at big ideas within a unit.

Start the unit with a big messy problem so that misunderstandings are revealed and let’s you know what to focus on within the unit.

Principals should not ask “What are you learning today?”  Instead ask, “What are you trying to figure out right now?”

Guiding Principle #3: Disequilibrium, cognitive confusion is a natural and even desirable part of the process of learning.

I’m pretty sure this was the point in time that she posed the problem below and I got so into solving it that I didn’t take any notes, but I think this guiding principle is self explanatory…if not try out the problem to see what it feels like:

Guiding principle #4: The ‘big’ mathematical ideas are never fully mastered.  They deepen in complexity over time.

Instruction should:

Reveal fragile understandings

Have periods of dissonance

Help kids see mistakes are sites for learning

Guiding Principle #5: Learning math is about the having of mathematical ideas

   Student sense making must be central to all mathematics teaching and learning

Guiding principle #6: There are usually many different ways to solve any given problem.

Guiding principle #7: We must meet students where they are when they come to us.

Going back and helping fill in the holes is essential.  If we don’t, we are laying dirt over a sinking foundation.  She gave us an activity to try out with students of any age, called Number Bracelets.  Here’s the description and a couple of examples:

Guiding principle #8: We need to always model the change we want to see happen.

We must be educators, not trainers….trainers pull

Most teachers teach the way they were taught

Resources

I did not spend much time in the exhibit hall but when I did go there I went directly to two spots: Stenhouse (to pick up a copy of Making Number Talks Matter…because Amazon had been sold out) and to NCTM to get Karen Karp’s new book Putting Essential Understanding of Addition & Subtraction into Practice.  Here are the books I bought:

Making Number Talks Matter by Cathy Humphreys & Ruth Parker 

Putting Essential Understanding of Multiplication and Division into Practice in Grades 3-5

Putting Essential Understanding of Addition & Subtraction into Practice in Grades PreK-2

If you have never been to an NCTM conference, I definitely recommend them.  They are an excellent way to CONNECT and RECHARGE.  Hope to see you in San Francisco next year!!