Some Thoughts on Teaching and Learning

Another PD Day, another blog post to consolidate everything! This afternoon I attended and helped run the OCDSB Math PD Day. Man, do I love a good workshop! And today, I experienced 5 of them.  Marian Small - Building Number Sense Marian presented a lot of good questions we can ask students in order to improve their understanding of  algebra. Some of my favourite examples were:  1. Look at y = 3x - 9. Is y big or little when x is big? When is y basically the same as 3x? I really like this question because it students get the opportunity to talk about "bigness" of numbers, and what it means to be big or small. Does is matter if the number is negative or positive? Is it the magnitude of the number that makes it small or big? I think there could be some great discussion there -- and it would be great for grade nine students, who are just beginning to relate algebra and graphs, as well as even grade 12 students working on things like asymptotes and end behav...

I must admit that I signed up for the QLSMA Math MiniConference on a whim, with the added knowledge that it would be a great excuse to visit Anneke. However, I was pleasantly surprised. And now I'm going to attempt to consolidate all that I learned so I can eventually put it to use! The key note speakers had done research into bridging the divide between patterning and algebra. Now, their study focused more on elementary school students, but I could immediately see a connection to high school mathematics. This is what I took away from their methodology: - introduce a patterning concept by using an "input" "output" robot approach --> which is really the definition of a function! - stay away from table of values until students get the connection between a pattern, equation and the graph representation (it is meaningless and confusing otherwise) - get students to create patterns using pattern blocks, using the terms 1, 2, and 3 and then get other stude...