Miss M's Learning Space

 On Wednesday I had the privilege of attending the Ontario Ministry of Education's professional development presentation called  Building Futures . The two workshops I was able to attend specifically were:    promoting well being: developing positive conditions for learning; and  supporting students with special education needs.  I won't go into extensive detail, but I found there were a lot of common themes throughout the workshops and I'd like to highlight several key messages.  First, we can't 'fix' students' problems or 'make students better;' all we can do as educators is promote positive mental health and well being. This was a powerful moment for me when I heard this message. We can do everything 'right' as an educator and still have students who are in distress, and we need to leave it to the experts at that point. This is a concept, in general, that I struggle with. I want to fix everything all the time, but I've learne

This week we focused on math assessment and feedback strategies. In terms of assessment, we went through the basic forms of assessment and their function in math. Assessment for learning: formative, ongoing assessment to guide instruction. Assessment as  learning: formative, ongoing peer and self assessment to guide instruction. Assessment of learning: summative assessment to gauge learning and can be used to guide further instruction. These terms and their function are detailed in the Growing Success document. I've previously posted a summary of these forms of assessment on my blog here . We also talked about different ways of providing feedback. There are several options in addition to products (i.e. tests, quizzes, assignments, etc) that can be used to provide feedback such as conversations, self-assessments, math journals, etc. In terms of providing written feedback we honed in on several aspects of meaningful feedback: specific, personal, and positive. For our web

This week we discussed the idea of using intuition when approaching math problems. Essentially asking yourself 'what is this question trying to ask me' as you work through or initially approach a question.  Take, for example, the video below. Now, a lot of those students probably didn't understand the problem but tried to solve it anyway with the numbers provided. Had they trusted their intuition that something was off they would have been significantly more successful.We need to teach our students that it's okay (and even encouraged) to question why they're doing something; why they're learning something. Knowing 'why' allows them to make connections between math to math, math to self, and math to the world. These connections are critical, since learning math within it's context allows students to truly understand where it fits and what it means.  Another idea that was discussed was taking the abstract-ness out of math whenever possible.

This week I had the privilege of attending Brock University's Arts Matter Conference . The day was divided into 4 workshops and concluded with a performance, and I thought I would share some of the ideas with you here. Dance We began the day by exploring dance in the curriculum. I haven't done a lot of work with dance before so this was completely new to me. We talked about how miming isn't the same as dance and were introduced to Action Pak cards . These cards are a teacher resource designed to level the playing field in the realm of dance and make it accessible to all students - especially those who are uncomfortable because they don't 'know' dance.  Drama In drama we explored Story Drama and it was truly powerful. Basically, you read part of a book (we used Henry's Freedom Box ) and do activities at each pause to help you understand and connect with the book. We did a couple of Tableaus depicting various scenes and the most powerful activi