After a fairly lazy 3-week-or-so stretch, I finally got on my bike again today, to ride to the airport for my flight lesson this afternoon.  IT WAS COLD!!!  Thankfully, I had enough foresight to pack my riding gloves and a headband to cover my ears, but nevertheless I was unpleasantly shocked by the change in temperature since last I rode my trusty steed!

I am determined to ride twice to work this week, to get in as much fall sun (even if the air is crisp) before winter sets in, and the waterproof pants and other winter riding gear become a daily necessity rather than a distant memory!

Finally did my first official cross country (dual) as part of my flight training -- awesome skies in Peterborough… nice red leaves in Muskoka (not allowed to take photos while flying – too much to do in the air on a x-country anyway, no time to diddle around with camera).  5 hours!  Too tired to blog properly, but here are some pics from the ground at two stops…

A big part of the project my colleague and I are working on this year with the students at our school is Oral Language.  Specifically, we are trying to teach the learners in our classrooms how to master the art of "Grand Conversations", for in so doing, we hope they will become more adept at talking about Math, thus consolidating their learning in this subject area.

and then proceeded to teach partner and small group talk-based lessons to introduce five elements of effective talk, based on the MInistry Monograph on Grand Conversations and a variety of other resources.

I am excited to report that they seem to be working! 

A student commented today that when others "link to and build on" (one of the criteria we shared) to what she is saying, she feels like she is learning something new.  :))) 

Another student corroborated this by adding excitedly that "even when someone disagrees with me, so long as they do it calmly and give me reasons, I feel like I am learning more!"

How delighted I am that my pathetic first attempts at using the Smart Board and introducting oral language in a coherent manner are not in vain.  I hope to keep up the momentum this year and see if it makes a difference not just in math, but in all subject area, and even in their social skills in general.

Working on the TLLP math project this year with a colleague from my school has really forced me to revisit some of my math pedagogy and examine it critically. 

It’s one of the things I really value about this project, actually...
If I am going to blog about “how to teach math effectively” and be authentic about it, I have to be honest about my own practice: Am I using problem-based learning on a regular basis, and how am I meeting the needs of struggling learners in my class?  Am I using research-based methods to remediate students who are showing gaps in basic skills?  How am I developing automaticity in math facts for my students who have not yet acquired this?

One thing I have enjoyed is reaffirming my “preaching” about skill and drill and kill:  I have long held the belief that drilling the facts into students is neither fun nor effective.  The students who already know how the add and subtract are bored by it, and the students who struggle become riddled with anxiety (and still do not learn the concept being drilled).

The research confirms my stance.

Page 17 of the Ministry’s GEIM (Vol. 5: Teaching Basic Facts and Multi-Digit Computations) suggests that worksheets without a purpose are simply busywork, and are not only not valuable in learning math, but may even be detrimental for some students:

As the late John VanDeWalle (2004) notes, “Fact mastery relies significantly on how well students have constructed relationships of numbers and how well they understand  the operations”, and that we ought not to  “subject any student to fact drills unless the student has developed efficient strategies for the facts being practiced. . . . Short-term  gains are almost certain to be lost over time. Practice prior to development of efficient methods is simply

       a waste of precious instruction time.”

Boy, can I ever related the preciousness of instructional time -- it feels like an ever-present threat in my own classroom this year... so many valuable things to address, and so little time in which to address them effectively!

Imagine my surprise, then, when my own two boys came home from school today with a giant package of subtraction drills!  10 pages of "mad minute", each with 30 questions, from a 1981 resource that – to my knowledge – has been out of use in school boards in this province for at least a decade if not more!!!

I almost fell over!

Marilyn Burns (1995) reminds us that this sort of drill and kill approach to mathematics "makes no instructional sense. . . Children who have difficulty with skills or who work more slowly run the risk of reinforcing wrong practices under pressure. Also, they can become fearful about, and negative toward, their mathematics learning.”

If 300 subtraction questions don’t cause “pressure” for an 8-year-old, I’m not sure what does!

After having a mini-meltdown, I took a deep breath, and reminded myself that not every teacher has the luxury of a 12-thousand-dollar, Ministry-funded research project, and that although it seems odd to me that someone teaching in Ontario in this day and age wouldn’t have long moved beyond this sort of superficial mathematical instruction, we are all at different parts along the continuum (don't ask me, for example, about my Science program, lol!)  I am also fully aware that I have not yet heard the teacher's/school's side of the story.  In fact, I am eager to meet with the person responsible for sending home this package so that I might learn what the motivation behind such a move might be.  I am very open to the possibility that I am about to learn something new.

Oh, how I am reminded of the importance of constant self-reflection as a teacher; critical self examination of one's teaching practices is vital to the longevity of professionalism and effectiveness as an educator.

Last night after flying, I saw the most beautiful sunset.  We came back from my flight lesson just as the sun was setting against the black backdrop of the night time city skyline.  What a magnificent sight!  Golden sunlight hiding amongst layers of wispy clouds.  The effect of the sun in the sky at this time was a colourful one indeed: shades of pink, purple, tangerine orange and more filled my eyes as I rolled off the runway and onto the taxiway! It was so pretty, I took a picture on my camera phone to post on my blog and write about later. 

Early evening is one of my favourite times to fly.

I am sometimes asked how detailed my daily teaching plans are, and how often I schedule in various subject areas like Math, the Arts, etc.

Although at this point in my career, I generally only make overview notes for each lesson in my dayplan, and therefore, only have one page per day, I try to make the outline user-friendly for myself and detailed enough for supply teachers in my classroom.

In general, I begin the first weeks of school with a fairly open- ended dayplan, just something to get me started, and I hand-write duties in, until the duty schedule firms up.

Although my mornings are pretty structured in terms of my Literacy Block, especially now that I am using "Daily 5" and "Literacy Cafe", my afternoons are not "written in stone" (other than planning times, obviously), so that a period that says "SES" might include a community walk and mapping activity, or a visit to the computer lab to work on the student's blogs for writing, or an extra math period to finish a problem we were working on, or a full afternoon of painting, or even a read-aloud that we didn't have a chance to do earlier in the day.  The subjects are there to remind me, to keep me on track, but I use the time as needed to fulfill the goals laid out in my curriculum map.

My day book as a teacher has gone through many incarnations since I first began teaching in the late 90s... I so love the templates I am able to create, and the fact that they are easily modifiable year to year or even month to month as schedules or philosophies evolve; I cannot imagine the struggles of my predecessors who had to do this work without the assistance of a computer!!!