Learning Opportunities

February 25, 2020- Face to face: Mathematics Can Always Be More Playful: Teaching through problem-solving can be an intimidating concept. Finding the right problem on a day-to-day basis, knowing what to do with the problems, and building in enough practice time are all problems teachers face. A playful pedagogy can help with time constraints, and open up our classrooms to powerful thinking by our students. The focus of this session will be making mathematics more playful. We need not accept that math *is* play, but rather that it can be more play-ful. We will explore purposeful practice through games, building tasks from big ideas, and mathematizing the world around us to come up with tasks.
March 10, 2020- On-line: Mathematizing Our World: We will look at how to use simple technologies like our camera rolls to “make math”. Mathematizing our world is a mentality that asks: “what can I do with this?” “This” could be anything from trees in the forest, to products on the shelf in a store. Mathematics is all around us.
March 17, 2020- On-line: Paying Attention to Student Thinking: We will look at a few playful tasks, and anticipate what sort of work and thinking students might do with them. This will include thinking through how to assess these tasks (what to look for), and what to do if students don’t “get” it. Differentiation through tasks is the key focus.
April 28, 2020 -Face to face: Toward a Pedagogy of Playful Mathematics: We will explore how to make our tasks more open and playful, and to bring the “mathematize it” mentality into our classrooms. We will look at using games for purposeful practice, and recreational mathematics. Participants will leave with their own principles for math teaching and learning-it is important that we all know what pedagogical principles we stand for, and with good resources harder to find in the post-textbook era, we need to know what we stand for more than ever.

This learning opportunity is being offered through a grant from Alberta Education.