Onward and Upward! Adventures in School Wide Mathematics Learning for Staff

Well, it has been awhile since we last wrote. We decided this fall to take a small step back and through consultation with our staffs, decided to honor our Challenge of Practice as well as the needs of our adult learners and work through a traditional Teaching Learning Cycle. Upon reflection with our schools, we determined that in order for us to work towards the goal of teaching critical thinking to our students in a precise and intentional manner,  we first needed to develop a common language of planning, instruction and assessment. We decided to work on this first through an area of relative comfort for people and thus we chose the new Social Studies, History/Geography curriculum. For teachers who did not teach this content area (and there were relatively few of them), we had them go through the teaching learning cycle in their own content areas. 

The TLC occurred from early Oct to the end of November just prior to parent teacher conferences.
We felt that if we developed an understanding of effective teaching practice using this content area, the common language and understanding would support the staff member's journey in mathematics in the new year.

Operational Items to Consider:

Release time was provided that day by reallocating our budget from other areas that do not support our vision of effective instruction and learning (ie photocopying, text books) to our professional learning budget line. Booking of supply teachers occurred in advance and involved fairly complex scheduling. We used the YRDSB meeting code and the money is repaid through a budget transfer later in the year. This TLC cost the larger school with 33 staff about $20,000.

Due to the fact that our school start and end times did not align, we had to ensure that for our half day sessions, that our day started at the latest start time and ended at the earliest end time. Teachers were expected to do work for the 15 mins before or after school to ensure that they worked their full day. This ensured that we were respectful of our collective agreement and nobody worked outside of the full day.

This was required for the half day sessions, but not for the full day sessions as we simply chose one school's start and end times and adhered to them for everyone. Thus, they worked the correct number of minutes. Also, as per the collective agreement, teachers were told that they could leave at their assigned prep times and do their preparation work and return after it was completed. It was up to them to avail themselves of this time outside of the TLC activities. Some did this and others did not.

We tried to plan our half day sessions to overlap literacy blocks as much as possible as it reduced the amount of prep periods that we were interfering with and thus the least amount of disruption to the professional learning. This worked well for our primary and intermediate teachers, less well for our junior teachers.

Who Participated?
All teachers in both schools participated. This included support staff and DECEs. The support staff were there to learn but also to keep the needs of our varied learners front and center during the planning and assessment process.

Short Synopsis of the TLC:

We engaged in the following sessions:

Session 1.
Half day release (separated into Primary in AM and Junior /Intermediate in PM) to discuss and determine norms for learning as well as to develop learning goals and our diagnostic activity which would be administered to the students and marked with other grade team members at our next meeting. Our Kindergartens engaged in similar Professional learning with some differences conducted by one of the Kindergarten teachers.

To access our drive folder including our PowerPoint and resources for this session please go to:

https://drive.google.com/folder/d/0BwZ1H1R7AKpTR3FwWDZvdXpEZEE/edit

Session 2.
We had two full day planning sessions (One day for primary and one for Junior /Intermediate grades at both schools) about a week later once teachers had administered their diagnostics to their classes. We spent the time learning about how to engage in moderated marking and then teachers worked in cross school grade teams to moderate their diagnostics.
We then provided some input around how to use their diagnostic information to plan units of study. Planning was discussed and the board planning memo was deconstructed. A variety of templates were provided to guide their work (if they so chose to use them). Resources were explored to support the content areas and then teachers were left with about a half day to plan with their grade team). We started to explore our mentor text on inquiry based learning.
At then end of the session teachers were asked to come up with a mutually agreed upon task to return with to moderate as their mid point check in.

To access our drive folder including our PowerPoint and resources for this session please go to:

https://drive.google.com/folder/d/0BwZ1H1R7AKpTWUtweXJFUlQxbzA/edit

Session 3:
For this session we took advantage of a PA day where we were able to work on school plan related activities for half of the day. This reduced our costs substantially. This session involved a reminder of the TLC process, a reminder of moderation and input regarding changing units to meet student needs both on a macro (correcting plans to address whole class misunderstandings) or micro (creating mini lessons or alternative tasks etc. targeted to correct misconceptions of specific students). We reviewed differentiation and how it looks for our ELL and Special Education students. Staff was asked to agree upon a summative (or formative - if the unit was still ongoing) to bring back to the final session to moderate and to help them decide where to go next for future units.

To access our drive folder including our PowerPoint and resources for this session please go to:

https://drive.google.com/folder/d/0BwZ1H1R7AKpTMkpOTGlJWXRURDQ/edit

Session 4:
This was our final session. It was half day with Primary in the AM and Junior/Intermediate in the PM. At this session we looked at the various types of assessment (diagnostic, formative and summative) and discussed their use in the TLC process. We also talked about how we could use the information from our moderation of the summative moving forward into new units and how we could convey this information to parents as our parent teacher conferences were coming up.

To access our drive folder including our PowerPoint and resources for this session please go to:

https://drive.google.com/folder/d/0BwZ1H1R7AKpTZTF4d2YxVVI0dzA/edit

Along the way we tried to model effective assessment and instructional practices in our teaching of the TLC...

We presented information in a variety of ways. 
We had staff construct their own learning whenever possible
We kept our teaching rooted in the real world and in student work...the process was very job embedded
We used Google forms to engage in diagnostic assessment prior to the first session to determine needs. We fed them back the content of what they said that they needed. At the end of each session we engaged in formative assessment through Google forms  as well as  our observations and conversations with staff and students at and between sessions. WE fed this information back to staff at the beginning of each session and showed how we hoped to address their needs during the session.
Also when we noted that people were struggling, we were able to release them and their partners with support staff and ourselves to work through the glitch so they were encouraged to stay the course.

As we move forward into 2015 we will now be going back to our roots with mathematics. Stay tuned for our jouney forward into the mysteries of math with all of our teachers!