Teaching kids to think deeply about math
What do you get when 38 middle and high school math teachers, plus one university math professor and researcher are together in a room?
Answer: laughter, excitement, and eagerly working on math problems for six hours (this is not a joke).
What do you get when this learning is applied to the classroom?
Answer: students who are more engaged and increasing their ability to think “deeply” about math and who are learning how to apply mathematical thinking.
“Teaching kids to think deeply about math and to be able to apply their understanding in new and exciting ways is our target goal. It’s a huge task, but one that our teachers have embraced with professionalism and enthusiasm,” explains SD83 District Principal (Numeracy) Val Edgell, who is leading the district’s numeracy team which is supporting teachers with the change to the new provincial numeracy curriculum and the greater focus on problem solving and mathematical thinking. “And it is happening.”
She said recently she was walking down the hallway of a large school in the district, and she heard many voices, cheers, and laughter coming from a math class.
“I paused in the hallway and the teacher saw me. She rushed out with paper in hand, first to apologize for the noise (aka excitement) coming from the room and second to ask a question on behalf of the students who have worked for 40 minutes on a problem without arriving at a solution and have come up with convincing mathematical arguments about why the question is impossible.”
“When we discover it is a case of a missing negative sign, the teacher rushed back in to pass along the information. Her clarification is met not with groans, but with “I knew it! Now we can solve this!” and the noise of productive thinking resumed.”
So what is happening? How is this different from math classes we’ve experienced before? Edgell explains that when she thinks of her own math class experience, she realizes she often sat in her desk, watched the teacher do a lot of math examples on the board which she usually copied down into her notebook to help her complete the questions she would later do for homework (“sometimes” she adds with a grin).
“We’ve come to realize that the way in which we need to understand and use math has changed over the past couple of decades. It used to be very important to be able to accurately compute through addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Now, almost everyone carries a calculator around in their pocket in the form of a cell phone. The importance has shifted from being able to DO math, to being able to USE math.”
“More than ever, we all need to be able to think about a situation, make sense of it, and apply mathematical thinking to solve the problem or make judgements about information and data. This means we have to be able to think deeply about math. This is a theme that our math teachers are focusing on this year in particular: Who is doing the thinking in math class, and how can we get students thinking, rather than copying?”
Enter Dr. Peter Liljedahl. Dr. Liljedahl is an internationally renowned mathematics educator and researcher who happens to live and conduct his research right here in B.C. “We are incredibly fortunate to have Dr. Liljedahl working with 38 of our middle and high school math teachers for four full days this year in a series we’ve called “Building Thinking Classrooms in Math”. So far this year we’ve spent two days together and teachers have jumped right in with implementing some well-researched practices into their classrooms.”
Edgell comments one of the first things you will see when you walk into many math classrooms around our district is likely to be students standing up and working in groups at white boards. This practice is supported by Dr. Liljedahl’s research, and teachers have seen the immediate impact on students’ involvement in class.
“Another thing you will likely notice if you are in our math classrooms is that there is a lot of talk. Productive talk. Talking about math. Hopefully you will see kids looking at other kid’s work and bringing those ideas back to their own work and then building on it. Hopefully you will notice that teachers are very actively going from group to group and asking just the right questions to deepen students’ thinking to the next level. This is incredibly difficult and requires a lot of forethought and deep understanding of the concepts on the part of the teachers.”
“Teachers in our district from K-12 have really been committing themselves to math education and especially to helping students learn to use math rather than just do math. Problem solving has been an increasingly important part of our practice over the last few years starting right in Kindergarten, and this really is supported by the work we are doing with Dr. Liljedahl.”
“We’re super excited to put into practice all that we’ve been learning and hope your kids enjoy the journey we are taking together. We are hugely appreciative of the commitment of the Board of Education and Senior Leadership in School District 83 for finding a way to make the series with Dr. Liljedahl happen. We are confident that the impact is already being felt by hundreds of students in our district.”