Building a Thinking State

Webinar Series

Sponsored by Idaho Council of Teachers of Mathematics

Register NOW!

November 9, 5:00-6:30 pm MST 

Speaker: Graham Fletcher

Session Description: When we ask students to memorize their facts, we are essentially asking them to memorize over 100 isolated equations. This approach doesn’t allow students to explore the relationships between numbers that are foundational to mathematics. In this session, we’ll explore the important role that context plays in developing fact fluency.  By purposefully sequencing a series of tasks and activities through the same context, students can begin to make connections and develop an understanding that is scalable well beyond single digits. 

Graham’s bio:  Graham Fletcher has served in education as a classroom teacher, math instructional lead, and currently as a math specialist.  He is continually seeking new and innovative ways to support students and teachers in their development of conceptual understanding in elementary mathematics. He is a coauthor of Building Fact Fluency and openly shares many of his resources at gfletchy.com.

January 17, 5:00-6:30 pm MST

Speaker: Fawn Nguyen

Session Description: In this session, you'll be asked to resist the urge to write equations to solve problems and be challenged to create meaningful diagrams that show understanding of the problem and experience how a good diagram can reveal an elegant solution. Word problems and writing equations [to solve them] are two things that students find difficult, so much so that they have a hard time just starting the problem. Learning to represent the problem via diagrams is a way to pause and think deeply about the scenario and its context.

Fawn’s bio:  Fawn is on the Math Advance Team at Amplify Desmos Math. She was a math coach for a K-8 school district for three years. Before that, Fawn was a middle school teacher for 30 years.  Fawn blogs about her lessons and classroom teaching at fawnnguyen.com. She also authors three other websites for teachers: visualpatterns.org, between2numbers.com, and chewablemath.com.

March 6, 2023   |   5:00-6:30pm MST  

Speakers: Kyle Pearce and Jon Orr

Session Description: Do you find yourself stuck pre-teaching concepts to students BEFORE they have a chance to truly engage in the problem solving process? Maybe you recognize that you are doing most of the thinking and students simply copying and following along, but you’re unsure how to make a shift towards thinking, reasoning, and crafting a productive struggle that leads to deeper understanding?

In this session, you’ll learn how to engage your students by planning and delivering lessons that ditch the “I Do, We Do, You Do” model of instruction and begin moving towards teaching through rich tasks to leverage student curiosity, promote resilience, and produce thinkers. 

By the end of this session, you’ll not only understand why it is important to provide students with an opportunity to think and productively struggle, but you’ll also gain access to open resources that will help you begin making the shift in your classroom as soon as tomorrow.

Bios: Kyle Pearce is the K-12 Mathematics Consultant with the Greater Essex County District School Board and Jon Orr is a former high school mathematics teacher, instructional coach and mathematics consultant in Ontario Canada. Together, they co-founded Make Math Moments where they develop professional development and classroom resources for K-12 educators and district leaders to spark curiosity, fuel sense making and ignite teacher moves so all students can realize their fullest potential in mathematics.