Professional Learning with Marian Small

Name: Professional Learning with Marian Small
Brand: Rubicon
Availability: InStock

At Rubicon, we know that true success happens when educators feel empowered and equipped to transform their math classrooms. Designed for the modern Canadian educator, our professional learning sessions with Marian Small dive into what matters most: student mindset, inclusive classrooms, and targeted curriculum goals.

Professional Learning Sessions

These can be virtual or in-person, in either 60–90 minutes, half-day or full-day formats.

Mathematics Instruction
Inclusive Instruction
Pedagogical Approaches

A Focus on Ensuring We Are Valuing the Right Things in Mathematics Instruction

Four sessions focus on these ideas: Our mathematics goals for students must be to help them see relationships and make sense of ideas, that is what we must be measuring.

As well, our instruction must respect what researchers have learned about how students best learn.

Building Number Sense and Fluency: What does number sense look like? What tasks do teachers need to set or approaches do teachers need to take to build number sense and fluency in all students?
Teaching for Understanding: People better retain ideas they understand and retention is an important goal of math instruction. But many teachers set tasks where students do math, but do not really need to understand the math they are doing. We will contrast such tasks with tasks that build understanding and discuss strategies to build more understanding type questions.
Authentic Assessment: Is assessment aligning with instruction? Am I sending the right signals, through my assessment, of what I think matters most in learning math? Should my assessments always be written? Or can I collect data in other ways as well? How should I “mark”?
MathUP and the Modern Classroom: A deep dive into how Marian Small’s work and the MathUP framework naturally align with with the Science of Learning. We will move past the false dichotomy of inquiry versus explicit instruction to explore how MathUP actually supports the goals of the modern math classroom.

Inclusive Instruction

Too often, math tasks are not accessible to struggling students and certain tasks are not really benefitting students who have already mastered that content. These sessions will explore differentiation in mathematics instruction primarily through the use of open questions accessible to a very broad range of students and parallel tasks that allow tweaks to an original task so that all students benefit. Ensuring there is a focus on manipulative use for all students as well as visual approaches for all also reaches more students. These sessions will provide many tasks and strategies for creating more.

Rich MathConversations: To have rich conversations, you need to ask rich questions. What do rich questions look like in a classroom? How do they compare to the kinds of questions that are less likely to promote valuable learning conversations?
Eyes on Math: Visuals can be an excellent way to bring out important mathematical concepts and to assess whether mathematical ideas have been mastered. We’ll share many examples of how visuals can be used to kickstart discussions and examples of how students can show their understanding by creating appropriate diagrams.
Manipulatives for All: Manipulatives benefit ALL students at all levels K–8 and across levels of proficiency. We’ll share how a variety of valuable manipulatives can be used as both instructional and assessment tools.

Pedagogical Approaches

Focused on specific areas of the curriculum, these sessions provide a deep dive into the “why” behind mathematical concepts. Educators will gain specialized strategies for building richer practice, crafting intentional questions to help student notice key concepts, and boosting student confidence with estimation.

Creating Richer Practice: Wouldn’t it be great if math practice not only involved practising skills, but also allowed for practice in reasoning, problem solving, and communication? Participants will get many examples of practice activities that do just that, plus strategies for teachers to create their own.
Helping Students Notice: One of the teacher’s main roles is to help ALL students notice the mathematical ideas that only a few students notice independently. This is addressed through very intentional questioning, ensuring that the main mathematical ideas are explicitly addressed. We will discuss different ways to make those ideas explicit and provide examples of how one decides what those noticings should be.
A Focus on Estimation: Elementary school math focuses on calculation and not nearly as much on estimation. The ability to estimate may actually be a more useful life skill than the ability to calculate when working with larger numbers, fractions or decimals, or working with measurement or algebra. Help students be more willing to estimate and set tasks that focus on estimation.
A Focus on [Topic]: Those asking for sessions can choose a mathematical topic of interest, whether early number, fractions, algebra, measurement, etc. This is also an opportunity to build a customized session that covers topics like a new provincial curriculum.

Marian Small

Author

Marian Small is an internationally renowned mathematics educator, author, and professional learning consultant. Dr. Small, whose career in education has spanned more than four decades, is considered one of the most influential math educators in Canada.

Marian has authored or co-authored more than 100 math resources and travelled to mathematics classrooms around the world.