Kyle Pearce: Hey Math Moment Makers, if you’ve kept your ear to the ground, you already know that we are less than one week away from the Make Math Moments virtual summit. That is right. Get ready for two full days of high impact professional development from your couch. Wait, wait, wait a second. Does that mean Jon, we could literally be participating in this virtual summit in our Batman PJ’s?

Jon Orr: Yeah, yeah. If you got Batman PJ’s you can be wearing them.

Kyle Pearce: Okay. Okay. Okay. So like I could be literally sipping the perfect brew of my choice. That would be coffee brew, and I don’t have to go and like pay over-priced coffee prices like at Starbucks? Like I could just make it myself.

Jon Orr: Yup.

Kyle Pearce: So at like 4:00 PM when we’re getting ready for the last session, I could be sipping on an adult beverage of my choosing?

Jon Orr: Yes. Yes, yes. You can do whatever you want. You’ll be in your house engaging in fantastic math professional development.

Kyle Pearce: Whoa. I want to learn more about this, and I bet you listening at home do too. That’s right. Stick with us because we’re doing just that on this episode.

Kyle Pearce: Welcome to the making math moments that matter podcast. I’m Kyle Pearce.

Jon Orr: And I am Jon Orr. We are two math teachers, who together with you,

Kyle Pearce: the community of educators worldwide, who want to build and deliver math lessons that spark engagement.

Jon Orr: Fuel learning.

Kyle Pearce: And ignite teacher action. Welcome to episode number 50: How you can engage with high impact PD from your couch. Are you ready, Jon?

Jon Orr: Oh yeah. Oh yeah, we are ready.

Kyle Pearce: Awesome. But before we do, let’s take a moment for everyone listening to stop and pause the episode if you have not already registered for the Make Math Moments Virtual Summit. It’s happening this weekend on November 16th and 17th. The entire episode today is going to unpack all of the great professional learning that you’ll have access to, and it is entirely free.

Jon Orr: Yes. So take a moment, get yourself registered and the details will be sent right to your email. Register for this year. makemathmoments.com/summit. That’s makemathmoments.com/summit.

Kyle Pearce: Awesome. And if the 16th and 17th of November, 2019 don’t work for you, or maybe it’s past that date, we have on-demand replays available until November 22nd, 2019, before all of the summit sessions will be added to our growth lab inside of the Make Math Moments Academy. But, you can’t access the virtual summit on-demand replays unless you register, so go do that right now. Pause this episode and go to makemathmoments.com/summit if you’re listening to this episode after November 22nd, 2019 you can still head over to make math moments.com/summit which you then can be adding your name to the wait list for the next make math moments virtual summit.

Jon Orr: Awesome. Head on over now, makemathmoments.com/summit that’s makemathmoments.com/summit. Also, special shout out to Danielle on Facebook for leaving us a five star rating and review on our Facebook page, Make Math Moments that Matter. Danielle said, I listen to your podcast every week on my drive in and home to work. There have been days I’ve gone in and reconfigured my days lesson plans because of the high quality discussion, exposure to resources, tasks, and strategies discussed in the episodes. Thank you for helping me elevate my practice. Some of us are the only math teachers in our building and don’t realize how much we gain from discussing our successes and failures with others in the game.

Kyle Pearce: We so appreciate Danielle and everyone who takes the time to leave us a rating and review on Facebook, and all other social platforms. It’s certainly fuels us to keep doing what we’re doing. So thank you so much for that, Danielle.

Jon Orr: If you haven’t liked, rated, or reviewed our Making Math Moments that Matter at Facebook page, you can do so by searching for Making Math Moments that Matter on Facebook, or jump straight there by going to fb.com/makemathmoments. That’s fb.com/makemathmoments. All right, Kyle, let’s get into this episode. Are you ready?

Kyle Pearce: I am so ready, Jon, and you know what? Before we get going, let’s say start with a little bit behind the why of why we’re doing a virtual summit in the first place.

Jon Orr: Sure.

Kyle Pearce: Almost a year ago, before we even started this podcast, we sent out a survey on Twitter, and on Facebook, and into our email subscribers asking teachers one question. We said, what is your biggest struggle in math class right now? And Kyle, I know if you remember, we had hundreds and hundreds of responses, and so many of them were so different. So many of them were ranging from how do I engage my students, but also like how do I differentiate my lessons? There’s so many things we are thinking about in our classrooms right now. So many struggles, and seeing all those struggles written down, it’s what sparked us to go on this PD journey. This is actually how we created the podcast and why we created the podcast. Because one of our main goals is we want to help teachers create resilient problem solvers and lovers of mathematics.

Kyle Pearce: But it took all of those struggles that we saw. They’re going to spark that motivation to make this podcast happen, almost a year ago, that we kind of set the stage to do this podcast and we want to get PD to everybody. And that’s one of our main concerns and main missions that we’ve been working on this last year, is how can we get great quality PD to everybody. That’s why we’ve had guests on the podcast, exceptional work in mathematics, guests like Jo Boaler, Dr. Nicki Newton, we’ve had Jon Hattie, James Tanton, Peg Smith, Jose Vilson, Christopher Childs. You may have heard some of these guests on our show if you’ve listened to many episodes, but some of those guests I just named are still to come. We interviewed them, but they’re still to come. You know, it’s addressing those struggles that led us to create the Math Moment Mentoring episodes, those types of episodes.

Kyle Pearce: We want to get that PD out into the open there too, where we specifically, on those episodes, we specifically bring on teachers like you, who were facing a struggle. And together we brainstorm ways to address it. Some of those episodes are our favorites. So when we thought our natural next step is that we wanted to make professional development, again, more widespread, so we took that natural next step and said, why don’t we have a conference where anybody can attend, anybody can attend for free. We don’t have to worry about travel, we don’t have to worry about costs, because those things that we definitely think about. And I think about going to NCTM, or going to OAME conference, or going to some of the regional conferences in your area. Only some people get to go to those and it’s based on cost, and time away from your kids and classroom and families.

Kyle Pearce: Some of us have to pay for our substitute teachers. You have to build substitute teacher plans. These are all issues that I know, I don’t like building substitute teacher plans. It seems more work to come back after. But these are things that we think about, and if we had a conference where we didn’t have to do that, could we, and this is why we started to create the virtual summit. But Kyle, we weren’t the first ones to create the virtual summit because we participated in one. Kyle, fill us in on some of those details too.

Kyle Pearce: I just want to roll back and just comment on this idea of the podcast. We decided to do the podcast because we were blogging for many years. Jon and I, and we found it so difficult in words to try to get out what we were trying to say and we find that this medium, this ability to just have a conversation back and forth allows us to kind of go a little bit deeper at like goes deeper and I feel like creates a bigger impact. And then when you start listening to the guests that come on to the episodes and we listened to them when we go, wow, I’m feeling inspired by what they’re saying, we still feel like, ah, we are one step removed from like, how am I going to actually do that? So really we’re hoping that this virtual summit will allow everyone to kind of go one step even deeper than the podcast interviews.

Kyle Pearce: So, that’s fantastic. But like you said, we have to give a shout out to Christina Tondevold from buildmathminds.com. She put together the idea of a virtual summit a couple of years ago. Both Jon, you and I had the pleasure of participating, I believe it was two summers ago and we had such a fantastic time not only presenting during that virtual summit, it’s during the summer. Hers is usually hovering over the last day or two of July and the first day or two of August. So many people are on summer break and her focus tends to be in the K to five area. So what we thought we would do is kind of piggyback off this idea. And we spoke to Christina and you folks have heard her on the episode recently, a few episodes back and she gave her blessing. She said, that’s fantastic. She knows that Jon, you and I both like really focusing in on sort of those middle grades.

Kyle Pearce: I’m going to say it’s actually wider than the middle grades but you and I tend to focus somewhere in that like grade 3 to 10 range typically, but this conference is actually going to be focusing in from kindergarten through grade 12. Most of the presentations that we have are going to really be helpful to all educators across the system. However, we do have that special place in our heart for the middle school and some of our high school teachers ,who those who are seeking it out find that it’s difficult to find high school specific sessions. So we wanted to make sure that we had enough for everyone in this virtual summit. And I’m going to be honest and say, I am so geeked and so excited for this coming weekend, so that we can not only see everyone loving the learning all weekend long, but so you and I can do the learning with everyone and alongside them.

Speaker 3: That’s true and something that I don’t think we say enough is that when we’re on this podcast and when, what we’ve already learned from working with the teachers who are in the summit and the presenters in the summit is that we’ve learned so much just from doing this process. So, that’s been awesome for us. Just as a selfish thing that we’ve done so much learning from interviewing the guests and talking to teachers. It’s been a huge professional development experience for both you and me, Kyle.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, you’re right. Jon, I want to mention as well before we head in just this idea that with putting on a virtual summit, something that you and I maybe didn’t realize initially is that there are a lot of costs associated with it. Like if anyone’s ever tried to put up their own blog, for example, if you’re not hosting it through something that’s a free platform, where sometimes they’ll put ads on it, or they’ll insert different things because it’s a free tool.

Kyle Pearce: When you actually go to this point where we’re going, oh my gosh, like as of this recording, we are at about 10,000 registrants for the virtual summit. And when we started looking into it, Jon, I remember you and I, our jaws dropped when we looked and we realized that wow, when you have 10,000 people on any website, there’s this thing called crashing the server.

Jon Orr: Right.

Kyle Pearce: Can happen. So you and I were hit with this. We’re gung ho, I’m a high level thinker. Jon always has to settle me down a little bit. And I’m all like, yeah, we’re doing this summit. It’s going to be amazing. And then we realized that, oh my gosh, there was actually going to be some costs associated. So Jon, we have to thank for helping us out with handling some of those costs to make this possible for so many people around the world.

Jon Orr: Yeah, we want to thank White Book, which we’ve talked about here on the podcast many times and it’s because we know that the flip charts that we’ve talked about, I use them in my class, Kyle uses them, we take them on the go to workshops. I just saw OAME leadership here in Ontario, had put them all around the walls of the whole conference room, which was hundreds of them. They are a great source for students doing work vertically. You know, just that dry erase surface is great for that. Getting that thinking out into the open and you know, obviously from Peter Liljedahl’s work, who is doing a presentation in the summit. Students are getting their thinking faster out into the open while standing, a dry erase or a erasable surface. So we want to thank White Book for sponsoring this and also White Book did even a better deal. They’re saying not only we’re going to sponsor the virtual summit, guys, we want to offer anyone who is listening or anyone who is going to register this special deal. Kyle, tell us about the deal.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah. As a sponsor, they are offering all Math moment Makers, 40% off your first 10 pack of white book flip charts. So they’ve offered a couple of deals in the past as well. These guys just keep upping the ante here. The regular price is $59 US for a ten pack of white book flip charts. So for me, in my situation of I have 30 students in a class, ten would do me just fine having three per chart.

Kyle Pearce: The regular price, $59 and they are giving you 40% off. That makes it about $36 plus shipping. These reusable whiteboard charts are fantastic for leading Math Moment rich lessons that students will remember. So make sure to check it out at whitebook.com/40moments. That’s whitebook.com/40moments. So something really cool. We want to thank those guys again, Toby and Frank are fantastic guys and actually Jon, they were on a TV show. Was it Thark tank? Which one were they on when they were getting started? You’d have to look it up, I guess.

Jon Orr: Dragons’ Den. [crosstalk 00:14:27] Yeah so they’re on Dragons’ Den.

Kyle Pearce: And we’ll add that to the show notes. Both of those two gentlemen were on there when they were starting their company and I think that’s kind of a cool story on how they got started. So, let’s go ahead and dive in here.

Jon Orr: Sure.

Kyle Pearce: Jon, in this episode we want to actually unpack some of the pieces or some of the ideas behind the sessions that we have in the virtual summit. And really it’s all based around those common struggles Jon referenced earlier in the episode. We sent out the survey to everyone that we had on our email list, people who were getting those weekly emails of tips, resources and tasks, and we basically asked them, what is your biggest struggle or challenge that you have? And basically, when we went through that list, first of all, you and I were just head nodding like, Oh yeah, Oh yeah, we have that one right now. Oh yeah. You know, so we’re going through this list and there’s a lot of commonality.

Kyle Pearce: However, there’s some themes that pop out. Jon, why don’t you help us out? We’ve actually pulled a couple out of that survey to help us sort of form. Like if you’re at home and you resonate with some of these common struggles, then you’re going to want to check out some of the sessions that we’re going to mention right after these struggles from someone like Amanda. What did Amanda say there, Jon?

Jon Orr: Right. So Amanda responded to our survey and said, you know, something that I think we all struggle with or we all think about our concern about, and she’s concerned about balancing conceptual and procedural understanding. What does that trade off between, how much time do we spend with conceptual understanding versus procedural? And she says, how do you decide how much emphasis to place on that balance but also on communication. We picked this one out because I think this is a common question that people will have. It’s like, well, how much do I focus on conceptual in my lessons versus procedural? There’s a lot of people talking about conceptual understanding and we’ve talked about it a lot, and sometimes people forget about the procedural side of things and the fluency side of things. So, we’ve got a few sessions highlighted here to address that. This is one of the greatest ideas about the virtual summit is that we can reach out to people and say like, we’ve got these struggles that teachers are having.

Jon Orr: What can you do to help us? Our first session that I want to point out to everybody is from Jennifer Chang Wathell, who we did have as a podcast episode. And her session is called teaching for deep understanding. And Jennifer says that her session will look at the particular learning engagement that focuses on deep understanding of some important mathematical concepts. She’s going to give you time in the session to work through engaging tasks together and teachers are going to give the opportunities to share those ideas in the chat box and we’re going to have chat boxes for each session so that when you hit their live you’ll be able to interact with everybody else.

Jon Orr: So, Jennifer is going to talk about, that deep understanding and help you decide like what is that deep understanding with conceptual learning. And then also she’s going to touch on some of that procedural learning. So her session is on the first day, Saturday at 1:00 PM Eastern standard time. So you can be sure to check in at that time. And if you’re registered, we’re going to be sending you a link and we’ll talk about the details of how all of this is going to work at the end of the episode. But check out Jennifer’s session for teaching deep understanding. Kyle, what is another session that can help us address this big idea of procedural fluency?

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, for sure. And before we do, I also want to just mention too if you want to learn more about what Jennifer’s all about, she actually was on episode 29 of the podcast. So don’t hesitate to, after this episode, go back to episode 29. Check out our interview with Jennifer. That was a huge, huge win for a lot of people. We had a lot of feedback on Twitter and on Facebook about how influential that conversation was. So if you check out that conversation, that’ll be a nice way to get you ready for her episodes. So you can go right to makemathmoments.com/episode29. That’ll bring you right there or just in your podcast player. Just scroll on back.

Kyle Pearce: So let’s talk about another one here, when we’re looking at this idea of building procedural fluency and we talk about this idea of like procedural fluency doesn’t necessarily mean standard algorithms, and in many cases I would argue we don’t necessarily want it to be like that’s just one way we want it to be about fluency and students building their number sense and we have another great session with dr Nicki Newton and her session is called Fluency Doesn’t Just Happen: Planning for and Facilitating Basic Fact Fluency. And her description says basic fact fluency is a major part of elementary school.

Kyle Pearce: Research says that we should devote at least 10 minutes a day to fluency practice. It should be done as energizers and routines in workstations, guided math lessons and strategic homework. Teachers should distribute practice throughout the year because everybody doesn’t learn their doubles the second week of school at 10:15 AM. What we need to know for sure is that all students can learn, given the time and scaffolding that is needed.

Kyle Pearce: And honestly I read that verbatim because it is right in line with what our beliefs are is this idea of spacing and giving kids opportunities to revisit concepts, because just like you said or just like Nicki says here that there is nothing saying that every student is going to learn it the day that you want to go through certain ideas and certain concepts. So I’ve had the ability, or I guess the great fortune of seeing and meeting Nicki Newton a few times.

Kyle Pearce: One time recently, last summer at CAMT and I sat in her session, she had her session right before my session so I got to see her session. She got to see my session. Hers is going to be more in that K to 3, K to 5 range, so that one is more for those teachers. However, I am going to argue that if you are a middle school teacher or a secondary or a high school teacher and you’ve ever said, my kids don’t know their math facts. If that’s something that you have ever said and I think we’re all guilty, then this is a session that you want to check out. I don’t care what grade level she’s going to be focusing on. If there are students in our room that are struggling with this idea, then I need to figure out how am I going to do that in my own classroom. And I’m telling you right now, you watch that session and you’re going to go, you know what? I could take this and I can make this work in my own classroom. And then a great way to kind of serve this up.

Kyle Pearce: Nicki will be coming on the podcast soon, but it’s not [inaudible 00:21:03] , it’ll be episode 62 when it’s released, but I feel like Nicki’s session’s going to be a great way to get yourself teed up for another fantastic session. Jon, who [inaudible 00:21:15] handling some number sense routine specifically for our middle and high school teams.

Jon Orr: Yeah. Now. I just wanted to say like Dr. Nicki’s session is going to be a great one and you’ve highlighted so many great things about that session. And it’s going to be a tough decision because her session is on Sunday, November 17th at 11:00 AM. It’s the first session of the Sunday of the second day and it’s right beside Graham Fletcher’s, who we’re going to talk about a little bit later. But his session and how his session can help you, but that’s a tough choice. I think it’s going to be tough to choose between her session and Grahams, but looking forward to her session for sure.

Kyle Pearce: You know what though, Jon, before you go on though, like just out of curiosity for someone who’s listening right now and they’re like, Oh gosh, you’re getting a little anxious cause they’re like, I don’t like making choices. What can I do if I want to see Dr Nicki Newton’s’s session and I want to see Graham session, obviously I can open up two browsers and watch them at the same time. Probably not the most effective way to go. Is there something else that they could do in order to ensure that they get the benefit of both of those fantastic sessions?

Jon Orr: Yeah, so because of the replays, as soon as Dr Nicki’s session goes live at 11:00 AM Eastern standard time, anytime after that you can access that same replay. So like for example, you could go back at noon, say you went to Graham’s session first at 11:00 AM and then right after that you’d be like, let me go watch a Dr. Nicki session right now. So you jump over and hit play on that session at that time and you’ll be able to watch it on demand at any time up to November 22nd. So, awesome there. Let’s keep going with the fluency kind of trade off between conceptual and procedural understanding because Sarah VanDerWerf is going to be talking about that exact topic, and we’re so great to have her do a presentation. And we’ve seen her present a number of times. And what I love about Sarah is that she is hilarious, and so excited about mathematics and mathematics teaching.

Jon Orr: So her session is going to be so energizing to you just to hear her talk. Her talk is titled secondary math talks, so it’s aimed at the secondary math teachers. And the subtitle here is a math routine to build flexible numeracy and algebra skills. And she says in brackets here, I’ll convince you with ducks, which is super curious for me. And we’re super excited to see her talk, and we actually talked to her just this last, I think in the summertime we talked to her and her episode is coming out very soon on episode 55.

Jon Orr: But Sarah’s got some great stuff. We saw her present at NCTM last year. She has some great, great stuff and the fact that the summit is visual, right? The summit is very visual because of the videos. It’s start a podcast summit where you’re listening to sessions. It’s a video summit, so you’re going to be watching her presentation. She’s going to have great slides. She does a great job of visually sharing the ideas that you can use in your classroom. So, super excited for Sarah to talk to us about secondary math talks. She’s done a ton of work on math talks and standing talks, so if you haven’t heard about her standing and talks routine in her classroom, she’s going to be doing that with secondary resources to build that flexible numeracy that leads into algebra. So, check out Sarah’s talk on that Saturday. That’s at 3:00 PM Eastern standard time.

Jon Orr: Kyle, let’s give one more here for the balance between conceptual and procedural understanding.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, for sure. Anyone who’s been following my Twitter feed knows that you know, again, just another pitch for K through 12 math talks because I’m telling you right now, it’s not something that I was doing regularly in my classroom when I was in the classroom, but now I’m going back and I just went into a grade 10 academic class.

Kyle Pearce: Anyone in Ontario would know that these are students who are really preparing for a postsecondary education that requires some math. And I’m telling you, I go in and I do some of the same number talks or math talks that I do with elementary students and they are at about the same level. Which really concerns me because I’ll see a student solve a system of equations and then I’ll ask them to do some basic calculation with let’s say a proportion of some type. And if they aren’t using their calculator, they’re stumped. So this is so, so important for K through 12 educators, and I think Sarah is the one that’s really going to help motivate our middle to high school teachers.

Kyle Pearce: And also I wanted to address the tradeoff too. It isn’t actually a trade off. I know that a lot of times we talk about conceptual versus procedural, but we want to really emphasize, and I know Jon, that you believe this, that this idea that we’ve developed fluency through understanding and through models and representation.

Kyle Pearce: So these math talks are really helpful for doing so. And in doing so, they help them become better problem solvers. So this is something that’s going to help us across the board. Not just with fluency, but also across the board in helping students be successful in mathematics. So the last one I want to share is our good friend Jon Sangiovanni who is going to be doing a talk called Building Number Sense One Day At a Time. And it will be based off of his book series that he has coauthored with a number of different authors called Daily Routines to Jumpstart Math Class. That is his book series. He’s going to be diving into some of these routines and it will build on his episode 31 where he came on the podcast and he actually chatted with us about the importance of building number sense and doing so over time.

Kyle Pearce: So I feel like when you look at it and he says one day at a time, it sounds like him and Dr. Nicki are definitely on same page. Which means they’re on the same page with us, that this is not something that happens one work day and then we move on. It’s something that we have to embed into our daily routine. So that’s going to be happening on Sunday, November 17th at 4:00 PM Eastern time, which means 1:00 PM Pacific times. So, that is our fluency section. Jon, what’s the next chunk here, or next challenge that we’re going to try to address through this virtual summit?

Jon Orr: This next struggle was filled out by Aaron. Aaron is struggling with addressing the needs of students at different levels, and sometimes we say differentiation a lot and differentiation is not enough for these kids with large gaps in their knowledge and the skills. And sometimes there’s different aspects to thinking about why students are operating at different levels. We have to consider that. So this idea of thinking about who our students are and I think is the hugest idea about differentiation that we kind of miss that teachers think differentiation means modifying my lessons. But I think it means more about considering who is sitting in front of you and thinking about those students as individuals, and their identities, and thinking about those kinds of things and how are you incorporating that into your lessons. So that’s a big idea that we want to address. Fortunately we’ve got lots of sessions in the summit that help us with that.

Jon Orr: We want to outline, I think we’ve got four here that we want to highlight. Now. Not saying that the other sessions in the summit don’t also address this same idea, but we just want to highlight these four and one of them is from our very own Kyle Pearce. Kyle is going to be talking about the concept holding your students back, which is when we think about assessing our kids and meeting them where they need the most work. Kyle, tell us a little bit about your session on why are kids, what concept is this and the holding your students back and how can we help?

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, like this session is going to be kind of a high level overview of this concept and some of you might be wondering like what is that concept? And it really does, like you said, it links to some of these other ideas, especially this idea of fluency. Because fluency, often times where students tend to break down. Obviously some students break down really early on with counting. Some students break down with addition and additive thinking, but the concept that tends to really be the big, big, a bit of a gatekeeper for students to kind of be able to move on and be successful versus being held back. And oftentimes in certain environments they get streamed or they get pathway to a different course because they struggle with this idea and it’s the idea of proportional reasoning, proportional reasoning, which leads us to proportional relationships.

Kyle Pearce: So this is such an important concept. In this particular session, we’re going to give you this overview from the beginnings, from the early years of what students are doing early on when they’re making spatial comparisons. We’re going to take us on a trip through counting all the way into additive thinking, multiplicative thinking, and then building into this idea of ratio and rate and really trying to unpack some of the concepts, the differences where a rate comes from. Is a rate a ratio, is it something different? And then how it leads us on to proportional relationships. So this one session, it is a one hour version of our entire nine module course, which is inside of our Make Math Moments Academy. So you’re going to get this high level idea from start to finish. And I’m telling you right now, for me it has changed how I think about how I teach most concepts.

Kyle Pearce: So this idea of solving proportions is not just an isolated thing. It’s built on so much knowledge and understanding. And when we talk about students with large gaps, and students who are struggling, and how do we intervene? Well, guess what? If I’m teaching at a certain level and I don’t know what students are missing, I can’t notice, I can’t name it. And then I obviously can’t address it. So that’s what this session’s going to be all about. That’ll be on Sunday, November 17th at 3:00 PM Eastern, which is 12:00 PM noon Pacific. And Jon, we actually strategically put this session, my session, with another session based on proportional reasoning.

Jon Orr: Exactly.

Kyle Pearce: Can you tell us more about that and why we did it this way.

Speaker 4: Yeah, so at the exact same time slot, so Sunday, November 17th at 3:00 PM Eastern. We also have Pam Harris talking about her ideas on proportional reasoning. Her session title is Building Proportional Reasoning. Why we put that there is because we strongly believe that proportional reasoning is like what Kyle is saying. It is a concept that can hold your students back stretching up until high school, so we wanted to make sure. Why we strategically put two sessions on building proportional reasoning in the same time slot is so that if you were choosing a session at that time you got one like you’ve got a session on proportional reasoning in life. Now you’re definitely, like we mentioned before, you can go back and rewatch any of them, any of them at any time after that, but we wanted to ensure that if you’re attending live, you’ve got a proportional reasoning session because it is so important.

Speaker 4: Now and Pam’s session is great because she’s also got a whole course, and grassroots workshops right now that she’s running at this time of the recording, but I think we’ll be also launching that course later on in the spring time and also again in the fall next year. Her course is all on building proportional reasoning, so I’m super excited to share this one hour session with you listening at home right now. Her session is going to be about, how can you solve problems without cross multiplying and dividing and why would you even want to. Her session is going to engage in powerful ways to help students develop efficient and sophisticated proportional reasoning strategies for solving problems. She’s going to talk about her ideas on problems, strings, she’s written some books on problem strings and how to talks can help construct powerful proportional relationships. It’s all about making connections to lead to better success in higher mathematics levels.

Speaker 4: So that’s pretty awesome. We’re really excited for that session. We just talked to Pam actually. We recorded a session for the podcast, which is coming up on episode 69. So that’s a little bit in the future, but we are super pumped for these two back-to-back proportional reasoning sessions. Kyle, let’s talk a little bit more about this differentiation idea and meeting students where they are, and also I think identity. I talked about that as partly why we need to focus on differentiation is thinking about who is sitting in front of us. Tell us a little bit more about a session that can help with that.

Kyle Pearce: For sure. For sure. Cause you know what Jon, it’s one thing to think about the students in front of us and the gaps in their knowledge. But if that’s all we’re thinking, and in this case kind of scary because at the end of the day it’s already overwhelming when we see a student is struggling in our classroom and there’s so much math content to think about and to know and understand in order to help those students. But I don’t know how far we’ll get if we only focus on the content itself. We have to actually zoom out and actually look at the student as a whole. Where are they coming from? What’s their background, what’s their experiences like? And this really brings in this conversation of equity and how important it is for us to realize that every student in our class is different.

Kyle Pearce: They’re coming from different places, they have diverse backgrounds and cultures, and so they have different perspectives as well. And it’s really difficult if we only see the world through our own eyes. And this is something that you and I, Jon, have talked about on many podcasts episodes, that this is an area that we’re really trying to raise our own awareness and really trying to better understand. Because again, the only life I actually know or have experienced is mine. It’s the one I’m living. And it’s really easy for us to miss how important it is for us to really go back and understand the students in our classroom and where they’re coming from. So we have a great session called The Power of Unity, and it’s coming from Jenelle Williams. She was a late add to the summit, someone who we were so happy to have been recommended to have in the summit and we are so happy to have her summit session. And it is built around the power of unity from the grand daddy parallelogram series that demonstrates how students can learn properties of special quadrilaterals while also focusing on social awareness.

Kyle Pearce: So talk about that double whammy there. Teachers can employ ideas developed in this workshop immediately to help students learn to embrace the perspectives of others and their diverse backgrounds and cultures through the mathematical content. Join us as we apply properties of parallelograms to real life applications and hands on activities for students in grades 3-8. So that session is happening on Saturday, November 16th at 4:00 PM Eastern time, which is 1:00 PM Pacific time. So we are super excited to have this session there. Definitely something to check out and to ensure that we are thinking about our students and their different backgrounds and cultures, their diverse backgrounds and cultures. So Jon, we also have more sessions, then again in this episode, we’re not highlighting every single episode. We’d be here for an entire weekend, but we do have one other we wanted to share that really gets in and hones in on this equity piece. Help us understand this next session.

Jon Orr: This session that you’re mentioning comes from a fellow Canadian Hima Kode. Her sessions title, Who is a Mathematician and which is also on the first day Saturday, November 16th but in her session she’s addressing a very similar kind of idea that Jenell is addressing but thinking more about identity and who considers themselves mathematicians and who is not considering themselves mathematicians. So Hima’s focus session is going to focus on her new learning that she’s had and she’s going to prompt you to consider some powerful questions like how do you connect a student’s personal narrative and identity to help them build a self image as competent mathematicians? I think this is a huge idea that we can all learn from in her sessions right away on Saturday. It’s actually the second session, but I encourage you to check that one out because it’s going to help us help our students see themselves as mathematicians when I think many of them don’t, and don’t for many reasons. So let’s check Hima’s session out there. Kyle, that wraps up four unique sessions about differentiation and thinking about student identity in classrooms. Let’s move on to another one of our kind of main struggles that teachers have identified.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, for sure. For sure. So we’ve definitely hit very well on this idea of equity and addressing students who have had challenges in the math classrooms. Now, let’s move on to, this is a common challenge that we all face and I’m going to say it’s probably one of the biggest ones that really takes a philosophical change in our own mindset in order to address it. And actually, Jon, we actually shared recently a webinar that focused in on idea. So this one’s from Chris, when do I use problem based lessons and do teachers who use problem-based lessons formally assess the learning and he’s putting in brackets outside of formative assessment? If so, how are the rubrics and thanks for asking for my feedback. So this is a big one from Chris and lots of questions that are out there and there’s many sessions here that are going to really be embedding this idea in here because all of the people who are presenting are big into this idea of teaching through task, teaching through problem solving.

Kyle Pearce: But, one of the sessions that will actually really zoom in and hone in on this idea of like how do we assess what we’re doing in the classroom? And we’re talking like outside of like a traditional test. At the end of the unit tests, like how am I assessing students on a daily basis formatively? And we are so excited to have the team of formative five authors Skip Fennel, John Ray and Beth Cobit. Their session is called Formative Assessment and Feedback. Participants will be engaged in considering how to regularly implement the following classroom-based formative assessment techniques of observations, interviews, show me hinge questions and exit tasks. We were lucky enough to have the formative five team on episode number 32 where they unpacked the formative five, those formative five techniques that we just mentioned. They’re going to take a deep dive here to analyze responses to the techniques and discuss the importance of feedback as support to both student learning and teacher planning.

Kyle Pearce: So this presentation is going to include a brief video clip of different classroom based implementation of those formative five assessment techniques and access to helpful classroom tools that are designed to enable implementation of the formative five techniques. So again, get a preview of that session by going back to episode 32 that’s the big one on assessment. However, there are others that are going to be addressing assessment throughout, and I’ll just mention one of the sessions coming up shortly will be Peg Smith and I’m arguing that what she’s going to be sharing is really helpful for assessment. But we’re going to highlight her session in just a few minutes, so we’ll have you wait for that to get there.

Jon Orr: Okay. Okay, so that’s going to be a great session on assessment. I’m pretty excited for that assessment is a passion for me to think about and it’s also a doozy to think about. So super excited to get some ideas there. One of the other big challenges that we have in our classrooms is addressing student mindset but also parent mindset and other teacher’s mindset. So mindset is a big one and this one comes from Brent who says his biggest struggle right now is in his grade seven eight classroom. He’s got 14 IEPs and it’s creating a productive disposition towards mathematics. Many of his students have spent the last few years of being sent to, it looks like he’s using an acronym here, L , R, T which maybe is learning resource room for math instruction in small groups. They have internalized some horrible messages from this and I am struggling to break the mindsets towards math.

Jon Orr: They are very apprehensive to share with classmates and avoid struggle like the plague. So mindset is a big one and I think we’ve had many questions about how do you help kids with mindset and how do you help other teachers with mindset too. So to address this, we have a special guest. We have Jo Boaler is going to be talking about her book, Limitless Mind and the ideas from that new book. It’s her new book that can help for teaching. So if you haven’t read Limitless Mind, you should check it out. I have just finished it last week. It’s got some great ideas, not just for teaching but for everyone. And I think that’s why she wrote it. But she’s going to use her book to help you address ideas for teaching. So that session is a kickoff session by Jo Boaler. It’s a recorded session from July 24th where she talked about her book Limitless Minds. So that session is the first session on Saturday, November 16th right at 11:00 AM. That’s when we start, which is 8:00 AM Pacific time. Kyle talked to us about another struggle.

Kyle Pearce: This one here is coming from Jacqueline from York region. She’s keeps it short and simple. She says it’s student engagement. That’s a challenge. She says, they’re looking at me, but they’re not always listening. Everybody’s head nodding like, “Oh, we’ve got that. We’ve had that before.” And we have many sessions here so I’m not going to talk about all of them, but one I’ll highlight is from Sunil Singh. He’s going to be talking about chasing rabbits, building a lifetime of curiosity and mathematics with arithmetic. He’s going to be hanging out with us Saturday mornings, Saturday, November 16th at 11:00 AM Eastern, which is the same as 8:00 AM Pacific time.

Kyle Pearce: We also have our curiosity path that you can learn about through our four part video series. That’s at makemathmoments.com/lesson one if you want to get a head start on it, a couple other key sessions. Definitely check out Raj Shah’s session on making math irresistible and we also have one by Dan Finkle, Play is the Engine of Learning. These are not the only sessions you want to be checking out, but they are some that really speak to that specific engagement challenge. Jon, take us down the next challenge.

Jon Orr: Yeah. This next challenge is about helping parents understand because you know she’s worked with students who catch onto the idea of thinking about growth in their minds and their mindsets. But she says sometimes the parent community are still pushing for worksheets and operation drills. She tries to foster perseverance and resilience with her students, but the parents are just not allowing them to take risks and learn from mistakes. So educating parents is a big concern right now. That one was from Jennifer from our survey and we are super excited that Dr. Hilary Kreisberg and Dr. Matthew Beyranevand have written a book called Adding Parents to the Equation. And they’re joining us for their session of this. All of these are video sessions. So that’s a exciting, they are going to present their ideas and what they’ve talked about in the book to help parents do exactly this. How do you get parents on board with teaching math in this slightly different way to build perseverance and resilience.

Jon Orr: So these guys were on our last episode, which is episode 49. So you can jump over or listen back to episode 49 to get a listen about Adding Parents to the Equation. But if you join them on their session, which is Sunday, November 17th at 12 noon Eastern standard time, or 9:00 AM Pacific, you will see the video version of their session. So super excited for that. Kyle, let’s talk math content knowledge as a struggle.

Kyle Pearce: For sure. This one’s from Danielle from New York. She says, we were taught very differently than we teach today. I think we’d all nod our heads to that, that you know what things are not necessarily the way it looked for us. She says many teachers do not have the deep, concrete and conceptual understanding of the math they are teaching. It’s great when they realize that and ask for help with building it so they can better teach their students. It’s hard for teachers to address misunderstandings if they do not even truly understand it. So that’s from Danielle and Oh my gosh. Like right there. I’m going. Absolutely, yes, yes, yes. And we have three great sessions here, three of many great sessions that address content knowledge. The first one is from Sarah Shaffer. Her session is on integer operations and if you know Sarah, she is all about the Singapore math method and building conceptual understanding, so you will see integer operations in a very visual form.

Kyle Pearce: It would be concrete if you are here and with her working with her, but it is online so you will see it visually, so crack out some of those concrete manipulatives and integer chips. She’s going to take you on a trip through integer operations. She’s on Saturday, November 16th at 4:00 PM Eastern, which is 1:00 PM I was going to say specific, but it’s Pacific time. We also have Graham Fletcher hanging out, doing teaching through context, focusing in on the progression of multiplication. He’s on Sunday at 11:00 AM Eastern 8:00 AM Pacific and we have Christina Lincolnmore and she’s going to be talking all about the ratio table. What a fantastic model. You see that all the way through Pam’s session. Pam Harris. As we mentioned earlier, you’ll also see a lot on the ratio table in my session on proportional reasoning. So the ratio table is key and if you want to hone in on that specific model, checkout Christina’s. Jon, what’s our last section? We’re going to talk about the last challenge before we tie this thing all together.

Jon Orr: Yeah, we just want to highlight two more sessions and this is also not to say that the other sessions don’t address this, but this is about igniting teacher moves and how to run lessons. What are the routines that we should be thinking about and this actual struggle was proposed by Jim from our survey. Jim says relevant lessons is a struggle and how much struggle is productive. He’s wondering this tradeoff between what’s productive enough and what’s not productive enough, so too much struggle and they give up and too little is boring. So he says, oops, I guess that’s two challenges. So thanks Jim for that. Gen two that we’re going to highlight here. One the highlights that’s very is actually from Peter Liljedahl and Judy Larson. They’re going to be talking about building thinking classrooms. If you’ve listened to episode 21 we had Peter Liljedahl on and he talked about his building thing in classroom structure and this addresses actually exactly Jim’s struggle here is that Peter has this idea about flow between what’s too much struggle and what’s not.

Jon Orr: So join in with Peter and Judy Larson who works closely with Peter. They’re actually have kind of a podcast style presentation where they interview each other and they talk about building the thinking classroom and if you’ve never heard of that, they’re going to let you in on that and if you have heard of that, they’re going to give you some new things to think about. So that one for sure, be checking that out. Also, another one that helps with teacher moves that we’ve referenced so many times is the five practices for orchestra, productive mathematical discussions. And we are super proud and pumped to welcome Margaret Peg Smith, the co author of that book and she’s running a session called orchestrating productive discussions, which is going to be on Sunday, November 17th at 1:00 PM Eastern. So she’s going to go through all the challenges we face when we try to implement her ideas of the five practices, so that’s going to be awesome. We also talked to her on episode 33 about that, but please tune into the video version with Margaret Smith. It’s going to be a great one if you’re used to or trying to implement the five practices. So awesome stuff here for igniting our moves. What do you say Kyle? That’s, we’ve highlighted many sessions but we also haven’t highlighted all the sessions. That’s not every single session that we have in there. We have 25 different speakers and 25 different sessions, so we are pretty pumped to bring you the virtual summit coming up very soon this weekend.

Kyle Pearce: Absolutely. Jon, I am so excited for that summit and I want to just make sure like I think we’re going to wrap this thing up, but before we do, we just want to hit a couple key pieces here. If there’s still some wondering, so again, you are literally logging on to check the summit sessions out. You can do so right at the time it goes live. So on Saturday, November 16th at 11:00 AM Eastern or 8:00 AM Pacific time to about 5:00 PM Eastern, which is about 2:00 PM Pacific time. But if you come in late, like if I show up and it’s 1130 Eastern time, I don’t have to wait to get that replay. Once it goes live, I can click the play button on the replay, like it will literally happen dynamically. So even if you have internet connection trouble or anything like that, if you start, you might just start your session and it you might be 10 minutes behind the rest of the people.

Kyle Pearce: So we literally [inaudible 00:50:11] ready to go so that.

Jon Orr: We don’t want you to miss anything. So we set it up that way.

Kyle Pearce: You’re going to get to engage in this as soon as you can and you are able. We’re also going to have a chat box to the side in every single session. So it’s a different chat box for every session that you’re not having all these comments and responses coming in from sessions that you’re not watching. You’ll actually be able to have a conversation with people about thinking classrooms if you’re watching that session and it will be live. So you could scroll back and check out the chat from earlier. If, let’s say, I watch it the following Monday and I’m watching the replay, if anyone else in the world is watching the replay at the same time, you’ll literally have the opportunity to continue the conversation with those people, which I think is fantastic. So Jon, let’s make sure we’re clear on like if you haven’t signed up and then also what you need to make sure you have so that you know that you’re going to get all the information you need.

Speaker 4: Great. So let’s take it in two approaches right now. If you have not signed up yet, you can head over to makemathmoments.com/summit. What you’re going to do to register is pretty simple. All you have to do is hit the blue button and a box pops up and you put in your name and your email address. We recommend putting your personal email address in because you know our school district emails are very stringent on the filtering out emails. Sometimes you don’t see our emails. It could be possibly it got filtered into the spam or the junk mail. So you might want to check that. So that’s how you’re going to confirm you’ve got a spot is you’re going to look for an email from us immediately. If you don’t get it, you’ll want to check that spam folder because that could have went into that spot there.

Speaker 4: So you check that. If you got that email and one of those two spots, you are registered. And so if you’re already registered, what you’re doing is you’re kind of put it on your calendar and then you want to show up at that time. But we’re also going to email you just before the conference begins.

Speaker 4: Okay. So we’re going to email you, which is going to have links to access all of the videos from that email. And that’s how you get in, is because you have to register. And then how you get in is just you’re going to get an email. So you want to look for that. That’s why that email checking is so important. You’re going to get that email from us, which has the links for the videos and the sessions all laid out for you and it kind of brings you to the main summit page that’s going live. If you didn’t get an email, you want to email us admin@makemathmoments.com and we can send that to you again. So that’s kind of how it works. You register by putting your email in and then you look for emails from us and we send them to you and you get into go click on any video you’ll want to watch. So that’s how that’s going. Kyle, tell us a little bit more details of how this works.

Kyle Pearce: Awesome, awesome. So again, how they work, again, they will be released as scheduled on the website, on the summit page, makemathmoments.com/summit. At those times, those sessions will go live. And again, you’re going to access those sessions through that email. So make sure that you are getting emails from us. If it’s not, if you can’t figure out how to do it, email us at admin@makemathmoments.com and we will help you figure that out. If you aren’t able to login that weekend or let’s say you come in late for a session we’ve already addressed, the replays will be ready for you. You could watch those replays all the way until Friday, November 22nd in the evening when we will take all of those sessions and we will then be taking them off of that site, that platform that we’ve been using, and we will be putting them into our online Make Math Moments Academy. When you register for the summit, you have a special offer that you can actually join us in the Academy and you can not only access these sessions for as long as you’re a member, but you can also access all the other content we have in there like our course on assessment, like our course on the concept, holding your students back and many other tasks and tools that we have exclusive in the Academy.

Kyle Pearce: So definitely check that out. Do you want to learn more about the academies specifically? You can go to makemathmoments.com/Academy Jon, how do we incur people to share this summit with other people? Because let’s be honest, if you’re already registered or you’re listening to this podcast, I have a funny feeling that dedicating your weekend is probably not that big of a deal to you, like you think it’s pretty cool, but I’m wondering about the colleagues you’re hoping to inspire around you in your building. You might need to give them a little bit of a push in order to, first of all, be aware that the summit is an opportunity, and then maybe give them some strategies of how they might even take in one session, one session. They don’t have to watch all 25 but just to get them into one session and take that first step. What’s one way we’re trying to encourage people to share this with their colleagues?

Speaker 4: One easy way is you could just share the link out to any colleagues through emails, but we think an even better way. You can share it by entering the summit giveaway, which is makemathmoments.com/giveaway, which is our kind of home base for all of our giveaways. But the summit giveaway page is awesome because what you’re going to do is when you enter the giveaway, that’s kind of like a free kind of like a draw. You are going to win some prizes by just sharing. You can share the summit on Facebook, you can share that by email, you could share it on Twitter. So you’re sending it out. But we want to reward you for that. So what we’re going to do is if you enter the giveaway, you can earn some prizes that we randomly draw after the giveaways over.

Speaker 4: What you can win is we are giving away and thank you to White Book for sponsoring the summit. We’re giving away 10 packs of White Book flip charts. Each of those, have the 59 US dollar value. So we’re giving away 10 different winners. Not one person’s going to get 10 packs, 10 different people will get one pack each. So that’s 10 prizes we’re giving away right there.

Speaker 4: And we’re also giving out 10 math professional development books from Corwin. So many of our presenters, they’ve written books for Corwin. And Corwin’s like you know what, we’ll help you guys out and we’ll give away some of these books from some of these authors. So one book is Formative Five by Skip Fennel, John Ray, and Beth Cobit. Another book is Concept-Based Mathematics from Jennifer Chang Wathell. Another book is The Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions, the second edition. Or the Five Practices and practice elementary or middle school. And also there’s a high school book coming from Peg Smith. So we’re going to give out 10 books from those and also Daily Jump Routines to Start Math Class from Jon Sangiovanni. So 10 books there to give out. So that’s pretty awesome. Kyle, what do they need to do to get the giveaway?

Kyle Pearce: Well, first of all, if they are registered, they will get an email. And in that email there is a link talking about the giveaway. So you’re all set up there. If you’ve already registered, if not, or if, let’s say you lost that email, you didn’t notice that there was a link in there, you could just go right to makemathmoments.com/giveaway and enter the draw that way.

Kyle Pearce: So again, everything that you do, every share action that you do will actually up your number of entries. So we’re really trying to reward you for really buzzing up or drawing up a buzz for this particular event. So we’re really excited. Something that I think is really important as well is that if you’re an administrator or a coach or some sort of lead learner, and if you’re listening to this episode, like I have a funny feeling that you’re a lead learner of some type. You might be a classroom teacher who’s considered to be the math lead in your building or you’re just the one that drums up the excitement for mathematics teaching. Or maybe you’re a math coach or you’re a principal or you’re a superintendent. How are you going to encourage your math teachers to participate? So again, some people are not able to attend on the weekend.

Kyle Pearce: How am I going to build it or maybe my weeknights are so busy, so even during the replay period I’m driving my kids around to soccer and baseball and hockey and all these different things. How are we going to ensure that we’ve encouraged our math teachers to participate? Will they watch on their own time or should you find a way to get them some PLC time, some job embedded time for them to do some learning? That’s something that you might want to consider. If that’s your role, how am I going to carve out that time from November 18th to the 22nd during school time so that I can encourage people to take the next step in moving forward?

Kyle Pearce: Now, if let’s say that week doesn’t work, we also have obviously the Academy option that people can consider, but if you’re a school or a district or, let’s say a department, and you want more than one teacher to engage, we have school in district pricing. We can definitely help you out with that. It’s always based on how many people you’re hoping to have access to the Academy. And we always try to do it in such a way that you will get a huge, huge benefit by going with that school wide or district wide pricing. So we try our best to make sure that everyone has access so that the most people possible can engage in the make math moments Academy content. Jon else are you going to get if you are attending any of the sessions?

Jon Orr: Yeah, so one thing that we know that people need is sometimes they got to bump up their PD credit hours. So we’ve handcrafted a certificate that you can earn for every hour that you attend. So each of those sessions are scheduled to be an hour. So you can earn up to 25 kind of hours for your PD credit hours if you need it. So at the end of the session, so like on Monday when the original conference is over, we’re going to be sending out links to getting those attendance hours. So what we’ll do is we’re going to send you an email if you’ve registered, which will then give you a link to get your certificate.

Jon Orr: And your certificate of attendance is going to be emailed to you following that summit and you want to ensure you get it by November 22nd before the sessions go away. Like Kyle said, after that they go in and Make Math Moments Academy. We also want to just give you a word of caution. I remember that just getting a certificate of attendance doesn’t guarantee you get PD credit hours. We recommend that you check with your district ahead of time to ensure that they will accept the virtual sessions for those PD credit hours. So we’ve talked about lots of different things you can learn and get from the virtual summit. We sincerely hope that you can engage in this three professional development opportunity. I think that kind of wraps up this session. If you have any questions about the virtual summit, feel free to jump over to makemathmoments.com/summit. There’s a little box there that you can ask questions to and we get those emailed to us and we can email you back.

Jon Orr: Or you can respond to any emails that we send out. You can ask any individual questions, we’d be happy to help you out. It comes this Sunday and Saturday, so make sure if you have not registered, get in there now so that you can get some of the emails so that you don’t miss out on those sessions. All right, Kyle, let’s wrap up this episode.

Kyle Pearce: All right, my friends, so again, makemathmoments.com/ summit. Make sure you get yourself in and before we head out, we want to make sure that you don’t miss out any future episodes as they come out each week. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform like Spotify or Google Podcasts. And if you’re liking what you’re hearing, please share the podcast with a colleague and help us reach an even wider audience by leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Play and tweet us your biggest takeaway by tagging @makemathmoments on Twitter.

Jon Orr: Show notes and links to resources from this episode can be found at makemathmoments.com/episode50 again, that’s makemathmoments.com/episode50

Kyle Pearce: well, until next time, I’m Kyle Pearce.

Jon Orr: and I’m Jon Orr.

Kyle Pearce: High fives for us.

Jon Orr: and high fives for you!