Saskatchewan Understands Mathematics Conference

This weekend I'm up in North Country working with teachers from all over Saskatchewan at the Saskatchewan Understands Mathematics Conference. Random? Sure. Thank you twitter and thank you @park_star for organizing a fantastic two days. After a fantastic opening talk by James Tanton, I led a 2 hour sessions this morning titled Beyond Polya: Making Mathematical Habits of Mind an Integral Part of the Classroom. Here are the Powerpoint slides (I will warn you that a few of the animations did not export correctly, but it's readable). 


In short, we walked through my ten mathematical habits of mind, brainstormed what this meant to us and how we could see and teach this in our classroom, and did some math.

Starting with a personal reflection, I felt that the session went well overall. We did, however, go too quickly and we didn't spend enough time doing math. In retrospect, I should have focused on some of the habits which would have allowed for more time to engage more deeply. That said, hopefully some of the participants will come back for day two where I hope to give more space and time for participants to work. I am also finding it hard after every conference talk I do to get a real sense of whether or not my session was at all useful to people. It's one thing for people to like a session (which even that is sometimes hard to gauge across the board). It's a whole other animal for people to change or evolve. I was super jealous when I heard that The Space Between the Numbers got an email from a workshop participant at her NCTM talk on proof through logic puzzles saying that he had created a lesson around this talk the very next week. Anyway, I'm learning that conference workshops are very different from the classroom.