Math Thinking

At our PD day session on Friday, Laura Gini Newman (@LauraGiniNewman) was our guest speaker. I live tweeted the event. These are some of the awesome things she said about math...

• No matter what you are doing in life you need to be math thinkers!
• Our ultimate goal is 2help students help themselves. How to get students to be self regulated, independent learners.
• Nurture habits of mind to promote #math learning: perseverance, attention to detail, flexible mind.
• Making mistakes is a productive part of learning #math.
• Really good #math students can think, act and communicate well mathematically
• Rigorous thinking is critical, creative, collaborative!
• Do not rush to the 'right answer'... pause for conjecture, prediction, reflection, create the environment.
• Students are not engaged unless they are personally committed to it.

She also asked these great questions:

• How can we support students in developing competencies to think critically, creatively and conceptually?
• Ask: what is the thinking that I'm doing? Need to make the thinking explicit.
• How to make best decisions possible? This is one of the questions #math raises.
• What thinking would you have to do to make a good mathematical decision

These are all things to keep in mind as we move forward in our math learning!