2008-09 Coaching for Math GAINS

Background for Focus on Questioning

Making GAINS through Questioning Through the 2008-09 Coaching for Math GAINS initiative, we have the opportunity to guide a critical mass of teachers of mathematics through job- embedded professional learning experiences that can shift their questioning behaviours in ways that immediately improve student achievement and close gaps. By capturing records of shifting practices, and building on emerging hubs of expertise, we plan to prepare mathematics educators and students for even greater gains in 2009-10.

Vision We reach every Grades 7-12 mathematics student by reaching every Grades 7- 12 mathematics teacher. Teachers will use more precise, personalized, and powerful questions to: ← • focus on important mathematics ← • provide access to learning for students across a broad range of ← readiness levels, and ← • keep the cognitive level high for all students, strong or struggling.

This will extend and enhance their current practice in using questioning for learning, teaching, and assessing.

Rationale for Focusing on ‘Questioning’ in 2008-09 The importance of questioning was initially identified in TIPS: Developing Mathematical Literacy (2005), and in the Connecting Research and Practice Professional Learning Guide on Questioning (2007): "Using questions effectively through class teaching and learning helps facilitate participation and stimulate higher levels of thought.” “Questioning is a developed skill which, when effectively implemented, can enrich the classroom environment and improve learning for all students."

The current initiative is energized by the readiness of teacher leaders to initiate and facilitate an examination of questions with regards to their focus on important

- 1 - mathematics and for their appropriateness to address the diversity of students in classrooms. A critical mass of teachers has indicated readiness to learn how to pose questions that evoke and expose thinking and how to respond appropriately to students’ answers. The intent is that teachers commit to refining their questioning for precision, personalization, and power to better address these two critical foci: important mathematics and diversity of students. Through collaborative work including TIPS lesson planning, CLIPS storyboarding, assessment task development, Lesson Study, coaching, and co-teaching, teacher leaders will develop and practise their own emerging knowledge about and skills in questioning, draw in an expanding number of teachers focused on questioning, and provide a wide range of examples of effective questions for teachers to use.

By focusing on questions, their nature and structure, and related instructional practice in 2008-09, educators at all levels will not only address all the mathematical literacy criteria in the Student Success Action Planning Template, but also mobilize a coherent provincial, board-, and school-wide approach to improving student achievement and closing gaps in mathematics. Strategic work on questioning at the school level will improve student achievement across subjects and grades.

Focusing on important focus on and evoke the big ideas of the curriculum for the mathematics teacher’s course/program

Teaching for conceptual expose and evoke student thinking about key concepts and skills understanding

Teaching through the engage students in the problem-solving process, developing Mathematical Processes mathematical habits of mind and life-long learning skills

Effective use of manipulatives call for and encourage the use of a wide range of thinking and and technologies learning tools

Establishing math-talk learning foster meaningful and purposeful discourse communities

Application of scaffolded and expose thinking in ways that provide teachers with opportunities to differentiated instruction respond with appropriate scaffolding and challenge

Formative assessment practice expose thinking to inform both instruction and immediate feedback to students

Consistency and alignment of collaboratively develop assessment to align with instruction, and assessments of learning provide opportunities for moderated marking across classrooms

- 2 - Context for a System-Wide Initiative Michael Fullan (2009) suggests in Change Wars that “systems will not improve without system leadership of a certain kind – leadership that realizes that top- down reform does not work, nor do decentralized bottom-up strategies. Rather, system leaders strive for a blended model of simultaneous top-down/bottom-up forces: top-down direction and investment coupled with bottom-up capacity- building.” (p. 282)

Using Fullan’s lens, the Assistant Deputy Minister’s October 2008 announcement of a focus on mathematics and boys’ literacy may be viewed as ‘top-down direction,’ and the December 2008 Acting Assistant Deputy Minister’s announcement of support for mathematics coaches and coaching as both ‘top-down investment’ and evidence of the belief that there is sufficient leadership capacity and will at the grass-roots level to tackle ‘bottom-up capacity-building.

Sharpening the Focus The Curriculum and Assessment Policy Branch and the Student Success Learning to 18 Implementation and Training Branch have worked collaboratively with mathematics leaders to sharpen the ‘top-down direction’ for Grades 7-12 mathematics. In May 2008, 42 members of the Advisory Panel on Connecting Practice and Research in Mathematics Education met to identify how best to increase student achievement and close gaps in Grades 7-12 mathematics in 2008-09. This panel, which included representatives from many faculties of education and boards, identified the following three principled practices for leveraging mathematics gains: ← • questioning to evoke and expose thinking ← • fearless speaking and listening, and ← • responding to provide appropriate scaffolding and challenge. ← The Panel judged these practices important to mathematics classrooms, to professional learning for teachers, and to system level decision-making meetings. Based on emerging research on questioning from both literacy and mathematics perspectives, the direction has been refined even further to focus on questioning to evoke and expose thinking as a driver for the other two principled practices.

Coaching and other professional learning opportunities will support teachers as they examine the power of their questions to move learners to grapple with important mathematics in ways that meet the needs of all students with precision and attention to personalized learning. Specific attention will be given, initially, to types of questions and their effective use, for example: • open questions that allow for student choice and evoke varied responses

- 3 - • parallel questions that provide access to a broad range of student readiness stages, while allowing for common reflection and discussion, and • scaffolding questions that take into account student responses.

Mathematics Goals for 2008-09 In response to the question “So what can organizations do to create changes that are both significant and profound – changes that not only meet the immediate priorities of the moment, but also energize everyone in the organization to seek a greater good?” Doug Reeves (2009) says: “To make these changes, organizations must develop level-five networks …The critical distinction of level-five networks is their purpose and orientation. The focus is not merely an organizational objective, but the greater good (Allison, 2006) – an orientation that transcends financial objectives, test scores, and quarterly goals.”

The overarching goals for 2008-09 will create significant and profound shifts regarding questioning, and energize teachers of mathematics by involving them in level-five networks for Growing Accessible Interactive Networked Supports (GAINS). This is the spirit that drives our strategic, current focus on questions and questioning, and through this focus, mathematics educators will move closer to reaching the following targets: ← • an increase in Grade 9 EQAO scores and a decrease in the gap ← between Applied and Academic scores ← • an increase in credit accumulation rates in mathematics in 2008-09, and ← • an increase in teacher content knowledge for teaching ← mathematics, and in teacher and student efficacy in 2008-09.