Cues from Ekuwah Moses: School-wide Collaborative Problem Solving

I strive for active engagement during all professional development (PD) sessions. I also make it a point to make all of our engagement purposeful and immediately applicable to the classroom. I use our brief morning meetings to model endlessly repeatable strategies, facilitate discussion, and give them something to replicate in the classroom. Periodically, I give teachers a task to complete with their students and bring samples back to share. The school-wide activity presented in this post was chosen to get an idea of our student's number sense, emphasize the usage of the common situations for all four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division); and offer a collaborative culminating activity to multiple PDs on the variety of ways to use representations or drawings to solve problems (The ABCs of Number Sense). Teachers were previously trained on: ten frames, open number lines, number bonds, base-ten models, bar model, simple shapes, and more.

"I used this problem as an informal preassessment, purposely choosing these numbers and this problem type in order to learn more about my students' number sense and mathematical reasoning. I was expecting a range of ideas and strategies..." (p. 5 - Number Sense Routines> Jessica Shumway)

During a thirty minute morning professional development , Jessica Shumway's monarch problem was modeled with K-5th grade teachers in a similar fashion described on the yellow sheet (above). Teachers worked independently for a couple of minutes and then shared representations at table groups. One teacher per table was nominated to present and model for the school-wide audience. The teacher signed his or her name next to the representation on the collaborative poster.

At the end of the PD, the teachers (K-5) chose a calendar photograph to complete the assignment...

Select vibrant pictures to create a meaningful context for problem solving. (Just like I chose the beautiful monarch photo from an old dollar store calendar.)
Choose a variety of situations provided in the Common Core (NVACS).

Choose grade-appropriate addends or subtrahends
Change characters/objects to relate to the photo (sample situations provided in the links above)
Use multiple representations to solve your generated problem and the problems posed by other classrooms
Spread a "Math Curse" around the building by posting the posters around campus for other classrooms to take and solve in another way

The Common Core State Standards (NVACS) outline a variety of common situations in the Appendix. This is the perfect document for planning differentiated instruction. There are 12 different problem types for addition and subtraction word problems. Historically, we have not been exposing elementary students to all of them.

On May 13th, teachers brought the poster back to the morning PD. We analyzed which situations teachers chose to use with students and the types of models used to represent the solution.

Gallery Walk - Analyzing the posters generated in the classroom

Great discussion about future classroom application!

The first grade teachers said the students shut down once the poster already had an answer from another classroom. But wait... this is the perfect reason to justify or prove the answer in another way! What is another way we can prove the answer is 8?

Benefits:
Facilitates great student discourse
No worksheets involved
Providing a context makes computation meaningful
Students must justify answers with a representation