In November, I got to attend the NCTM and NCSM conferences along with the Magma Team! It was exciting to be in the booth at both conferences and talk with math teachers and leaders from all over the world! And, Monique Cabellon and I had the opportunity to present at NCSM! 

Our talk was titled Fostering and Empowering Identity and Agency in Thinking Classrooms. It was a reflection about how we take action on some or all the ideas from attending a conference back in our home schools and districts. Last year, when I attended NCSM, I was a Regional Math Coordinator in Washington State, and I came back to the Seattle-Tacoma area with SO MANY ideas swirling in my head. I used this slide to capture what was swirling around in my head.

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As I was trying to put these together into action, I talked with Monique and colleagues. I wanted to take what I learned back to my region to remove barriers, Increase student engagement, foster mathematical agency & identity AND empower students!

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In the mix of my thoughts, I was also thinking a lot about Dr. Peter Liljedahl’s talk about our role as teacher educators in supporting teachers to Notice, Name and Nuance as they are growing and developing their teaching practice. 

Monique and I decided to collaborate in classrooms in the school where she was a Math Interventionist. First, we co-taught a lesson using practices from Building Thinking Classrooms, modeling for teachers, while learning with and from students. Then we went back to the same classroom and enacted a task using Magma Math to help students consolidate their thinking. In our NCSM session, Monique and I told the story of what happened, and what we learned.

For our Building Thinking Classrooms task, we used the task Protecting Your Garden from Peter Liljedahl’s site, and as I introduced the task, I situated it at the student’s school using a screenshot from Google Maps, and introducing it from a STEM perspective.
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The 50ish students in this 4th/5th grade classroom eagerly got to work. They happily went to their random groups and engaged. This was their first experience with a BTC type task, but they approached it like enthusiastic pros. The teachers noticed that all of the students engaged, including those who usually hang back, and we were impressed with their perseverance. Truth be told, no one completely solved the task! We had to break for lunch before they got done, and one of our learnings was that this was ok. The teachers had several mathematical ideas to take up with their students over the next few days based on the task, and the kids wanted to return to the task and keep thinking about it.

A few weeks later, Monique and I returned to the same classroom where she led a task that was focused on math the students were learning at the time using Magma Math. The task was to add two fractions - and the prompt included a model with fraction bars.
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Monique used ideas from Rough Draft Math for this lesson, encouraging students to first submit a rough draft answer, then pair with another student to consult, followed by some time to revise and refine their thinking in Magma. Monique had realized that in Magma Math’s Exam Mode students are able to revise and submit their solutions (even if they are originally correct!). We leveraged that as we encouraged ALL students to add to their solutions after they consulted with a partner. We were delighted at how enthusiastically the students consulted with each other - and by the details they used to explain their thinking in Magma! 

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We had conversations with different students about the various ways they solved this problem, including methods where students visualized moving parts of the fractions, to adding using variations on common denominators. 

Monique and I reconvened and had a number of conversations about our observations - both of what we did, what the students did, and also what the teachers who were observing their own students did. Here are some of the things we learned - under the big headings that we used to organize our talk:

Removing Barriers:

• Working in small groups at Vertical Non-Permanent Surfaces (via a BTC Task) gave more students access and supported perseverance.
• Multi-Language support & text-to-speech in Magma removes huge barriers.
• Students appreciate having unlimited attempts to solve problems in Magma.

Increased Student Engagement:
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• Students are super engaged and perseverant when working at VNPSs. They didn’t want to stop for lunch recess!
• The buzz in the room when we asked students to find a partner and consult was delightful! Everyone got involved, and then most students added to or revised their thinking.

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Fostering Mathematical Agency & Identity:
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• Engaging in a Thinking Task with a small group gives students agency in how they collaborate and solve. Everyone in the group is a DOER of Mathematics.
• Students LOVE having their first/home language enabled on Magma! They appreciate having their complete identity represented. Some students said that their families spoke a language at home other than English, and even though they are fluent in academic English, they lit up when they were able to enable that language in Magma!

Empowering Students

• Highlighting & displaying student work affirms math identities and EMPOWERS students!
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Noticing
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• I have often noticed that when I model lessons in classrooms, teachers have the opportunity to observe their students and notice things the students CAN do that they maybe hadn’t anticipated. When we modeled lessons with practices grounded in Building Thinking Classrooms, it seemed as if teacher noticing of what their students know and do was increased. Teachers were able to see who participated and how.

When we modeled lessons with Magma Math, teachers were impressed with the thinking that students showed in the app. One of the delightful outcomes that they enjoyed was that even though we used anonymous mode, students claimed their errors! When we were debriefing the fractions task where students submitted an answer, consulted, then revised, one student shared that he had gotten it wrong at first, and his partner helped him figure it out, and he wanted us to see how his work had changed! The teacher was delighted that her class was such a safe space for students to share and learn, and this created a wonderful opportunity to explore his first attempt and see why it didn’t work.

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First Attempt:

Second Attempt:

Our session ended with us sharing that we have unfinished work! We want to continue to support teacher noticing, and have not moved into the realm of Naming and Nuancing. We had a wonderful conversation with the teacher leaders in the room about the work of fostering and empowering identity and agency, and are looking forward to coming together to continue the story in 2024 in Chicago! 

Please let us know where you are on this journey! 
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Best,
Leslie
leslie@magmamath.com