Math PD Day 2026

Peter Taylor is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Queen’s University, cross-appointed to the Department of Biology and the Faculty of Education.  His longtime area of research is in evolutionary ecology but for the past few years he has spent most of his time developing curriculum for 9-12 mathematics. His heroes from long ago are Whitehead, Dewey and Papert, and more recently these are the many teachers he has been lucky enough to work with.  

The High School Math Classroom as a Maker Space

My feeling is that most of our students spend too much time “learning” things and need more time “building” things. In short you learn best by creating and building. But to do this in the classroom we need resources. Physical resources are always great, water bottles, tires, coins, dice, robots, etc. but technology is also a rich source of projects, and we have been creating some interesting resources with Desmos. These are essentially animations which the students are faced with both a math problem and a construction challenge, and we are often surprised to find out just how much mathematics comes in to the latter. At the end of the day, the student who has both built the animation and solved the math problem has had what John Dewey (1938) would have called an experience, and that has real staying power.

Cal Armstrong is a long-time mathematics educator and board member of OAME, and his most significant earlier development project was what became the OneNote Class Notebook. He has been deeply engaged in technology and education for decades, and his primary motivations are to save teachers time, personalize the student experience and enhance the educational journey for both learners and teachers. He has worked with AI since 2017 and is enjoying leading the chatOAME Generative AI project to aid OAME members. Outside the classroom & away from devices, he is an avid outdoorsman, a motorcyclist and an active volunteer in his community.

Mirrors in the Classroom: Reflecting on Mathematical Flourishing

Math classrooms are full of surfaces: whiteboards, notebooks, shared slides, videos, even chat logs (and the occasional coffee-stained scrap of paper). All of them can become mirrors of practice, places where teachers and students can see mathematical thinking more clearly and reflect on it together. These mirrors help us gauge the impact of our instruction and catch glimpses of the depth (and quirks) of students’ understanding.

Our goal is to explore how physical, digital and metaphorical mirrors can support reflection by teachers on their own practice, between colleagues, by students on their learning, and among whole classes. Drawing on rich problems, Universal Design for Learning, and insights from thousands of teacher conversations with AI, we’ll look at how (and why) we might use these mirrors to notice more of what matters.

Even with the best tools, we still only see “in a mirror, darkly.” So what do we want, need, to see more clearly? We need to refocus or improve simple moves many of us already use and turn them into a launchpad for more inventive approaches; small, human-centred technology-adjacent reflection routines that help us attend to student ideas, refine our questioning, and keep mathematical joy and curiosity at the heart of our classrooms and our professional growth. After all, we’d like to smile at what we see in the mirror.