FIRST 10 DAYS

We have placed an emphasis on collaboration this week so that students have opportunities to get to know each other. Being placed in visibly random groups frequently, they will have a chance to interact with many different peers throughout the first ten days.

We have also included community building activities where students can get to know each other more personally and find out about one another's backgrounds.

As all of these interactions are taking place, it is important for the educator(s) to observe and take note of students in the room: their interests, their primary languages (if not English), the lived experiences they bring into the room, how they interact with other students, etc.

MATHEMATICAL IDENTITY

We know that some students have had negative experiences in mathematics learning situations in the past. We also know that students require support in developing social-emotional strategies to regulate their emotions when they are faced with challenges or experience struggle.

Students' mindsets about themselves and their own abilities have a large effect on how they view their potential to learn mathematics.

We have included activities to help students develop a positive math identity by naming and understanding the importance of having a growth mindset, embracing struggle and making mistakes when we are learning new things that are challenging.

SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING

The MTH1W curriculum's Strand AA is explicit about the aspects of social-emotional learning that we need to support students in developing throughout the course.

The activities we have included here offer strategies for students to be mindful of themselves, cope with anxiety and normalize how we can respond to stressful situations as we learn and work together.

The non-curricular and curricular tasks included here are designed with the Thinking Classroom practices in mind. Facilitating the suggested tasks with these strategies will help establish norms around movement, interaction and learning in the classroom from the first day.

Thinking Classroom strategies to familiarize yourself with for these tasks are the following:

• Thinking Tasks (both non-curricular and curricular) (Practice #1)

• Visibly Random Groups (Practice #2)

• Vertical Non-Permanent Surfaces (Practice #3)

• Verbal Instructions Given When Standing (Practice #6)

Each day is set up so that a competency or math topic is the "theme" or focus for that day. There is an activity or task intended to highlight the day's focus, for example, "collaboration." As the task is consolidated or debriefed, this focus is deconstructed and a set of criteria for that skill is built as a class. A class in the next couple days likely includes an activity or task where students can use the evaluation tool that they co-created earlier to self-assess.

The goal is to value students' contributions to the class, to make explicit the values and culture for your classroom, and to set the stage for the types of competencies that will be important to develop in this course.

The goal of the first 10 days is to set the stage for what math class will be like for the rest of the semester: collaborative in nature and one that values the ideas of all students. We want to communicate that all students will be invited and expected to engage in the learning environment and to get to know the students as learners. Our aim is to avoid practices that serve to "sift and sort" students.

While thinking tasks are underway, it will be helpful to observe how students are activating their prior mathematical knowledge, as well as their problem-solving skills.

We have designed some "Diagnostic Thinking Tasks" that are a collection of more open-ended or choice-based problems where students can demonstrate their prior knowledge.

Strategies for how to implement these diagnostic thinking tasks can be found within the tasks themselves:

• MTH1W Diagnostic Thinking Task: Integers

• MTH1W Diagnostic Thinking Task: Linear and Non-Linear Relations

• MTH1W Diagnostic Thinking Task: Proportional Reasoning and Fractions

• MTH1W Diagnostic Thinking Task: Algebra

We have adapted a continuum from the intermediate division that will help teachers record and identify where students are at and what next steps to take to move students along this continuum.

Each school has been assigned an Itinerant Coach. These coaches are implementing these elements in their own classrooms and learning more and more about what the Thinking Classroom can look like. Reaching out to your school's Itinerant Coach is a great first step.

A second step would be to access a copy of Peter Liljedahl's Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics and read the relevant chapter. Copies have been delivered to each secondary math department so follow up with your Department Head to inquire whether there is a copy you can have/borrow.

When students persevere through through challenges and take risks in their thinking and approaches, they can have access to deeper understanding. When they do this in collaborative settings, they benefit from sharing learning about diverse approaches to problems.

Many of the tasks and activities we have included here are set up to be collaborative in nature so that students can interact as they solve problems.

Non-curricular tasks are used in the first three days so that students can get to know each other, the classroom culture and teacher expectations in a low-stakes setting where they are not also worried about being evaluated on the mathematics they might be recalling or learning.

We offer strategies for establishing expectations around collaboration with students. Some of the tasks we have included lend themselves well to discussing perseverance and risk-taking, which are key competencies for mathematics learners, and we offer supports for holding these conversations with the whole class.