Pro-D Reflection

I went to Whistler for this Pro-D session, and I learned a LOT!! I have always heard about people mentioning the whole building thinking classrooms, so it was so nice to hear it from the man who started it all :)

Session 1 Building Thinking Classrooms: Closing the Lesson

Of course, I wanted to attend Peter’s session, and when I got there 10 minutes before it started, there were only around 4 spots left! So I got very lucky with that. And yes, I learned sooo much from the session, as I felt like so many things I’ve learned so far in BEd has been validated by the man himself and plenty of data and examples. Peter is also a very charismatic and funny speaker, so I felt very engaged in his presentation. This is absolutely my favourite session, as he talked about how to summarize a lesson after 80 minutes of learning. He said that a third of the lesson should be to help consolidate the information with the students, help them take meaningful notes, and to have check-your-understanding questions rather than homework. I never really thought about homework widening the gap between strong and weak students, so it’s interesting to see that a knowledge gap exists in this sense.

Session 2 Fostering Creativity in Math: Celebrating Alternative Perspectives

This session was sort of interesting? It’s meant for a younger grade level, but I still found it pretty valuable to see that small words can mean very different things. So instead of asking the students to draw what they think an octagon looks like, we should encourage them to try to draw an octagon that no other student would think of. This is a fun perspective on learning math creatively, which is very aligned with what we have learned in the garden so far, so I think that’s neat :) Though I don’t think I will be using this too much in my classrooms.

Session 3 Responsive Unit Planning in Secondary Thinking Classrooms

This one is a miss to be honest. Everything that was mentioned was more or less covered in Peter’s session. Though it was interesting because the speaker asked the audience to share their stories of the building thinking classrooms, which validates the idea of Peter’s topic. I didn’t feel like I learned anything with unit planning, but the speaker did bring up how we can organize the check-your-understanding questions. The order of which questions go first really matters when it comes to building confidence in the students, so I think it’s in interesting lesson to take away still.

Session 4 Class Openers and Quick Games to Foster Numeric, Algebraic, and Geometric Thinking

I loveeed this session! After Peter’s session on closing lessons, I wanted to finish off my day with class openers, and it didn’t disappoint at all! Most of the session is showing off how to use Desmos Teacher as a tool to check students’ understanding and boost engagement, and it definitely does! I am writing this blog after my first 2 blocks of teaching, and the students really enjoyed using Desmos as an interactive tool! They liked my mental health check-ins, and I will definitely be using more of this in the future. The speaker taught us the basics of making activities on there, and some resources that we can use. 

So the main takeaways are: building thinking classrooms is a very great way to engage the students, and a very fun way to learn for the teachers as well. And using Desmos is a very great way to show the students that their voices were being heard! The doubts I have about all of this is the amount of work that the teacher may have. As a teacher, I would love to mark exams and lesson prep during students’ work time, but with the building thinking classrooms, I don’t know if I would have the time to. Overall, an amazing experience that I would go back to the next following years! :)