Garden City's Inquiry Question: 

How can we expand our students’ schema of math, provide them vocabulary and help them notice these competencies within themselves?

Why ask this question:

It’s important to students to expand their metacognition of what mathematician do and develop awareness of the ​

competencies involved in process of learning, so that we are nurturing and valuing competencies over speed and getting it right. 

What was being noticed about learners?

We are noticing that our students love to engage in numeracy problems and tasks. They enjoy learning about math and “getting good” at it. Despite many rich mathematical tasks, when asked “What is Math?” students answer were simple and resorted to the typical schema of math.

What Actions were taken?

• Our focus was to encourage students to work together to solve problems. We attempted this by using numeracy tasks that built on applying students' knowledge and new learned concepts. We used a variety of collaborative tasks that could be found on Open Middle or Peter Liljedahl's book.  By doing so, they will learn to communicate their ideas effectively, listen to others, and work collaboratively to find solutions. This will help students develop important teamwork and problem-solving skills that are valuable skills. At the end of each session, we reflected on the competencies that we used as mathematicians. 
• Collaboration can be challenging at times, but it is immensely helpful. Working on vertical surfaces or hands-on materials allows learning to be visible and tangible
• In our classrooms, we have both witnessed the high level of engagement among students when using the vertical surfaces. As a result, we have adapted our classrooms by transitioning from standard whiteboards to vertical whiteboards, such as WipeBooks.