For my Professional Development Day, I went to the BCAMT Conference in Whistler. My experience as a new teacher was very positive. I attended Peter Liljedahl's session on the importance of closing a lesson effectively. I learned that a third of your class time should be dedicated to closing. I had never thought of how much time must be dedicated to closing prior to this, and I like this idea because Peter argues that when students learn something new, their thoughts are unorganized and chaotic and with effective closing practices, we can help organize those thoughts so the students understand and retain more information.
I attended another session in the math Lounge where I learned about the importance of organizing practice questions in the categories of mild, medium and spicy. In this session, the speaker got us to list the things in the Linear Equations chapter that we want our students to know and then organize them in a way that the next topic would build on the previous one. We then looked at some qualities that make these questions mild, medium or spicy. My understanding was that mild questions are supposed to be approachable for students, medium need to be the same as mild with one more tier of difficulty and spicy is supposed to be 2 or more tiers of difficulty.
I also learned that with the four categories in the Proficiency Scale, students tend to think of the fourth category as a secret garden where only the elite students are granted entry and so calling the questions "mild, medium or spicy" will get more engagement with students and encourage them to try more!
Oh, and I also got a lot of freebies and merch! I got a few math textbooks and some stickers and other things for free!
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