Problem Solving Masterclass

Presented by Dr John West, Mathematics Education Consultant

Thursday 23rd January 2025

9am-1pm (4 hours)

Today I was a little reluctant to participate in Mathematics Professional Development, mainly because I am an EAL/D teacher, and I wasn’t sure if there would be much relevance for me or my students. However, I truly enjoyed the workshop today and was able to see how I could utilise some of the strategies and resources in my professional context.

I highly recommend Dr John West for professional development at your school. His details are above if you wish to contact him to present and work with your staff. I spoke with John after the workshop and he was happy for me to share some of his resources but of course to understand and utilise these resources well, the training is a must!

I am only sharing a couple of activities which I wanted to have ready and accessible for my use, I hope you enjoy them as well.

Here are the Problem Solving Strategies we covered today. It was good to go through these but also look at how these strategies can be used together, separately, intentionally for different purposes and even lessons.

G

Guess Who? Guess my number. 

I loved this task, a great start of year activity, gets students talking to each other, working out great questions to ask, process of elimination, lots of alternative approaches and scope to adapt the task for younger learners.

Scrabble Activity:

I particularly loved this scrabble activity. I have many students, many of whom are Chinese, and I was sitting with the Chinese teacher today and we were going over place value and the number system in China. I found that in itself fascinating. I have many Chinese students who love mathematics, numbers and problem solving being a universal language or sorts. I want to adapt this lesson to build English vocabulary using number and problem solving. I thought this could be lots of fun!

Scrabble Activity

This PDF has all of the pages and resources for the Scrabble Activity.

Sqwabble Activities:

Sqwabble

Resources for this on the linked PDF.

Some of the main take-aways for me today were:

• Try as much as we as we can as educators to dispel the myth of students and people either being good or bad at Mathematics.
• We want to focus on teaching strategies and problem solving skills instead of focusing on the right or wrong way to solve or answer a question.
• Always plan lessons by including elements of  fun, tactile resources, provide hands on and engaging materials, plan intentionally with specific skills in mind.

An enjoyable Professional Development experience today.

Staff were provided with all of the resources from today’s presentation as well as a digital copy of this handbook. I am obviously not allowed to share this with you on my blog, but highly recommend getting your hands on a copy for your school and booking Dr John West for some staff PD.

Thanks Dr John West!

Thanks for reading.