Professional Development Workshops

Listed below is a sample of some of our more popular workshops.  These sessions run from anywhere between one hour and across an entire day and they can be modified, combined, condensed or lengthened to meet the needs of your staff and your school.

Unpacking the Proficiencies

One of the issues with much of the current maths professional development is that it spends a lot of time focussing on what we need to teach and comparatively little time on how to actually teach it.  This workshop looks at the best way for students to learn by examining the four proficiencies (understanding, fluency, reasoning and problem solving).  Participants will explore each of the proficiencies via engaging tasks sourced from classrooms. 

What’s the Big Idea?

One of the issues facing educators is a crowded curriculum, and there is perhaps no subject where this is more evident than in mathematics.  So how do we prioritise which elements of the curriculum to emphasize? What are the key aspects of mathematics that students need to focus on to ensure that their long-term progress is not adversely impacted?  And how can teachers make meaningful connections across content strands, to help students develop a relational understanding of mathematics?  This workshop will explore the big ideas of the curriculum- what they are, why they are important, and how to ensure your school is planning to teach them properly.

Differentiation That Works 

One of the greatest challenges confronting teachers is how to best cater for the wide range of abilities in our classrooms.  In this workshop, we investigate a variety of effective yet practical approaches to ensure your students’ diverse learning needs are being met.  Topics covered can include how to plan differentiated sequences of lessons, when to use focus groups and how to ensure that they are truly fluid, and the important role that student collaboration plays in effective differentiation.  We can also explore a variety of lesson structures that are easily adaptable to suit a range of content areas and year levels.

Reasoning:  More Than “Can You Explain Your Thinking?”

This hands-on workshop provides an in-depth look at all of the different aspects of the Reasoning proficiency.  We explore how you can get your students thinking and working like mathematicians by taking your staff through a series of engaging warm-up activities and lesson ideas.  This workshop also focusses on the crucial role that questioning plays in developing students’ capacity to reason. Teachers will leave with a range of practical ideas, as well as an increased understanding of how other tasks can be modified to ensure that your students are proving, comparing, contrasting, explaining, justifying and analysing on a regular basis. 

Open-Ended Tasks

This workshop will focus on how teachers can enhance student learning while also increasing engagement, simply by changing the type of questions that they ask.   A somewhat boring lesson where students are practising a skill that they have previously learned (e.g. using a written method to solve multi-digit subtraction equations) can be transformed into an engrossing challenge via a few simple steps.  We will explore the benefits of using open-ended tasks by sharing examples that have been successfully implemented in classrooms.  We also outline some methods that can be used to create open-ended tasks across all of the strands of mathematics and for all year levels.

Exploring the Launch, Explore & Summarise Instructional Model

In this workshop, we examine the Launch-Explore-Summarise instructional model.  What are the key features of this approach to structuring a maths lesson and how does it differ from other, more traditional lesson structures?  Attendees will participate in a modelled lesson/s, allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of the benefits of using this approach.  This can include a focus on how this instructional model can be adapted to suit a variety of lesson styles (e.g. problem solving, explicit instruction, game-based learning). We will also explore issues such as student agency, differentiation, teacher questioning and perhaps most importantly- student engagement. 

Number Sense Workshops

One of the questions we are most frequently asked is what’s the best way for students to learn their multiplication facts. This workshop introduces a practical method to ensure that your students are learning facts in a meaningful way that supports their conceptual understanding. This approach prioritises student engagement, helps build strong links between the classroom and home environments, and has differentiation built into its structure, thus ensuring students are working on goals that align with their current learning needs.

Love Maths also offer workshops on a wide range of other topics including Place Value, Addition & Subtraction, Multiplicative Thinking, Fractions/Decimals & Percentages, Statistics & Probability and Measurement. We can tailor a professional development program to suit the needs of your school. For more information, please contact us.