Hello all,
My name is Amanda Younger, I’m a grade 4 teacher in Langley, British Columbia. I’m currently on maternity leave with my first child, a wonderful little boy. I completed my bachelor’s degree in geography and geographic information systems at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in 2014 and my Bachelor of Education with a focus on personalized learning and technology at the University of British Columbia in 2015. Since then, I have been teaching in the Langley school district and have taught grade 1-6 in a variety of term positions before settling at my current school and teaching grade 4 for the last 5 years. In my classroom I am passionate about creating opportunities for students to think deeply and critically being the primary thinkers in our community, I set up opportunities for students to think through rich tasks, engaging questions, problem-based learning opportunities and inquiry units. I have been using the Building Thinking Classrooms approach across all subjects for the past two school years to create a vibrant, curious, thoughtful and engaged learning community.
I began my journey to this course in the winter of 2021 when I started my Post Graduate Certificate in Mathematics education through Queens. After completing that I began my Post Graduate certificate in the Classroom Specialist focus completing that in March of 2023. I am currently working on my Professional Masters in Education as a Classroom Specialist. I was drawn to this course as I feel my assessment skills and strategies do not match the ways I am teaching in my classroom or the way instruction is moving in BC. I am also hoping to use the ideas in this course to frame my idea for a capstone project, creating a number sense specific assessment to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses when working towards fluent use of numbers and deep understanding of numbers. The assessments currently avails to me from my district and neighbouring districts target mathematics generally or operations, we do not currently have a tool for assessing solely number sense beyond what we create as individuals for our classrooms, I would like to see a comprehensive tool that like reading assessments can guide our instruction with individuals or small groups as well as being used to look at trends within a class, grade group or school.
I couldn’t choose between the two images above, for me they both convey the same feeling as a teacher when assessing student work weather as a summative piece, practice or formative assessments I need students to show their work to understand their thinking. Students writing answers in full sentences is as much showing their work as writing out all of their steps in math. Students need to represent their thinking clearly so that we can understand their thought process and help them build different thinking skills.
I’m looking forward to learning with all of you this term,
Amanda
