Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Element One Chan Artifact
Element One Chan Artifact
Positionality
Alex Chan
Department of Education, Vancouver Island University
MEDL 680
Dr. Paige Fisher and Dr. Leah Taylor
September 28, 2021
POSITIONALITY 2
Positionality
All students deserve the opportunity to believe they can do anything. When students can learn
all subjects, in particular math, to a level of capacity that gives them the belief that they can continue to
explore the subject on their own, it keeps their options open for them to find a career they can be proud
to have.
I grew up and went to school in Richmond, BC. I would classify my student experience as
traditional. My elementary school was designed to have pods. Each pod had 3 or 4 classrooms. Aside
from kindergarten, I remember always sitting in rows. In high school it was much of the same. I have a
better memory of high school and the only classes that I didn’t sit in rows was PE. School was fine for
me. Other than math, I was a B student who didn’t feel that putting the extra effort was worth it to get
that A. Math came naturally to me and I did not have to work hard to earn an A in those classes. I often
knew the grade I would earn on a math test before it was returned to me, marked. Overall, I valued
learning for myself, not the grade the teacher gave me. After graduating high school, I attended BCIT
where we also sat in rows during lectures. I also graduated from SFU where we sat in rows too. At UBC
where I earned my Bachelor of Education, we had a few classes where we sat in groups. However, our
teachers still taught to us at the front of the classroom. My whole educational experience up until this
point was basically learning traditionally.
Two years after I started teaching, I got my first continuing contract and my own classroom. The
first thing I did was put my desks into rows so I could teach to the class. I was a traditional teacher, who
didn’t experience any other way to teach. Eventually I arranged the desks into groups with the intent
that students would work with each other more. However, I was still teaching to the class traditionally.
As a new teacher I remember focusing my time with the students that had lower grades. This
made me concerned that I was not challenging the students who were middle or high achieving. I
believe that all students should feel challenged regardless of their abilities and I gave little time to those
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students. Trying to address this issue I felt as if I was pulled in too many directions, and I was not able to
fully help any students. I knew of problem‐based learning and went to a few professional development
sessions on this, but I never saw the connection to senior math classes.
The first year (September 2020) of my Master of Education in Educational Leadership (MEDL)
was a transformational experience. One of the principles of Adrienne Maree Brown’s (2017) Emergent
Strategy is “Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy)” (p. 42). My teachers
trusted me. They believed that by the end of the year I would learn the things that I needed to learn.
Their Instructions were open to interpretation (which made entry into the learning accessible at many
levels) and they supported my learning as the year progressed. They believed in me. I continue to
remind myself that they trust that I will do the necessary work, and this allowed me to learn to believe
in myself.
I also did an inquiry using Dr. Peter Liljedahl’s book Building Thinking Classrooms (2020) as a
guide to transform my asynchronous online Workplace 11 Math classroom. Dr. Liljedahl was also my
mentor for this process. His book was written for the brick‐and‐mortar classroom, so I adopted some of
the ideas for my context. As part of the inquiry, I asked my students to do a voluntary anonymous survey
to determine how they feel about math now. The results were inspiring! One student started thinking
about math problems while they puttered around the house. Another student, who was already
confident in math felt they understand math at a higher level than before. There was another student
who went from disliking math to feeling like they have loved math their whole life, and yet another,
whose tutor told them they can’t help them with this type of math, is now a top student in their college
math course. I learned from this experience that with the right approaches, I could be a teacher who
truly believes and trusts students. As a result of my transformation, I see students putting more effort
into their own learning. I see that my belief and trust in my students are translating into the students
believing and trusting themselves.
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Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) offers teachers a framework that helps students believe in
themselves by teaching them how to problem solve. Liljedahl (2020) defines problem solving as:
what we do when we don’t know what to do. That is, problem solving is not the precise
application of a known procedure. It is not the implementation of a taught algorithm. And it is
not the smooth execution of a formula. Problem solving is a messy, non‐linear, and idiosyncratic
process. Students will get stuck. They will think. They will get unstuck. And when they do, they
will learn – they will learn about mathematics, they will learn about themselves, and they will
learn how to think. (pp. 19‐20)
In this framework, we teach students how to problem solve by giving them thinking tasks. According to
Liljedahl, thinking tasks are problems that are so engaging and so interesting that people cannot resist
thinking (p. 21).
BTC (2020) was written for the physical classroom setting so, with the mentorship of Dr.
Liljedahl, I used the chapters that would more closely relate to my setting, the online asynchronous
classroom. First, I started by introducing the concept of the thinking task by asking students to create a
vertical non‐permanent workspace (VNPS) to do thinking tasks and by giving them three, non‐curricular
thinking tasks to try. Second, I added curricular thinking tasks and reduced the number of questions in
the traditional assignment and the way it is assessed. Third, I changed the way notes were taken. Finally,
I added a new assignment to evaluate the curricular competencies.
Liljedahl (2020) researched 5 different workspaces—students standing at vertical whiteboards
(VNPS), sitting at horizontal whiteboards, standing at flipchart paper mounted on the wall, sitting at
flipchart paper on a table, and sitting with their notebooks. Researched showed that using VNPS
produced better results in almost all variables tested: time to task, time to first notation, time on task,
eagerness to start, amount of discussion, amount of participating, amount of persistence, amount of
knowledge mobility, and non‐linearity of work (pp. 59‐60). I also think asking students to create a VNPS
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disrupted the norms of my online asynchronous classroom. This significant change subconsciously
changes the student expectations that my class is not the typical online asynchronous environment.
According to Liljedahl, students exposed to these sorts of tasks will soon expect and experience that this
is a space for thinking, collaborating, and risk taking (p. 73). Starting with non‐curricular tasks primes
students to be able to think about curriculum thinking tasks (p. 30). Initial results from my student
survey in 2021 and student forum responses suggest that students are thinking more deeply,
collaborating with each other, and risk taking.
Because I was adding thinking tasks to the course, I felt that I should reduce the work in other
areas. It seemed natural to reduce the number of questions on the chapter assignments since the
thinking tasks addressed some of the same curricular content (and competencies). Thinking also needed
to be embedded in the class and not only required for thinking tasks. To achieve this, students marked
their own assignments using what I called the Level of Understanding Table. Following the advice of
Liljedahl (2020), my students marked according to an answer key that indicated if they solved the
problem correctly and independently, correctly and independently but with a silly mistake, correctly
with help from a teacher or learning partner, correctly and collaboratively with a group, attempted but
incorrect, and not attempted (p.240).
The previous way of note taking instructed students to download the printable notes that
followed the lessons. There was space for writing definitions, doing examples alongside the video
lessons, and doing practice problems. The practice problems also contain worked out solutions. To
emphasize thinking when taking notes, my students now take notes for things that they find are
interesting and important, cannot find elsewhere easily, and things they think they will forget (Liljedahl,
2020, p. 193). I also provide an optional graphic organizer to prevent students being paralyzed by the
possibility of choice (Liljedahl, 2020, p. 198). Liljedahl (2020) suggests, rebranding the practice questions
to check your understanding questions. Along with this rebrand, I also emphasized to my students that
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they have full autonomy on which (if any) questions they choose to do by giving them a completion
grade when they submitted their notes and check your understanding questions to me. This change in
name and teacher action showed who the questions were for—the student—and what it was for—to
check understanding (p.125). The work students are doing with these questions are for them, not for me
(the teacher).
To assess the thinking students are doing, I added a living document for students to provide
evidence of their use of the curricular competencies. Students would provide up to three pieces of
evidence for each of the eight curricular competencies they choose. This assessment piece was
suggested to me by Dr. Liljedahl during one of our mentorship conversations.
The idea of thinking tasks is not new. These problems typically have low‐floor: meaning that
they allow for all learners to find a point of entry, and high‐ceiling: has room for extensions so students
can remain challenged as they discover more, or open‐middle: the problem has a single final answer but
has multiple possible correct ways to approach and solve the problem (Liljedahl, 2021, p. 23). Some of
the main contributors of this method of problem solving are Jo Boaler, Robert Kaplisky, and Marion
Small. However, they do not provide the additional framework that Dr. Liljedahl presents.
Many of my students have low math self‐efficacy and some level of math anxiety. Richardson
(1972) defines math anxiety as the feelings of tension and anxiety that interfere with the manipulation
of numbers and the solving of math problems in ordinary life and academic situations. According to
Richardson, among non‐students, math anxiety may contribute to tensions during everyday activities,
such as handling money, balancing bank accounts, evaluating sale prices, or dividing workloads (p. 551).
Dowker (2016) concludes from studies between 1972 and 2014 that math anxiety is a significant
problem (p. 3). In general, math anxiety increases with age during childhood. However, this also may be
related to the fact that general anxiety also increases with age. Other factors relating to math anxiety
are the exposure to other people’s negative attitudes to math which include social stereotypes, threat
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of failure, and changes to the content (Dowker, p. 8‐9). According to Dowker, studies have shown that
parents and teachers should model positive attitudes towards math and avoid showing negative
attitudes towards math to children. This is difficult if the parents and teachers already have high math
anxiety (p. 10). If there are strategies that improve math self‐efficacy and prevent math‐anxiety at an
early age the impact of these later in students’ lives may allow students to thrive in math situations.
I am an online teacher at EBUS Academy, in School District 91. I currently teach Workplace Math
10 and 11, Foundations of Math 11, and Calculus 12. In addition, I teach Entrepreneurship 12 at our local
brick‐and‐mortar high school. I also share Math and Science department head duties with Tyler Clark
and I am on Joint Occupational Health and Safety Committee for our school. My Workplace Math 11
course currently uses a Building Thinking Classrooms framework, and I am in the middle of transforming
my Workplace Math 10 course to a BTC framework.
This year I am leading a PLC group on BTC with the support of our District Numeracy Lead,
Roberta Toth. Dr. Liljedahl is working with our district this year (2021/2022) and has already facilitated
three of five sessions. Some of the teachers who are participating in this have expressed interest to
meet between sessions for additional support. I also wanted to support district teachers who were
willing to implement the BTC framework into their own classes. We will be meeting in January where I
hope to get more detail on the type of support each teacher wants. I also plan to ask them to complete
a survey to gain a sense of their perceptions and abilities in math. I am also co‐leading, with Tyler Clark,
a book club at EBUS Academy with Dr. Peter Liljedahl’s supplement book, Modifying Your Thinking
Classroom for Different Settings (MTC). We planned last year to use Robert Kaplinsky’s book, Open
Middle Math (2019) However, we had teachers who were not in our book club last year interested in
BTC and with Dr. Liljedahl’s new book, MTC, having applications specific to online teaching, it seemed
natural to continue with BTC and MTC. I also plan to present BTC at the Distributed Learning Symposium
in April 2022 with the current working title Becoming a More Confident Math Teacher (K‐9). I hope to be
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more of a coach/mentor (than a top‐down leader) in these roles hoping that my colleagues direct their
own learning.
My exploration and learning last year revealed that my belief and trust in students transferred
to the student and they began to believe and trust in themselves. The results of this are that my
students are not anxious in math the way they used to be, and they view math through a positive lens
which removes the barrier that math can be in life. This led me to wonder, if I can affect a
transformation in students, can I do the same for teachers? What would happen if I believed and trusted
other teachers of math? Shaeffer (2020) investigated the relationship between teacher’s math anxiety
and student’ math learning over the course of grade 1, she indicated that higher teacher math anxiety
was associated with lower student achievement. My pedagogical shift only affects the students in my
classes. By expanding my influence to include teachers, I can affect more student perspectives and
abilities in math. I wonder, if the Building Thinking Classrooms framework can shift negative
perspectives and abilities students have towards math, can it do the same for teachers who practice
using this framework? Moving forward, my question to guide my research is: What strategies including
the BTC framework will shift negative perspectives and abilities teachers have towards math? My
guiding question to improve my leadership is: What can I learn about myself as an educator and as a
leader by working to support other educators who are implementing the BTC framework in their own
classes?
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References
Brown, A. M. (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press.
Dowker, A., Sarkar, A., Looi, C. Y. (2016). Mathematics anxiety: What have we learned in 60 years.
Frontiers in psychology. 7(508). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00508
Kaplinsky, R. (2019). Open Middle Math. Stenhouse Publishers.
Liljedahl, P. (2020). Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. Corwin.
Liljedahl, P. (2021). Modifying Your Thinking Classroom for Different Settings. Corwin.
Richardson, F. C., Suinn R. M. (1972). The mathematics anxiety rating scale: Psychometric Data. Journal
of Counseling Psychology. 19(6), 551‐554. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.viu.ca/10.1037/h0033456
Shaeffer, M. W., Rozek, C. S., Maloney, E. A., Berkowitz, T., Levine, S. C., Beilock, S. L. (2021).
Elementary school teachers’ math anxiety and students’ math learning: A large‐scale replication.
Developmental Science, 24(4), 1‐6. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13080