This full-day conference aims to bring together a community of educators who are interested in enacting a mathematics curriculum that can challenge and delight students. The conference will feature sample activities, teacher-led lightning talks, a rethinking of curriculum objectives, and much discussion.

Basically we are interested in starting to build a community of teachers committed to the development and support of new kinds of problems and activities featuring:

• Dynamic structures
• Animation
• Beauty
• Doing and creating, design and construction
• Capacity to stretch the student
• Experiential, hands on
• Invitation to play
• Working together, classroom community

Considerable research has shown that working in the classroom with activities of this kind can lead to a richer more authentic mathematics curriculum for students and teachers. But the research also identifies a number of challenges faced by a curriculum shift of this nature. These include time constraints, access to rich tasks, unfamiliar teaching practices, and resistance to change by colleagues, students, or the teachers themselves. There are several ways that teachers can be supported in the use of such rich tasks. These include the teachers themselves having experiences of engaging in problem solving, seeing the connections of using rich tasks with the curriculum, as well as having opportunities to collaborate with colleagues as they wrestle with new approaches to pedagogy and other challenges they face.

Our purpose in this workshop is to reignite the process of community building. Teachers will be encouraged to share examples of such problems and engage in discussions on how these problems can contribute to the evolution of the curriculum.

This event is made possible by the Fields Institute and the Centre for Digital Innovation in Education at the Frazer Faculty of Education at Ontario Tech University. Thanks to their generous support, we are able to offer free registration, as well as a limited number of travel grants. 

To present a lightning talk, or to be considered for a travel grant, please register by Tuesday May 20, 2025. Of course the earlier you register the better your chances.

Register here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfrTsYhsXTGJBteCiIHVH5kXNFdT48eUEbAxbN4bYdTl6XtDA/viewform

For more information          

Peter Taylor peter.taylor@queensu.ca

Ami Mamolo ami.mamolo@ontariotechu,ca

Tentative Schedule (10 - 2:30pm)