By Jisoo Seo
We are delighted to share that the Robertson Program for Inquiry-based Teaching in Mathematics and Science (OISE/University of Toronto) was featured in California-based news website KQED’s education blog MindShift! Author Katrina Schwartz spoke to Joan Moss and Zack Hawes about the importance of approaching mathematics with a spatial reasoning focus.
The article also features our partners in the Rainy River District School Board. Nicole Thomson and Cristol Bailey speak about how the collaboration with the Robertson Team has transformed their entire mathematics curriculum to be seen through a spatial and geometry lens. As a result, math has become more accessible and students, “had such a high degree of success with these activities and showed strengths that more standardized number sense lesson plans would never have brought out,” Cristol says in the article.
For Nicole, redefining math was one of the greatest transformations she had seen after being a part of the Robertson Program’s M4YC-Northwest project.
“We started making sure we labelled [spatial reasoning activities] as math,” Nicole says in the article. By viewing math from this new perspective, students enjoyed math time, often choosing to play with math materials during free time.
