MEE Workshop 1

Standard 7 - Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community.

Standard 7.4.1- Engage with professional teaching networks and broader communities
Understand the role of external professionals and community representatives in broadening teachers’ professional knowledge and practice.

I am currently enrolled in a Mathematical Expertise and Excellence Project known as MEE which is run by Sydney Catholic Schools. Catholic Schools all over Sydney are welcomed to take part in this project. Within this project, there are four workshops we need to undertake in order to become Proficient in MEE. Due to COVID-19, we were only able to attend the first workshop which was primarily focused on Designing Mathematical Tasks focusing on Addition and Subtraction.

I believe this MEE Course is incredibly important, as it broadened my professional knowledge and practice by teaching me to become more confident with the mathematical content and recognise important mathematical ideas. By the end of workshop, we learnt about ‘Launch Tasks’ which are essentially mathematical tasks provided to students with the learning intention and success criteria clearly displayed for the students to see.

This workshop has influenced my professional knowledge in many ways, but particularly through the professional reading in which we were exposed to the two useful frameworks – the Task Analysis Guide and Solo Taxonomy. In addition to this, I now have more in depth knowledge of how to differentiate lessons for students including articulating differentiated success criteria’s and the four lenses of differentiation. We also learnt how to construct and answer a Launch Tasks ourselves, with the assistance of the external professionals and our colleagues.

These Launch Tasks will be implemented in my future teaching, as the external professionals clearly explained the benefits of these tasks through the professional readings and the professional discussions on Launch Tasks.  

By engaging with the professional teaching network of MEE run by Sydney Catholic Schools, having conversations with colleagues from other schools on their mathematical programs, alongside broadening my own mathematical knowledge on Launch Tasks, I believe I am meeting graduate standard 7.4.1 of the AITSL Standards. (303 words)