QSLMA mini conference 2025

I was thankful to have had the invitation to present at the QSLMA mini conference this year. My presentation was about Creating Brave Spaces in your Math Classroom (slides here).

We talked about how we start our term at KSS focusing on establishing norms, and encouraging participation, including lots of examples of noticing and wondering, and using various low floor high ceiling thinking routines and tasks, like which one doesnt belong, slow reveal graphs, dot talks, 3 act tasks and more. (The slides have more information and links to these sites).

The most fun part for me was when we did a cup stacking task. The challenge was the same as I had brought to my classes this week: to build a stack of cups as tall as me.

We had a few ways to do it. It was neat to see the variety of strategies. The triangle stack extension idea had people working in different ways again. This group made a flat triangle, so each row was one less cup than the row below.

This group decided to try something I’d never tried: a triangle based pyramid of cups. (They had really wanted to have unicorn emoji faces, but my options were limited!)

We worked on modelling the growth for this stack, and based on 3rd differences being the same, we think it is cubic. We start with 1 cup, then add successive triangle numbers as each row is added. We know that triangle numbers are a quadratic pattern, so it makes sense that it is cubic. Desmos can be used to do the regression for us.

Thank you to the enthusiastic participants for the session. It was great to have so many teacher candidates in the room.