A Briefer on BANSHO and LAST DAY for the LTO Roster questionnaire for the upcoming school year

What is Bansho?
Bansho is an effective, research-informed strategy used to enhance both student and teacher learning of mathematics.  By incorporating bansho into collaborative co-planning and co-teaching sessions, teachers, working as partners or in groups, can effectively learn about mathematics for teaching.  When these sessions occur within communities of practice that meet regularly over time, learning for both teachers and students is significantly enhanced (Kubot-Zarivnij, Fleming 2011). 
Bansho captures the development of students' individual and collective thinking.  The strategy allows students to:

• solve problems in ways that make sense to them
• build understanding of tools, strategies and concepts by listening to, discussing and reflecting on their peers' solutions
• build understanding of concepts through explicit connection-making facilitated by the teacher's board writing

Bansho's origins come from Japanese Mathematics Lessons where Japanese Teachers refer to the use and organization of the chalkboard as "bansho" or board writing.  For bansho, students' solutions and strategies are recorded on a large-size chalkboard, SMARTboard or dry-erase board using  mathematical expressions - numbers, letters and mathematical symbols, figures, graphs, algorithms and labelled diagrams (Shimizu, 2007; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999; Takahashi, 2006; Yoshida, 2002).  Japanese Teachers refrain from erasing what they have written on the board because they have strategically selected and recorded mathematical details and annotations that capture the mathematical thinking of the students for the bansho.
Kathy Kubota-Zarivnij (2011) has interpreted and adapted Japanese bansho so that it complements the Ontario curriculum's emphasis on teaching and learning mathematics through problem solving and supports the current exploration of collaborative approaches to knowledge building in the classroom.  She explains that bansho is:

• a mathematics instructional strategy that makes explicit students' mathematical thinking and provokes students' collective knowledge production through strategically coordinated discussion, organization and mathematical annotation of students' solutions to a lesson problem
• an assessment for (and as) learning strategy that enables the teacher and students to discern the range and relationships between mathematical ideas, strategies and models of representation
• a classroom artifact that is constructed collectively by the teacher and students in order to display the mathematical relationships derived from students' solutions; it can be organized and used as a mathematics learning landscape or as a mathematics anchor chart
• a job-embedded professional learning strategy that develops the teacher's knowledge of mathematics for teaching through the anticipation and construction of a bansho that depicts the breadth, depth and complexity of mathematics elicited throughout a three-part problem-solving lesson.  

Taken from the Special Edition #17 of "Capacity Building Series" by The Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat.  The series is posted at www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/

Deadline February 28th -
On another note, today is the last day to complete and submit the questionnaire for all those interested in an LTO for next year!  Please check the Occasional Teachers Folder through First Class for important information regarding a questionnaire you must complete for the LTO Roster.  Look for the "red button" on the Employee Portal. February 28th is the LAST day it will be available to you.