 So everyone, thanks for coming today to join us in this live webinar, Grow Your Math Mindset with CESAW. This session is specifically focused for those of you working with upper elementary and middle school students. It's gonna be amazing, I'm Angela, I work full time with CESAW on the community team, supporting teachers all over the world using CESAW. So we are so excited that you are here spending time with us, or maybe checking out a recording via YouTube, which we always encourage that as well, because we know you're busy. One of my amazing teacher friends, Kara Bram, is here today with us, and I'm actually going to switch her over to presenter, and she is actually going to be hosting us here today. She is, as you can see here on the screen, a seventh grade math teacher, and she is really great at using all sorts of CESAW activities with her students to really get their mindset strong in math. So we are so excited to have her. And just a note before I jump into questions to answer any questions you have throughout the session, you will get the slides in this recording sent to you because you registered for the webinar. So Kara, take it away. All right, hello everyone. I'm so excited to be here this evening with you and going to be sharing a little bit of how you can grow your math mindset with CESAW. Our focus will be on upper elementary and middle school age students. However, I'm sure you can make it apply to any age that you might teach and make it work for your students. My name is Kara Bram. I am a current seventh grade math teacher, but also know that I taught third, fourth and fifth grade in the elementary setting for 19 years. I'm coming to you today from Kerry, North Carolina, right outside of our state capital, Raleigh. And if you are interested in following me on Twitter or connecting with me, you can find me at Mrs. Bram tweets. You can also find me on Instagram at Mrs. Bram math. So as a math teacher and an elementary teacher, who of course taught, do you know elementary teachers can do it all? I taught it all. I did focus on math as well. And one of the things that I always wanted to do with my students was start off the year, whether that's a brand new year or a brand new school year with a very positive mindset and focusing specifically on a math mindset. Having that flow throughout your classroom all year long is so important and keeping it positive so that there's no more of this, I'm not a math student. I don't do math and I know you hear adults say that and then children hear that and internalize that. So we wanna just give everyone that positive start to the school year. One of the things that I've been doing this school year is really focusing on that positive math mindset using CSAW and we use it almost every Monday with a celebrate Monday activity. So celebrate Monday as a hashtag on Twitter by started by a North Carolina principal. And he's amazing if you don't follow him already but I've created a variety of different positive thinking CSAW activities whether it's setting amazing goals, celebrating success or looking at every week as a new opportunity for a positive start in math class. So I'll share one of the activities that's available in the CSAW library for you. It's just a very simple one. We're gonna celebrate one thing that students are looking forward to in my class this week. So one math thing, how students like to use that word thing that they would be looking forward to. And with my students when they're doing this it's interesting to hear their thing and what they would do. It's interesting to see goals that they set for themselves. I think it's very powerful for them to look every week and think about something that they can make go better for themselves. And I'm gonna share this activity too here, this second student example, excuse me. This is where we were looking at how success is like an iceberg. And this student was sharing how their success is like an iceberg in math because people don't always see all of the effort that goes into their test grades or even their overall grades. They don't see the effort, the practice, the time, the determination, the hard work. And that's not something that I told them to do. It was pretty amazing, but that was one of our celebrate Monday activities that we did. And I thought just that very simple sentence and those keywords really hit home and was just so strong and powerful. I have my class set up, my CSOL class set up so students can see each other's work. So when they're posting, they're able to also, once I approve it, see their fellow students' ideas and their goals. I have for you in these slides, which like Angela mentioned, you'll get all of the links to the activities that I have. Some I'm sharing, I'm not sharing every single one, but every link, every picture, every student example, you'll be able to access and see. But I did wanna point out up at the top, here's the celebrate Monday link and this would take you to a bunch of activities that I have that are just focused on matching that hashtag, celebrate Monday. And I'll share a couple of the other ones with you today. You can see here is that Iceberg, one of those great Sylvia Duckworth sketches. But students can be so inspired by each other and inspired by the things that you share with them and present to them as well. So we're gonna be keeping it positive. A second thing that I've been focusing on is a very small but powerful word and that word is yet. So giving your students the power of yet. Let me share this activity with you here. So it's very simple. And I actually found the template with someone else's seesaw activity from the library and then kinda tweaked it a little bit to make it my own. If you don't know already any of the seesaw activities, you can save and then you can use them as they are or edit them for your own classroom. But so with this activity, they were just telling me something they cannot yet do. And then going on to tell me a little bit of something, but if I did this, I would certainly be able to. So I wanna share with you a student example of this. This student and all of my students, I asked them to share their thoughts about this when we were doing a proportions relationship in my seventh grade math class. And even just hearing their voice is so powerful. If I try my very best in practice solving it, then I will be able to do it. So just, whoops, sorry about that. Just hearing his voice say it and having him hear it, I think that alone allows students to feel more confident that they're able to do it and that they will get it and it might not happen right away and that it's okay if students don't understand the concept, a topic on the very first day it was introduced or in the first day or two it was introduced. And so many students believe that, oh, I should have already known that or why didn't I get that the first time? So practicing the power of yet is a very strong thing to do in your classroom with building that positive mindset. It's something that you could complete multiple times throughout the year, multiple times throughout a grading period or even with the beginning of a unit or the end of the unit and celebrating that it's okay to not quite grasp everything just yet, but with effort, with hard work, with determination, with extra practice, with help from the teacher, whatever it might be, they will be able to do it eventually. And just so you know when you're building the CESA activities, you might wanna know how do I get those little icons in there? I did provide access to a CESA page that does share with you how to put the icons in there and the special code writing that you need to do. It's nothing too fancy, everything you can completely handle, but it will get those little icons into your CESA activities. So a lot of teachers ask about that and just wanted to make sure you had that available to you. Something else that I feel is so strong in math class and really allows for positive thinking towards math is building relationships. And I know that you hear that often from your administration or other teachers, from other venues, but building relationships really does matter. And this is one activity, it's called Two Stars and a Wish. And this activity, I've done Two Stars and a Wish in a different way, but I came across it again and I thought, this is something we can do in math. We can tell two things, two shining moments or two stars that make you feel proud about your math abilities. These are two things I do so well. And then you can also have students tell you one thing that they wish that you knew about them. So as a student, one thing that you wish your teacher knew about you as a math student. And it was very just, I don't know, it hit me emotionally when I was reading these because students don't often walk up to you and say, hey, you know, if you knew this about me and math, you'd get me a little bit more, but they were able to type it out, to record it, to sketch it. So I think this student example, it kind of gave me a little bit of insight into this student. She was saying that her first shining moment was when she got a great grade on her assessment, of course, students like that, right? And another one was a moment in math when they were doing classwork with partners. And I think she was really shining and showing off what she knew. But the Wish, I wish Mrs. Brum knew that I liked answering questions and taking challenges in class. And I know you don't know my student that I'm sharing with you right now, but this is a student that doesn't participate very often, that when I see her hand up, I am jumping on the chance to make sure that I hear her voice in the room. And so just seeing that allowed for such great insight as to what type of student she wants me to see her as, even though I might not regularly see that in the classroom. I think, you know, building these relationships allows you also to, as their teacher, to get students to really believe in themselves and to show them that you believe in their abilities too. And I do have some other building relationships activities in here and student examples for you as well. So again, when you get the slides, you can certainly go into them and click on these links and use them as your own. All right, so this is a fun activity that you really learn also about students and where they're coming from. And I typically do this activity at the beginning of a school year, but you could do it anytime throughout the year as well. It does help build positive relationships between your students. It gets everybody to kind of know each other a little bit more, but it also gets them whether you want them to or not to learn a little bit about math signs and symbols that they may know or may not know, or maybe they've seen, but they weren't sure what it meant. And so it kind of allows you to share a little bit with them. And I always share my own with the students as well. So the activity is sharing a sign or symbol from math that really represents you and who you are. So with this one, I'll share a student example here. With the first example that I'm gonna share, this student is sharing the multiplication symbol. The multiplication symbol because it makes a number and makes it greater than before. And I think that I do that with my friends and I try to bring up the best in them. So I thought that was something I wouldn't know just having a regular conversation with a student. And here's just another quick example. I not only represents addition, but also represents a positive number. And because I have a positive attitude, I think a plus sign fits me the most. There you go. It was also kind of neat for me to go back and revisit these after knowing my students for a while. And it was, I love hearing them of course, but now that I know them, I can really see this even more and how much they really do know themselves. And you might not get to see that side of them or to hear that part from them personally. But through CSAU and the power of CSAU, we were certainly able to do that in our classroom with each other. Okay, so this is a favorite website of mine. It's called which one doesn't belong. And this website is actually stemmed from a book. I do have a link for the site there if you click on the picture of which one doesn't belong in the upper left-hand corner that black and blue and purple picture. But it stemmed from a book and then it kind of exploded through social media and they created their own website. The idea of which one doesn't belong if you are not familiar with it is that math doesn't always have to have one correct answer. Now I know that that's mind blowing for some people because they think, well, math, there's a right and a wrong, a yes and a no, a black and a white. But there's not always one correct answer. So I love these activities. I created a bunch. I have over 30 which one doesn't belong CESAW activities, but that doesn't even make a little dent in how many which one doesn't belong activities are on their website or that could even possibly exist out there. The link that I have here for you will take you directly to my CESAW activity library. And you can certainly sift through here for all of my activities, but you'll find within these a ton of which one doesn't belong. And the way the website is organized, if you go there, you'll see that there are graph activities. So maybe a little higher level. You'll see that there are number activities and again, varying levels. There are shape activities. There are all different kinds that you can have your students work on four different grade levels. So I think this is really one that you can take no matter what you teach even if you taught first grade, even if you taught 12th grade and make it work for your students. So what you're doing is you're having the students within all of this, you're having the students look at the activity and then be able to tell as many different ways or justifications or arguments to support the reasoning of which one of the four does not belong. But again, it's about justifications. It's about arguments. It's about that math talk. It's about having support and not only having one correct answer if you can justify and show and prove. So if I'm gonna show you one of the student examples, I do have a couple here for you to check out on your own as well. This is a which one doesn't belong with shapes. Very basic. You could do this with a third grade class. You could do this with a seventh grade class, a 10th grade class. And you could have your reasons. This student used the label tool in order to give justification as to why every single one of those shapes has a reason that it doesn't belong with the others. So whether it's a circle or it's shaded in or it's not shaded in, having that reason to justify telling by either typing it out. I have students that record through video. I have students that share the picture and write on it. So it doesn't really matter in my opinion how they share as long as they share with their justification to support their reasoning and support their answer. So it's perfect for that differentiation because I can have students that are working in a seventh grade level and I can have in that same class students that are really on a ninth grade level but in a seventh grade course and students that are on a fourth grade level and in a seventh grade course. So you can get everyone's ideas. And I also use this at the beginning of the school year to kind of engage the parents at our parent open house night. I had one of these up on my board when the parents came in. And then I gave them time to think about it and asked them what they thought. And I would say, okay, well, which one of you thinks that nine doesn't belong and 16 and so on and so forth. And it was interesting that they were stuck with there only has to be one correct answer. So getting that discourse out about support and justification and math talk and that was really powerful for them to see. All right, so we wanna keep math and what we share with them simple but effective. And I also have some additional ways that you can engage students in math while allowing for their voice and choice as well. While allowing for keeping the fun in math and the excitement in math. And of course, one of the most important things for you is making it fit all of your math standards. So if you've not used math tic-tac-toe boards before what we have here are a variety. You can click on these, make a copy of them and edit them to fit your units of study, to fit your math standards for your grade level. The examples that you see here are from seventh grade but we'll say that they are very easy to change the topic and very easy to change what's in there. For example, instead of writing a story that included absolute value, you can just remove the absolute value signs and write a story that would talk about how this number sentence would be appropriate for a third grader. So very easy to tweak and change and make it fun and have every single example that students make to support their tic-tac-toe board posted on CISA. Another example would be real world relationships. So whether that's hunting around the room, discovering from something that you bring into the classroom, whatever your topic is, look for it, find it, snap a picture of it and tell why it relates. A super quick student example from my fourth grade classroom is when we were starting off with patterns and I said, all right, here you go, we're gonna share in CISA, I want you and your partner go around the room, find a pattern, capture it and tell me why it's a pattern. It says it's blue, white, red, yellow, green. Then it's blue, white, red, yellow, green again. Okay, 11 seconds, they knew what patterns were, very basic, but they knew that before we started talking about more complex patterns. So you can use CISA to find these math relationships in the real world, in your classroom, you don't even have to leave your room. And in less than 30 seconds, without dragging a piece of paper home and stacks of paper staying after school for hours, you can know that they have an understanding of that concept. All right, so another quick one is creating your own amusement park ride. And this is really fun for any grade level that studies geometry, angles. This was a fourth grade project that I did, but we are currently also doing angles in seventh grade. So we all know it's spirals, right? But it was pretty exciting and you can take a look at both the activity on the left and change it and make it be your own because it is a Google Doc and you can see a student example of the actual amusement park ride that they created and their questions and you can see their angles embedded in it as well. And this is my favorite. So I didn't wanna to go and leave without sharing this super versatile, super easy, explain your thinking. It does not matter what your grade level is, even what subject we're focusing on, what topic in math or any other subject that you teach. Justify, support, show me what's going on. You choose how you're gonna do it, but through math talk, tell me how you solved that problem. Tell me what you did, explain it, show it. And I wanted to show you a quick example here from my class. This is from a seventh grade class and we were doing equations. So they're just explaining how they would solve the equation. Today we are doing two times the quantity of X plus two equals 164. First we have to distribute two. So we're gonna do two times X that equals two X and then we do two times two that equals four and that. Now I'm gonna pause it here for time. You can see he took two minutes to solve this problem but not only solve this problem, check this problem. Just by watching him solve this problem and others that he's done, I'm able to really to hear him use the math vocabulary we used in class. I'm able to see if he's on it and able to distribute and to check his work, which he does. So all of that I can see and I can grab assessment grades from that without a piece of paper. So powerful, so strong and really supports what's going on in the classroom. Everything that I've shared with you today, all the links again will be available to you when you receive the slides and you can see the student examples. You can look at the activities that are there for you. So whether you click on the underline link or some of the pictures, all of that you can use with your students tomorrow if you want. You can edit and use them another time and you can look back even in my CESA activity library and you're welcome to anything that's in there as well. If you haven't already connected with CESA on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, please do. There's so many amazing ideas out there that other teachers have. If you'd like to connect with me, my information for Twitter and Instagram is on here as well. And I believe, Angela, we do have a few minutes for some questions. We do. We do. A couple of things I'm just gonna share too, because I know we have a variety of teachers working with various ages here. If you wanna just pop into your, I don't know if you have CESA open in your browser or not, Kara. But I can get it open. No, it's totally fine. Don't worry about it. But one of the things I just wanna mention is obviously Kara went through various examples that work awesome in her seventh grade class that can be easily modified for your students. But I would also encourage you to just peek inside the activity library. There are tons of activities already ready with lots of math concepts, a lot of focus on building that mindset as well that you'll find at all different grade levels. So no matter what age you're working with, you're gonna find something that will help support your students. So we have a couple of questions that we're gonna get through here in just a few minutes. One is coming from Toby who teaches year three and he's asking specifically, how do you actually get the students to build to get to the point that they're actually kind of coherently making, being able to reflect and justify their work? I know from the kindergarten lens, which I have is number one, giving them the opportunity, which CESA allows that. But what tips do you have, Kara? Because I noticed that with my kindergartners, they never really had had the consistent opportunity to do so. So what advice would you give there? I would say, to just give them the time, don't expect the first time that you give them an opportunity to share that they are just gonna wow you over with amazing, fabulous everything you ever dreamed of and more answers. But I think one of the things is, I'm gonna go back here a slide to this one. I include, sometimes I include, if you wanna call them exemplars or examples, sometimes there's students explanations from previous years, for example, or even my own to show this is what I'm maybe not expecting cause you don't always wanna tell them that, but for explaining thinking, this is how I explain my thinking and this is what I'd like to see. Your problem won't be my problem. I want you to make it your own, do it however you like, but that's one way to start modeling for them. Another thing that I also do is, I don't always tell them, but I will select a few examples and pull up CESA on my screen in my classroom and share with them. Oh, let's take a look at Angela's. I really liked how she and, you know, and then just kind of model that every now and again. I wouldn't spend like a whole day doing all that, you know, just spot check here and there. Wow, I really like this. Let me just share this with everyone. Anything other thing that's helpful too in this context, especially with younger students that are just getting started with the opportunity to actually reflect consistently is sometimes using kind of a sentence starter, like very young students saying, I figured out how to what or I can or today I learned that and that kind of gives them a bridge to help, which is exactly, that's a perfect example of that. I'm gonna move on to the next question because I know we are at our time right now and I really respect your time you've already devoted to us. So I wanna kind of buzz through these really quickly here. Diana is asking, you know, you have so many students, especially working, you know, at the middle school or seventh grade level, how do you find time to listen and look at all of these responses? Can you maybe in, you know, 20 seconds care and give us what are your daily habits that make it possible as you're kind of reviewing this work? So a couple of things, one, I have 122 students this year. So when I ask them to post, it does feel a little overwhelming because we're usually doing it within similar timeframes. But I would say, don't feel like you have to tackle all of that immediately. Make sure I have on where I have to approve it before it's posted or shared with parents or anyone else who's connected. So again, don't feel like it has to be done immediately. Let's break it into chunks, take your time. I do it when I'm, you know, at my daughter's gymnastics tonight, I looked at some. So, you know, I just kind of fit it in when I can. If it is something I know I'm grading, then I look at it through a different lens than if it's something that I'm just looking for a reflection and a mindset of activity. Right, and I think another tip too is be thoughtful about what you ask them to do with, you know, video or audio. Pictures are amazing as well and can share tons of information with you. So I think you can also balance kind of the types of posts you're asking students to do. And not all students have to respond the same day at the same time during the same lesson. So, which leads me to my next question. We're only gonna answer two more questions here live. Marjorie is asking, do your students answer your activities in school or at home? My students answer activities typically in school. However, we are a bring your own device school. So that means a lot of students are using CSAW on their own device and we are connected through email or Google logins. So they're able to finish something at home if they started on their own device. But I do not use it specifically for homework. I use it the majority of the time in the classroom. Great, Martha has one last question. I think it's a little bit more about, I think she started off giving them a lot of choices and maybe not saying, oh, answer this one or respond to this activity. And just tips for moving to maybe an activity where all the students are responding. How did you kind of start with that, Kara? I would only give them one activity and at the beginning of the year and I wouldn't give any additional activities until I knew that everyone was done with that successfully. Perfect, yay. Well, we could just hang out for a while here, but I wanna let people move on with other obligations that they have. But Kara, thank you so much for coming and sharing your awesome ideas with us. We hope that everyone will come back and join more of our live webinars. Of course, you can check out our schedule posted at web.csaw.me backslash pds. We also have tons of recordings on YouTube which you might be joining us from right now. So thanks everyone for coming today. Thank you.