Inventure Academy is committed to building critical thinking and making students intrinsically motivated learners with a mindset for change making. In our Math classes, we have explored different ways in which we can build teachers’ mindsets for exploring higher-order thinking skills in our Primary Math classrooms. Helping teachers think beyond just operations and to help them become facilitators of thinking has been part of our learning journey.

We have addressed this through the Math workshop, deconstructing problems as Math teachers and exploring ways in which we can learn as a community of practitioners. Through this journey, we discovered many resources and approaches that helped us identify practices and structures that could help us foster critical thinking in our classrooms. We also used the Design Thinking process to engage with teachers and identify their areas of focus and craft support systems to help them improve their understanding of grade-level content and encouraged them to explore age-appropriate pedagogy.
In this workshop, we would like to share practices that other schools can explore as they build learning communities that can rally towards common goals.

The presentation will focus on the following:

1. Practices that help to build teachers’ skills, capabilities and motivation levels
2. Ways of using design thinking to help teachers change their mindset that Math teaching is not just about formulas and procedures
3. Approaches to building a community of teachers as learners