Fawn Nguyen – Wins over MN Math Teachers
This summer the MN Math Leaders and MN Council of Math Teachers hosted 1 day professional development with Fawn Nguyen. We had a packed house with about 100 teachers and administrators in attendance. If you don’t know anything about Fawn, I highly suggest you head over to her blog http://fawnnguyen.com/ . 
Fawn also keeps up three other sites that may be useful to know about for your classroom practices: visualpatterns.org, Mathtalks.net, and between2numbers.com. Fawn and I have been friends, well, on Twitter, since the 2012 – 2013 school year. What drew me to Fawn was her honesty, passion, humor, and her smarts…yes, don’t ever let Fawn tell you differently, but she is crazy smart!
Our day was filled with learning and thinking critically. Fawn shared with us classroom routines to explore visual patterns, problem solving prompts, and rich tasks. Each of these items had a different routine. Fawn was an expert at helping the group understand how each of these items could be used in our classrooms while still working through a core curriculum and our standards. One intriguing thing that Fawn talked about was exposing students to more non-routine thinking. In Fawn’s classroom she has pieces directly related to her standards and also things that are not related to her standards. This was great food for thought.
The highlight of the day for me was working through a number of rich tasks (tasks related to the standards) and problem solving prompts (questions that prompt deep thinking, creativity, and perseverance – not related to the standards). Fawn kept the audience deeply engaged, and she even gave us homework! Here is one problem that we were charged with going home and solving.
25 Mice
Colin has 25 pet maze-running mice and he would like to determine which ones are his fastest three. Unfortunately, he does not have a timer and he is only able to race 5 of his mice at a time. Can you devise a strategy so that Colin can identify his Gold, Silver, and Bronze level mice? What is the fewest number of races that need to be run?
As participants in the workshop, we had to follow Fawn’s two rules.
The first one was easy, but the second one was very hard – especially when she wouldn’t tell the teachers the answer!
Did you figure out the answer to the 25 mice? Please share and explain your strategy. Or post to twitter and tag @mctm_mn.
Fawn strongly advocates for challenging every kid, every day. In our session she stated, “When we hear, ‘my kids can’t’, how do you know? All kids need to have access to problem solving.” Fawn also holds the highest of expectations for all of her students, she works primarily with 6th – 8th grade students. The only problem solving questions (PS for short) that Fawn gives to her students are those that she herself has struggled with. Not only does this create buy in from the students, but it also sets the stage for students to know that she believes in them and is genuinely interested in helping them learn to think critically.
In the picture she is showing some of her students solutions, which wow’d many teachers in the audience because they were very different from what we had done.
To end the workshop, Fawn spoke about finding time to incorporate math talks, problem solving, and rich tasks. Her number one suggestion was to, “keep the student’s plate FULL.” This means using every day to the fullest, including day #1, half days, and days before or after breaks. 
The structure that Fawn has in her classroom allows students to go back and work on items once they have finished another. Her motto is, “We start together and they finish on their own, honoring the students’ learning pace.” What you see in the diagram to the right is if students finish their textbook assignment they go back and work on their problem solving prompt/rich task/problem of the week. As they finish one of those, they move onto another one.
The day with Fawn was a gift. She inspired, encouraged, and engaged all participants. If you are intrigued, head to her blog and start reading, or reach out to @mctm_mn on twitter or our MCTM Facebook page to post a question or comment. We can continue the conversation!
By Jessica Breur
Social Media Editor