Kat O’Rourke is doing a series of two free events!
Session 1: Epic Fluency Instruction - Strategy Instruction and Practice
Tuesday 19 August at 7:30pm (AEST)
After Serpentine Primary School shared their fluency program (Maths Ninjas), Kat led the development of this into a targeted 15 minute maths fluency block at her school. She is slowly making all 1700+ resources she developed publicly and freely available. Kat believes all students deserve high quality maths fluency instruction - and all teachers deserve the right to high quality resources to support this.
In Session 1, Kat will demonstrate how she has incorporated her knowledge of fluency research and inspiration from other maths fluency materials to develop sequenced strategy instruction and practice materials. Informed by the Instructional Hierarchy and following the Gradual Release of Responsibility framework weekly, Kat will model how she systematically builds fact fluency across fact sets. She will reflect on what she has learnt about implementation and how best to support teachers.
When you register for this event you will be added to the Think Forward Educators email list.
Session 2 - Epic Fluency Instruction - Maths Ninjas
Thursday 11 September at 7:30pm (AEST)
In Session 2, Kat will model the Ninja Belts (timed testing) system, justify the adaptations made since the original development at Serpentine, and discuss the excitement levels for fluency from the school community. She will address common misconceptions about delivery, model practical setup and how to reduce the administration time. Kat will share the tracking and assessment systems used to monitor individual student progress and whole-school impact.
When you register for this event you will be added to the Think Forward Educators email list.
Kat O’Rourke
Kat O’Rourke is a NSW public school teacher, and the recipient of the 2022 NSW Commonwealth Bank Schools Plus Early Career Teacher Award. After completing the La Trobe Master of Education, she began applying the knowledge of cognitive load theory and explicit instruction to mathematics in the Science of Learning Alliance (SoLA) network of schools.
With Amy Telfer and Belinda Harrington, Kat leads a major curriculum project to deliver fully-resourced explicit mathematics curriculum using Ochre and EAST (a major grassroots explicit mathematics curriculum recently profiled by the Grattan Institute) across 47 NSW public schools.