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Graduation Speech : Teacher And Teacher

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Signing up for encouraging critical and skillful thinking class I was really excited at the possibilities I could learn as an educator to share with my students. Every day in my math class I am trying to show students how I approach different math problems. I go step by step explaining my logic behind every move I make and emphasize why I am making these very specific moves throughout the problem. To me, I feel what I am doing is very cut and dry but somehow there are students who get lost along the way. Maybe it is the way I present the material or it could be that our thinking does not line up. To some students Algebra is very stressful and it is almost a self-preservation class, meaning students fall back on prior knowledge and …show more content…

Since we are about three quarters of the way through the year, I felt like I had a good understanding of the students in my class. My assumptions turned out to be somewhat true. The top three strengths I thought were going to be social, music, and body movement but it turned out to be self being number one, then social and bringing up the rear spatial. With a new found insight into what type of students I have in the classroom, I was setting off to meet their needs to teach them how to become better learners not only in my class but in life. A big chunk of this course is based on the five thinking strategies. The one strategy I knew that I could implement in my classroom without a hitch, was the third strategy, thinking together. I teach 7th and 8th grade Algebra in an urban school district. Middle school students live and breathe being social. I really think some students go to sleep with their cellphones under their pillows. The first thing I did was rearrange my desk so they were in groups of two and three. I did have my desk arranged in groups of four but I wanted smaller groups so I could have more groups participating. The first cooperative learning exercise I tried in the classroom was, pair checks. In a math class this is very easy to create and execute. I created a worksheet with one side being for one student and the other side for the other student. Folding the paper in half and separating the problems

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