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
I believe that I am proficient in establishing a classroom setting that calls upon the students to learn in an individual and collaborative manner. I believe that I have sufficiently encouraged positive social interaction, active engagement in learning, and self motivation. I have shown this in learning activities that have been presented to the students. An example of this would be with the placard assignment, which had the students fill out a sheet that corresponded to four maps to help them figure out what artifacts certain cultural regions would use. During this learning segment, students would have to be self directed after the directions were given, the students would have to use collaborative skills, and they were all engaged during
Good afternoon [name of members of the head table], teachers, parents, students, fellow graduates and distinguished guests. I must first and foremost thank God for this blessing and honor to stand before you today as Valedictorian of the Class of 2011. Yet, today is not only my day to shine. Every graduate present here is deserving of high praise and recognition and I would like to congratulate each of you on reaching this milestone in life. I think I speak for my fellow graduates when I say that this is a moment we have always imagined and one we will remember for the rest of our lives.
“Helping students develop mathematical dispositions in which they share their ideas, discuss others’ ideas, and so on, is always a challenge,” (The National Council of Teachers Mathematics, 2003, P. 151). I found this quote and reading to be very relatable, in the sense that students can often struggle to come up with their own ideas. This was definitely true for me and my group when we were working on the locker problem in class. In the book and in class, discussions can really benefit students and keep them engaged. “To encourage all students to contribute to discussions, the teacher should ask other students to explain their classmates ideas,” (The National Council of Teachers Mathematics, 2003, P. 153) this statement made me think of dialogic teaching. Dialogic teaching is students having a rich discussion amongst each other while being guided by the teacher. The students find out the answer on their own and the teacher does not tell them. So social norms and classroom management plays a big role when students problem solve.
Some people have asked to read the commencement address I delivered this morning to the 2013 graduates of Butler University. So here it is.
Tonight since it was my last time working with Keily, I told keily that today she could pick the game that we played today, but I told her it had to be math related. Of coarse, the first couple games that she wanted to play were not math related at all, but the she asked if we could play a card game. After observing in a kindergarden classroom last semester and looking at Pintrest from time to time, I drew from my previous knowledge to think of a card game that we could play that would relate to math. The first game that popped into my head was the card game war, but this was a modified version of the game. Instead of the regular war game, we would play addition wars. I told keily that in this card game we would split the deck of cards between
The Great Being saith and I quote: “Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom”.
I intentionally employ a mix of instructional strategies in the classroom in order to give my students a variety of opportunities in which to engage themselves and each other with new content. Most class periods provide chances for students to work individually, as partners and/or in groups and units include a variety of problem-solving tasks to help students understand how the skills are used. Although the students seem to
As result of creating and implementing this artifact, I realized that the most effective lesson plans are those which initiate with the final assessment in mind. So, I applied a pre-test at the very beginning of my lessons with every different group I would be teaching to measure a starting point or the amount of pre-existing knowledge on the topics to be taught. Based on this, I planned the instruction to deliver and how to differentiate it.
When introducing students to the strategies it is important to ask students why they believe it would be important for them to have mathematic discussions. Once students understand why math talk is important they need to know that when they are in a learning environment they should be active listeners and how to respond to one another. The next step is to teach students about sentence stems, which is a guide that may help students begin their math discussions. After students have the first three steps down it is important for them to understand the difference between an explication and giving justification. Instead of just listing the steps to a math problem, students must know that they need to tell why and how they solved the problem in a specific way. After going over the strategies and discussing why it is important to have meaningful math discussions, teachers need to model each
When living in America, the chances of one having received some form of general education are high. Schools come in all shapes and sizes to accommodate the needs and preferences of parents and students; they can range between the extremes of religious to liberal arts and private to public education. In E.B. White’s “Education”, he describes his son’s shift from a city private school to a country public school. In contrast, the public education I received before entering college was very different from the experiences of White’s son as a child.
II. Main Point (state as a single declarative sentence): The progress that I have made helped me lead up to writing well-developed essays. The main reason I believe my essays are improved because of the time I take on my pre-writing.
This significance of the these issues are that in order for students to become more successful throughout their math curriculum, they need to work together in a more hands on way, exploring, discovering and solving problems together. This concept is more of an inquiry based learning style, where the teacher’s role is to initiate the student’s interests and ideas that will advance their critical thinking skills. Cooperative
As for Teacher C, this is her first year teaching as a full-time kindergarten teacher. Prior to being a kindergarten teacher she worked as an instructional support teacher for kindergarten. The primary socioeconomic status of School C is low. It is considered a Title 1 school which means that they reach out to lower socioeconomic families to provide quality education to their children. Most of the families that they work with are single parent families, or divided households with more than one child. Teacher C claimed that most of these parents are incredibly hard working and busy. She said you can see this with the amount of support students are sometimes not able to get at home due to the parents working. Therefore, at School C teachers try their best to provide as much meaningful instruction in school, so that that the families can focus on providing for their children in other ways. Teacher C only utilizes 1-2 hours of technology a day due to the fact that her only access to technology while in school is a computer and projector. These are the only tools that they have available to enrich students’ learning. Through the computer, Teacher C uses power point presentations, short videos, pdf documents, and learning based games. The use of the projector is how she gets everything onto the board and makes it big enough for everyone to see. During the day, Teacher C tries to use these resources at least 2 different times for content such as learning phonics, or
As an aspiring elementary educator, my goal is to bridge the student’s knowledge to their curiosity. I will provide the facts that will drive their curiosity to asking questions that are relevant to the past and the future. I do not believe that avoiding inquiry is the most beneficial teaching method for my students because no student is “too young” to understand the events that have shaped our country and our world. There is always a method to teach difficult content in an honest, truthful manner to students. Since I am currently spending my first practicum in a kindergarten classroom, I have been considering and applying methods of teaching history, in regards to Teaching What Really Happened, to the primary levels.
English class seemed to be the most dreadful to take within school. Writing essays for most of my grade in a class is not what I was looking forward too. When I entered college I knew that it would be one of many challenging classes I would have to take. Starting from the lowest English class to moving on up, the writing assignments became longer and more thought out. The time came when I got into this class that I knew more work was going to have to be put into essays and thus brought out what I had not seen before in my work progress.