Week 6 - Final Report & Reflection

Thank you friends for staying with me throughout these past six weeks and for letting me share my math journey with you. I've learned a lot about math, myself and about the math teacher I want to become.

Final Class
In our final class this week we discussed assessment, redos and the power of descriptive feedback.

The primary purpose of assessment is to improve student learning, according to the Ministry document Growing Success. There are seven principles outlined in this document to ensure that assessment is valid and reliable. These principles are outlined in the table below. There are three different types: assessment for learning, assessment of learning and assessment as learning.

Markes, A. (2018, October 15). Comparing types of assessment [Venn Diagram].
Information adapted from Growing Success

Descriptive feedback in an important component of assessment FOR and AS learning because it is during these assessments that teachers and students monitor their progress and make adjustments as they learn. By the time the assessment OF learning portion has come around descriptive feedback may be unimportant because students will not have the chance to correct their mistakes and fix their learning about that topic.

Freepik. (2014).  Redo arrow symbol free
icon [Online Icon]. Retrieved
from https://bit.ly/2AbWPOU

And that is where redos come in. We had quite the discussion in class about when and are re-dos appropriate. The consensus was "Of course!" What shocked me was the quote our instructor posted "You don't get redos in life." This is completely untrue! Every day is a redo in life to do better and be better. We are constantly being told to learn from our mistakes so as to not repeat them in the future. Why can't this be true for learning math? I believe that during assessment FOR and AS learning, re-dos should be allowed with descriptive feedback to help students progress in the right direction. Hopefully, this will prepare them well enough to fully demonstrate their learning during the assessment OF learning portion.

How to take what I've learned and use it
Over these past six weeks a few things have really stood out to me that I will carry forward into my upcoming teaching block and onward.

1. Believing all students can do math. The research supporting this statement will change students to believe in themselves and be resilient when struggling with something new.

2. Descriptive feedback has the power to change the world. Specific and clear feedback will help students better monitor their own progress and will guide me as a teacher to improve my teaching practices.

3. Help students fall in love with learning. This encompasses the big messages behind having a growth mindset, changing math from its traditional ways of being taught to the more modern and progressive methods and will help with classroom management. This also pertains to student interests and learning styles, which should always be taken into consideration when planning anything for students.


Pun of the Post
Why does algebra make you a better dancer? Because you can use algo-rhythm!

Thanks to Reader's Digest for this one.

Week 5 - Report & Reflection

Welcome back alge-bros! (If you saw the pun in my post last week, you’d get that joke.)

In-class 
In-class this week we focused on blended learning, which is a combination of face-to-face and online learning, and technology integration. Individually, we participated in five stations to discover the basics of blended learning, several blended learning models, the popular SAMR model (as seen on the right), and the pedagogy wheel. Each station was online so all I needed was my laptop and headphones. Upon completion of the five stations, I met up with a few of my colleagues to record two 30-second videos using the mobile app Chatterpix about what we had just discovered.

 

Online 
Before class, we were asked to read a monograph entitled Making Math Children Will Love: Building Positive Mathitudes to Improve Student Achievement in Mathematics produced by the Ontario Ministry of Education. My thinking about teaching math changed when I read “Instead of trying to make children love the math they hate, make a math they’ll love.” This struck me as an ah-ha moment. I feel it is easier in younger grades to make a math that students will love because there are more concepts that can easily incorporate manipulatives and hands-on activities to establish the foundations of math. However, this quote made me think about the older grades and my upcoming placement. How can I make a math these students will love? I will not just give these students formulas for them to memorize and hope they know how to manipulate it in their favour. I want to know which apps I can use that will be the most productive for these students.

Carrington, A. (2001, Mar 15). The Padagogy Wheel V4.1
[Online Image]. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2hTX8XW

Thankfully, the pedagogy wheel has that laid out for me. Based on the level of technology integrated into the classroom (Substitution-Augmentation-Modification-Redefinition) and on the learning goal for the students (create, apply, evaluate, understand, and analyze), this wheel lists a bunch of action verbs, activities and apps students can use to aid their learning. 

Blending it altogether 
Students these days are much more tech-savvy than I was when I was their age, mostly due to the accessibility of technology in their everyday classroom. I remember when we had a designated time every few weeks to go to the computer lab to work on our typing skills or play Math Circus. Combining these strengths in technology use with the need to support a wide variety of learning styles at the same time can be difficult but integrating technology into a math class is a simple solution. Choosing the right apps can engage students by providing new tools, different methods and most importantly, by allowing them to play. When students play, they have fun. They learn from each other which is more powerful than the teacher telling what math is. 

Therefore, my goal for my upcoming placement is to familiarize myself with apps that can be used in a math classroom, so that when the time comes, I will be ready to redefine students’ math learning.

Pun of the Post 
What did Jay-Z say when he got home from school? I got 99 problems and I have to show my work for all of them.