My Weekly Report and Reflection 10 (Week 18)

Holy, it is hard to believe that this is my final blog of the year for this course! It has been ana amazing experience and I have loved every second of my time in the “Teaching Mathematics (Part 1)” course. This week, it was my turn to lead a learning activity. I really enjoyed the entire process: creating this activity and facilitating the students’ engagement in it!

This project provided me with several crucial insights as a future Mathematics teacher. I organized this activity based on there being three students per group. In a full class, I would put the students into three or full smaller groups. They would complete the main activity in a “Jigsaw” style. They would start by discussing the examples that they are given with their small-group members for about 10-15 minutes. Once all groups have finished considering their respective examples, each group member will be dispersed into a new group with one person from each other group. Here, they will represent their former, original group by speaking as an “expert member” and explaining their problems with their peers. Finally, the class will engage in a class wide discussion involving everyone, where we will converse some RUBRIC writing that we did throughout the process. This will include times when we were “STUCK”, special findings or “AHA!” moments, times when they reasoned or wrote “CHECK”, and other key ideas/moments/learning experiences as they “REFLECT”.

Kirsten said it could be good to add to each example by extending them so that they fit in more than one category. Thus, I began asking groups to turn these rather “black-and-white” examples into ones with multiple solutions by adding “grey” areas. For instance, in a question that involves a cigarette company asking 5 people in Niagara if they smoke obviously illustrates misleading statistics through small sample size. However, I could prompt the students to alter this question by adding, for example, that the cigarette company asked 5 people “Do you smoke cigarettes, even though they are disgusting and likely to kill you?” This would make the question not only a small sample size, but also faulty polling, since they are clearly persuading the respondents to answer that they do not smoke.

We also debated making this activity technological (done on computers), but concluded that we believe the hands-on format is more fun, engaging, and better suited for Grade 12 College level students. Although there is a time and place for technology to be implemented in learning, that place in not this particular context. High-achieving and Gifted students may benefit from answering the activity example questions online and independently. However, College level students prefer (for the most part) hands-on and visual-kinesthetic learning. Hence, I would leave this activity as is when teaching it in the future to a College or Applied level class.

Another thing that I started doing with the second group that worked really well was having them debate their answers to each example and try to get their group mates to side with them and change answers. This encourages the students to use higher-order thinking skills and consider other perspectives. It also enhances students’ verbal and communication abilities, which is a life skill necessary for all college-bound students. I find that this strategy worked especially well when the example actually did have more than one answer possible, since no students were “incorrect”. For example, the example that posed the student as the head of a marketing campaign that wants children to wear Champion brand clothing had more than one potential “correct” answer. The example went on to state that “you phone 8 of your friend’s kids, 7 of whom have admitted to wearing Champion”. After pondering this question, it is evident that it could have more than one possible solution: small sample size and selective bias. More open-ended questions like these encourage higher-order thinking skills and make the discussion was much livelier and more meaningful!

Overall, this curriculum assignment was a terrific learning experience! Not only was it a great opportunity to lead my peers through and activity and discussion, but it was also my first structured opportunity to teach a math lesson of any type in the classroom. Since Mathematics is my second teachable, I have never actually taught a structured classroom lesson in the subject, and this is something that I am somewhat anxious about doing in my future placemats. It is imperative, then, that I am provided with such opportunities to practice and receive feedback on my teaching and instruction. Experiences like this one are crucial starting points and allow me to exercise my “Teaching Intermediate/Senior Mathematics” pedagogies and practices in practical and applicable ways!