TEACHING

#2

Model Conceptual Understanding

One of my favorite teaching strategies is to display student's work on the screen (anonymously) and ask the class to critique the work. I ask students, "What did the student do well? What can the student improve on? Are there glaring mistakes that the student made?" I especially love to do this after I've assigned homework and I see a common misconception. I display homework on the board, with marking to show that it's wrong, and I ask the students to tell me why this was marked wrong. Often students do not return to view homework corrections once they have been made, and I use this as a method to get student's attention when I catch misconceptions on homework. Stern and her colleagues discuss "why models matter" in their book called Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding (2017). 

#3

Effective Feedback

Teachers know the power of effective and timely feedback. "Feedback should reveal to the student exactly where on the learning journey the student is and which habit or strategies the student is using that might be working or might need to be changed and give an idea of what to do next" (Stern, 2017, pg. 108). I love offering students feedback. I like to use Desmos since I can build classroom activities from scratch and see all student's work simultaneoulsy while I run the activity. I watch for glaring mistakes of misconceptions, I give students time to work and then I stop students and discuss student's work. My thinking is that without timely, kind, helpful, and specific feedback I leave students in the dark, which is a painful place to be, and I do not wish that for my students.

#4

Individual Journaling

My goal for formative and summative assessments is to reveal students thinking. Students' preconceived notion about math is that they solve problems without thinking about the concepts. They follow an algorithm without thinking about what they are doing, why it works, or whether it can be trusted. All of my assignments and in class tasks serve as formative assessments. When I post a simple conceptual question on my screen and ask students to respond to that question students begin to think deeper about the problems (Stern, 2017, pg. 48). I believe math teachers need to break the stigma in math class that the subject is removed from reality, that students are simply to remember steps, rules, algorithms, practice enough problems until they've memorized them, and instead begin teaching students to think about the math, and lead them to communicate their thinking.

#5

Engage Prior Knowledge

One of the things that I find to be very effective in my teaching is engaging student's prior knowledge. Students need to make connections between concepts that they already have a solid understanding of and those they are learning. And "students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom" (Stern, 2017, pg. 48). It is so so so important to get students to tell you what they already know about a concepts, so you can see where to build from or where there may be incorrect preconceptions.

#6

Investigation and Inquiry

On of my favorite methods for teaching is through question-asking. I start by giving them an easy question that they can all answer and I follow up with questions that get progressively harder until ultimately I reach a challenging question that is the heart of the unit of study. Through a series of question asking, I allow the students to derive formulas, applications, on their own instead of just giving them the answers or modeling a process.