It is hard to believe that almost six weeks have past since I began this course and that in less than two weeks I will be standing in my second classroom, ready to begin teaching a grade 8 class for a seven week period. This unfortunately means that I will be writing my last reflective post, but I am pleased to say that this past week has been the best learning experience that I have had in this course. In the last class my partner and I had the opportunity to deliver a 30 minute presentation, the purpose of which was to facilitate a beneficial learning experience for my peers. The topic that we chose was teaching strategies/math inquiry and by the end of the presentation I think the learning experience was two fold. I wouldn't be surprised if my partner and I learned more from this experience than our peers. We delivered a math inquiry involving place value and the beautiful part about this demonstration was experiencing just how risky inquiry can be. We had hoped that we would have seen a diverse display of strategies being used to solve for the problem but every group decided to figure out the problem in the same way. This meant that we needed to be flexible in our delivery of the lesson and ask questions that guided the students' thinking towards other possible solution strategies. To consolidate we discussed these strategies and then we discussed the other teaching strategies that were being intertwined with the inquiry lesson. Although a struggle to design and facilitate, this learning experience has allowed me to feel just a little more comfortable in my ability to run other inquiry lessons in the future and to be confident in my ability to be a flexible educator who can go with the flow during a lesson. For the purpose of this post I don't want to dive to far into this inquiry lesson and all of the little intricacies that were involved, partly because I have already written a reflection about this experience, but also because there were other great learning experiences for me while participating in the other group members' learning demonstrations.
As I have mentioned earlier in this blog, fractions and I are not the best of friends. Not because I don't understand them, but because I find them difficult to teach. One of the groups presenting in the last class did an excellent job showing how to differentiate the process of learning and did so under the umbrella of teaching fractions. We participated in learning about fractions through three separate learning stations. One stations used paper plates with various visual displays of fractions and required us to group them into separate fraction categories (e.g., 1/4, 5/8 and 2/16). Another station required us to make up a song about fractions after watching three different video examples modelling our task. The last station allowed participants to use an app on the computer requiring us to make different sized pizzas, each with their own separate fraction of toppings. This app was engaging because the faster and more accurate that you could create the correct pizzas, the more money you made. Each group tried their best to outdo the last group and the competition made everyone put in their best effort. Throughout these stations, the one that I had the most amount of difficulty with was the paper plates station. For some reason the various picture representations involving different fractions was hard for me to discern. The more practice I got with them, however, the better I got at picking the correct paper plate. My partner was a big help during this station and I learned from this that it is important to have a collaborative partner during these stations because we learned from each other and the learning experience was far more useful and engaging. In the future when I run a math lesson such as this I will be sure to make collaborative groups where those who fully understand the problem can help those that are struggling and together they can benefit from the partnership.
It was interesting to see the contrast between this kind of partnered learning experience to the more independent kind of learning experienced seen in the demonstrations involving financial literacy. Two group shad this same topic and each group decided to take more of an independent approach. One group used the Kahoot! online app to facilitate a questionnaire and I found this app to be very useful in promoting competition but it was also difficult for me to do well because each question is timed and the faster you answer the question, the more points you get. This element to the learning experience didn't allow me to think through the questions enough to really give an honest account of my learning because I was more worried bout my speed. I learned from this experience that this kind of app is very useful as a minds on or icebreaker activity that excites students and encourages them to be interested in the action or core activity portion of the lesson. The other lesson demonstration involving financial literacy was more of a hands-on demonstration where the group gave each individual five hundred monopoly dollars and were asked to spend our money on a variety of items that we would need for the month. Those items ranged from tuition, to rent, to groceries, to games and so on. The list of items essentially ranged from very useful and based on necessity, to least useful and based on want. During this activity we were also allowed to save any money that we thought appropriate. Along with their icebreaker activity that had us reviewing different terms involved with financial literacy, I was influenced to think more about my needs than my wants and was positively thinking about my future spending habits and my financial goals. I believe that with this kind of positive set-up, younger students who often don't think about these kinds of life skills would also be encouraged to incorporate such spending habits into their daily life. Essentially I learned that giving students these kinds of tools early in life will benefit them in the future and help them to be more mindful individuals who are more concerned with their needs than their wants and can become active participants in future change.
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