From my past experiences teaching, I definitely think great teaching and learning not only works off previous knowledge, but enthusiasm for the subject. Unfortunately, as students progress in school, many attitudes toward mathematics shift. Although students may have the previous knowledge to work through a problem, unless they're enthusiastic about the new content, they won't be as willing to learn. Great teaching brings the content to life and can instill enthusiasm toward a subject in students even if they didn't have a positive attitude toward the subject previously. So overall, great teaching and learning stems from enthusiasm. If you're enthusiastic about your content area and teaching, your students will be enthusiastic toward learning.
One of my most memorable teaching and learning experiences was when I was in my pre-student teaching. My cooperating teacher often just presented content in a direct instruction type of way. He was able to capture and hold the attention of his students because of his presence and voice. When I was set to teach, it was the opposite for me. My co-op was tall, muscular and had a deep voice. I'm not quite 5'4, not muscular one bit and even though I don't have a high voice, it still wasn't as deep as my co-op's. By comparison, I learned the students didn't respond as well to my presence in front of the room at first. So, I needed to think of a new way to keep the students engaged in the lesson. I realized that direct instruction alone would not keep the students' attention when I was teaching. I decided to make my lessons more constructivist. Instead of just telling students a rule, I had them figure out a rule from a chart that we completed together. This allowed me to grab the students attention and then present the rule as well as promoting deeper learning for them through Constructivism. I used this type of format for my entire unit on exponents and the students performed quite well on the test.
The ideal that I try to strive for in my classroom is to keep the lesson engaging and to keep the students on track while having a consistent schedule. Engaged students are better learners. The same old routine does not lead to an engaged class, but it leads to a well managed class. On the other end, if a classroom gets too engaged, sometimes the students can get off topic. To solve this, I try to keep my students as engaged as possible. If they get off topic, I try incorporate that topic into the lesson or just make a quick remark and transition back into the lesson. The students will see you someone who gets down to business, but also is willing to deviate from the set structure of the day.
The main challenge that both teachers and learners encounter is the question "when will I ever use this?" When a teacher is asked this question, sometimes it is difficult to come up with an answer on the spot. If the student couldn't think of a reason and you can't think of a reason immediately, the student(s) may not have the enthusiasm to learn the new content, which makes learning that new content challenging. So one challenge that teachers need to overcome is having relevant examples for students for each lesson as to why this is useful. One challenge a student needs to overcome is learning a subject they don't feel is relevant to them by "learning for learning's sake."
Some of my most pressing questions are:
1) How can technology be incorporate into mathematics classrooms?
2) How can I get more comfortable with using technology in front of others?
3) How will I be able to adapt to ever-changing technology?
Melissa, I LOVE the chart idea! I never heard of doing something quite like this; what subject were you teaching and what kind of constructivist activities did you plan? I have a very hard time with that.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think that creating a "When Am I Going to Use This?" list together as a class during the first week of school would maybe spur some interest early on in the year. Any thoughts?
Britt,
ReplyDeleteI was teaching the properties of exponents. The first one was zero and negative exponents.
I had a base column on the left and the result on the right. So down the left side the students had 2^3, 2^2, 2^1. The right column they filled in what it equaled by plugging in their calculator. So they had 8, 4, 2. They realized that they divided by 2. So we continued the chart by adding 2^0, 2^-1, 2^-2. They were able to continue dividing by 2. We did this with 2 other bases and they constructed their own rules for zero and negative exponents.
"Engaged students are better learners."
ReplyDeleteI love this because I agree 100% I believe that students have to be engaged in the topic in order to fully understand what they are doing. Dr. Fluck stresses to us that particularly in math that students must learn concepts first then the procedure. Understanding the concepts will help keep the students engaged. :-)