WEEK IV

Hello everyone and welcome to my week 4 math post!

During the past few weeks in my math class at teacher's college, we have been learning many ways to enrich our instruction as teachers, so that we may benefit all of the students in our classrooms. Today, I will be highlighting some more of my learning experiences and how I plan to integrate them into my teaching! I hope you enjoy! 😀

Out With the Old, In With the New (and RICH!)

It strikes me every time how different our students' learning experiences are today, compared to when I was a student myself. The way we teach math has evolved into so much more than just worksheets, teacher lectures, copying notes and independent work. Now, educators aim to teach math in a way that is...

• relevant, 
• current, 
• challenging, 
• collaborative, 
• engaging, 
• has depth, 
• fosters deeper thinking, and is
• student oriented.

I will elaborate on how having these components in a math class creates rich tasks shortly! But I know that when I was a student, I did not always have these types of rich math scenarios. Oftentimes, we would end a unit with a unit test, and that was that. Now, teachers strive to develop these rich opportunities for students, and they also try to finish math units with rich culminating tasks, as opposed to tests. There is a time and place for everything, however, and I believe students will also benefit from taking a test, or two. When I teach in my next classroom, my goal will be to shift away from the: teacher lecture → independent worksheet → test strategy, no matter how tempting! Because hey, it is what I was brought up with! Having students talk to each other about math and work together on rich problems really improves their overall learning and understanding.

Below, I am going to talk about some other strategies and ideas for enriching student learning in the class. I will also share some of my experiences with these strategies!

Talking About Math and Making Connections

Art and Math. (2018). Image. Retrieved from: http://discovermagazine.com/mathart

When students talk about their math work, they are able to communicate different approaches to the problems they face. Again, when students just work independently, they may not have opportunities to understand the many pathways that could be taken, or the many questions that could be asked about the math problem.

Reflecting on my experience with math talks, I recall several times where this was put into practice. One experience I remember was having students volunteer to share their work to the class and display it under a document camera, for example. The class then began a math discussion and students could see and hear the different types of reasoning used in the math problem. This is great for differentiating too because it lets all learners actively participate as they compare and contrast their reasoning with their peers! ANOTHER type of math talk that was done during my last placement was having students take up their exit tickets in their groups. The way that I would have done this a long time ago as a student in math class would have been a) the teacher would have taken it up in front of the class, b) the answers would have been posted on the board and we would have checked by ourselves or c) we would just ask the teacher any questions we had during class time or recess. Thus, having students work through their exit tickets together is another type of math talk, where students analyze the problems and discuss their reasonings behind it!

Rich Math Performance Tasks

According to Steve Hewson's article titled, "What is a Mathematically Rich Task?" (2011), he states that rich tasks allow for, "[a] resulting learning process is far more interesting, engaging and powerful; it is also far more likely to lead to a lasting assimilation of the material for use in both further mathematical study and the wider context of applications". In his blog, my colleague Tyler also believes that rich tasks allow for collaboration and discussion and that, "[...] in a math class, or any class in general, collaboration and discussion really drive learning and are linked to inquiry". The short video above also goes into further detail about rich tasks. Take a look!

Here is an example question:

Word Problem. (2018). Image. Retrieved from: https://nrich.maths.org/895

As I described before, this question would be an example of a rich task. Teachers could even bring these manipulatives (marbles) to school as well, to make it even richer. There are many ways students can approach this! NRICH has a great collection of rich tasks to use in the classroom and I will definitely refer back to them when in my next placement. Another resource I found that will be great to refer back to is from YouCubed! Check them out!

A final reflection for today would be about one thing I vividly remember during placement. We were summing up the math unit I was teaching and I decided to end it by doing a story problem. Students were engaged and loved the real life applications, along with the time they had for collaborating in order to solve this rich task that was presented as a fun story!

Closing Thoughts

So far I have been learning even more about differentiating, making math meaningful, the importance of making connections, having rich tasks and allowing for discussions and collaborations about the big ideas in math.

Please come back next week, I have a feeling it will be worth it to do so!

Love,

Teddy