Reflections from block 1 & Moderated Marking

Reflections from Block 1

My first four-week student teaching block was an incredible learning experience. I loved being able to apply the knowledge from our classes with students in a classroom setting. The four weeks went by so quickly and I am so greatful for having an associate teacher and group of students who welcomed me into their classroom. This teaching block reinforced my desire of becoming a teacher.

Some of the most rewarding moments throughout this blocked involved helping students succeed. For me these moments included having a student change their mindset about “not being able to do math”,  having students interested in the topic and having a student who was previously disengaged volunteer to answer questions.

One of the resources that I found helpful to have during this teaching block was 3 act math. I often used these as minds on activities.  In the grade 9 class, when learning about distance time graphs there were several different videos that were able to be used. 

One of the challenges I found during teaching block was finding a method to catch students up on material they missed while they were away. Attendance varied greatly each day and there were times when it was difficult to move on to a new concept when several students were away for the previous classes. During my last two practice teaching blocks I hope to develop a method to address this.

Moderated Marking

This week we did a moderated marking activity in class. In groups of three, we were given sample grade 9 math EQAO student responses from an open response question. We were also provided with the scoring guide which listed indicators associated with each level. We graded each example individually and then compared marks as a group.

It was interesting to discuss our responses as there were several problems that we did not agree on marks for. The discussion turned to be what components or processes of the problem are more important or worth more marks. It was also interesting to discuss what each of us thought were the key indicators of student understanding for a particular problem. 

A key take away from this process for me was to make sure my marking is consistent. As a new teacher, I hope to be able to participate in a moderated marking activity again. 

Context In Mathematics

A bus and a car leave the same place and travelled in opposite directions. If the bus is travelling at 80 kilometres per hour and the car is travelling at 100 kilometres per hour, in how many hours will they be 210 kilometres apart? Source

But who cares? 

Week 7’s math class focused on adding context to our math lessons. The Ontario curriculum states that we should be encouraging students to use mathematical reasoning in life. In order for them to do this, we need to find was to add context into our lessons and have students care. If we can try to teach relevant problems that connect to the real world, students will see the connections to the real world can happen with math.

3 Act Math provides great examples on adding context to lessons and something I found very useful in my teaching blog. 

However, not all things in math can be taught with a real world context, which leads to the notion of pseduocontext.  Dan Meyer's website has a weekly Saturday post of math textbook questions with "real world" application claims. It is pretty interesting to read about them and try to guess what the intent of the question was. 

http://blog.mrmeyer.com

I was surprised to see this image was connected to a question about finding the area of parallelograms!

Mathematical Discussions & Formative Assessment

Orchestrating Mathematical Discussions

When encouraging rich discussion in a math classroom, the task being presented should be carefully selected. I believe that to encourage discussion the task needs to be of interest to students. In addition, students need to feel comfortable in sharing their responses or ideas.  This connects back to the concept of creating positive norms in a math class. 

Asking good questions is an important part of having math discussions. A higher-level question will require students to think and go beyond memorizing or following the steps exactly from a previous example. These types of questions or tasks involve students making connections and really thinking. There may be more than one way to solve the question, and/or the question may not explicitly be stated. Open-ended questions can be a great example of this.

The cognitive demand of low-level tasks can be increased by changing (or eliminating) some of the information in the question, by asking students to prove their answer, describe what their answer means, or by having students explain why another answer may be correct or incorrect.

Formative Assessment

Formative assessment can help in determining if students require the lesson or part of a lesson to be re-taught. Using different forms of assessment like exit cards and observation, a teacher can determine how much of a lesson should be re-taught. In my first teaching placement, I would often start off the class with a couple review questions from the previous day. This would provide me the opportunity to explain the concept again, ask questions and have students practice.  

When giving feedback to struggling students, I think it is important to take into consideration the feedback strategies of timing, amount, mode and audience discussed by Susan M. Brookhart. 

If a student is struggling, it will be important to provide them with feedback in a timely way in order to help their understanding of a concept. It is also important to decide on the amount of feedback to provide so that the student does not get discouraged. Ensuring that there is positive feedback about the students work is also an important aspect. Depending on the mistakes or gaps of understanding causing a student to struggle, the mode of feedback may need to be adjusted. If there was a major concept being misunderstood, it would be very difficult to express this through written feedback and would likely be more successful visually/through demonstration

Timing is very important for feedback. Within a unit, I think it is important for all students to have different forms of feedback before the completion of a unit task/test.