This post will cover my reflections from today & yesterday. Today we covered questioning and yesterday we covered mathematical thinking.
Yesterday we saw two videos, a Ted Talk by Dan Meyer which my instructor has shown many times in his classes and has seen many times at workshops, it's great to have a transformative math teacher on a TED talk! Dan references a TV sitcom, 2.5 men, in which all the problems are simple, and he says this has fostered an "impatience with irresolution". However, math reasoning requires patient problem solving. He says 90% of his prep time is spent taking textbook questions and reformulating them. He also references Einstein in that the formulation of problems is more important than the solution, and therefore let the students formulate the question, or at least develop the substeps to the initial framework of the question provided by the teacher. This reminds me of my 3 part lesson which I submitted today, in which our question in the action part, has no numbers in it, and it's up to the students to create those numbers. Dan demonstrates how he takes a complex textbook problem on filling a tank with water, and strips it down to its bare essentials. Our group was discussing this video, and determining the three most important things we learned from it, and one of us mentioned how the textbook is not necessarily "evil", but it can be used appropriately to formulate questions. I also like how Dan refers to intuition, and that everyone is on a level playing field in terms of tuition for a well formulated question. Our instructor Vel refers to this "level playing field" as "everyone playing in the sandbox".
After the Dan Meyer video, we saw a video by Marian Small, in which she states that if kids were curious they wouldn't ask why are we doing this? They're asking why because they are bored! Therefore, what I can conclude from this, is plan engaging lessons which have multiple points of entry, and students won't be asking how this applies to real life, because they will enjoy doing math for the sake of math itself.
Several interesting insights to share from today's class:
-Our instructor normally shares learning goals at end of lesson during consolidation, our group was discussing this, how it doesn't make sense to state it at the beginning for an inquiry based lesson, and when Vel stated this, that really drove the point home, and confirmed our groups intuition was right!
-Vel on homework, he doesn't expect his kids to do it, and has to cover everything they need to learn during class, they can't be expected to learn on their own at home, he tells the story of how he had a very busy high school life, and had no time to do homework, however, he also mentions that while the research is mixed in regards to homework, there is consensus that it is beneficial for upper level math and sciences
-Vel also referenced a book "5 practices for orchestrating productive mathematical discussions", definitely a book worth reading, and he said it had a major influence on his teaching practice
-Vel on standardized testing (this was from yesterday)- EQAO is a reflection of teacher's teaching, not the students learning, it is worth 0-10% for grade 9, Vel and his department decided not to count it for any marks, some teachers say it should count for marks so students would take it more seriously, but research shows this is not true, Vel mentioned that EQAO can be used to guide teaching practice, for example, if EQAO scores show geometry was really low, then teachers need to spend more time on that unit rather than rushing through it at the end of the semester
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