Semester 2 - Blog 1

Hey everyone, welcome back to the blog! A few days ago, we had our first class back for EDBE 8F83. In this post, I will reflect upon this lesson by using different prompts and supplementing them with images and resources. 

What struck you during this session?

Something that struck me during the session was that we can all view the same solution in very different ways. In the Jo Boaler Ted Talk, she showed a problem where you were given squares and had to describe how you saw the pattern growing.

The way I saw the solution was that there is one block being added on top of every block present as well as one on the end. This is similar to a method that she described in her podcast as the raining method. She gave seven different solutions to this problem that she had encountered and I have put the raining method as well as two other examples below for your viewing. 

I found it interesting how we can all approach the same problem in different ways but get the same solution. As a future educator, this allows me to realize that not all of my students will think the same and I will have to be open and prepared to see their different strategies and solutions.

What were the dominant emotions evoked (affect)?

One emotion that I felt during this lesson was surprise. I felt this during the Dan Meyer video when he gave his advice for current math teachers in a classroom. He gave five pieces of advice which were to use multimedia, encourage student intuition, ask the shortest question you can, let students build the problem and be less helpful. Initially, I was shocked that be less helpful was one of the solutions; it seems counterproductive to me to be an unhelpful teacher. But, his reasoning for being less helpful made sense. By being less helpful, we are encouraging our students to build problem solving strategies that are not only useful for math class, but are useful for their life as a whole.

What for you were the main points (cognition)?

The following three points summarize what was discussed in our lesson:

1. We discussed a Ted Talk from Dan Meyer where he explains that math class needs a makeover. He believes that math class focuses on just being able to cut and paste skills where we should be striving to teach our students to be able to formulate questions. We need to be able to prompt our students and have them stop and think.

2. We discussed an additional Ted Talk from Jo Boaler. We saw how people are able to view solutions to problems in their own way and that everyone has different ways to view things.

3. Finally, we received different strategies we could use to promote a growth mindset in a classroom. Some of these include making a task an inquiry task, making it low floor and high ceiling and trying to add a visual component. 

Here are the links to the videos we watched in class!

Math Class Needs a Makeover - Dan Meyer: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_class_needs_a_makeover?subtitle=en

How you can be good at math, and other surprising facts about learning - Jo Boaler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3icoSeGqQtY

What actions might you want to pursue further (awareness)?

Something that I would like to pursue further is finding some other options for how to promote a growth mindset in my classroom. As I mentioned prior, we were given some strategies that we could use in our own classroom. I think that I would like to research some more strategies that I could potentially use. I may have a student that does not respond to any of the six strategies that were provided and I will need some different options to give to those students. 

That's all from me today! I hope you enjoyed reading my post and I hope you will be here for the next one!