Stage 5 Math Reflection

     The modules continue to inspire me with informative strategies to make math meaningful to students in elementary school.  More importantly, I am learning how to develop knowledge and understanding of mathematics to practice and pass onto my students.  Key math principles were highlighted this week and include the importance of using intuition, drawing and representing, making sense of math, and understanding big ideas rather than memorizing.  My blog will mostly concentrate on these concepts because they left an impression on me, but I would like to comment on a webinar that I participated in.

Taken Wednesday October 11, 2017


     Since webinars are valuable educational tools, I look forward to incorporating them when needed. Bernadette and Jacob did a fabulous job of presenting their webinar about Universal Design and sharing ways to set up an encouraging mathematics classroom atmosphere by making changes to the environment's instruction, content, and product.  Overall, the webinar was very well -organized and included many interactive activities for this process; Answer Garden, input about how we could change ways to delivering instruction/questions, lesson content, and approaches to assess student learning.  The webinar was successful by providing us with ideas when considering the wide-ranging abilities of our students so that all are served and engaged.

Forsythe, G. (March 4, 2013). Universal design for learning.  Retrieved
     from https://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/8527950743


     Dr. Boaler and other professionals continue to invite us to approach learning and teaching math with simple, important teaching practices; help students make sense of math by thinking of questions, and using intuition, encourage drawing and representation, and looking for the main ideas in math instead of memorizing all the little details such as formulas.   Have a look at how Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity values intuition and math learning.

     This entrepreneur's message highlights understanding, thinking like a mathematician, and problem solving. These skills not only help with math but can be applied to citizenship and relationships. Thrun believes that intuition has the ability to empower and remove the fear associated with learning math.  I agree that the ability to use intuition can help students learn and embrace mathematics successfully. 

     Drawing and representing are other processes that can and should be developed to help students understand and solve math problems. Visualization allows students to remember and manipulate concepts. Focusing mathematical instruction on these approaches allows for greater flexibility when students display math ideas.

     The last important point that I learned this week is that practicing memorization can be problematic in math. While it is important to know certain math facts and hold them in memory, Dr. Boaler said that the best way for students to learn math is by deeply understanding the big ideas and not the little details.  She is not an advocate of practicing math facts over and over again or being tested on them.  I support the approach of organizing content around main ideas because I think that focusing learning around a few big ideas makes it easier for students to relate new knowledge to previously learned ideas.  After watching this video, I no longer believe that having a great memory is the key to excelling at math.  This was another one of my misconceptions of math.

                                    

Washington State University (2010). Big ideas. Retrieved from http://wsm.wsu.edu/s/index.php?id=789

     Of course, I want my students to feel good about math.  That means adopting strategies early on within my instruction that improves  student learning.  This week's module supplied me with many.


Talk to you next week.