I think the micro teaching this time around went really well. I was confident throughout and the group members were engaged. I wrote a script for the lesson this time and even though I ended up not needing it, I was relieved that I had it if needed it. In terms of my voice, I was trying to be mindful of the other lesson going on in the classroom at the same time as ours but perhaps it would be a good idea to check with the students if they can all hear me so I can adjust in the moment.
Jasmine, Sahl and I chose "Binomial Distribution" as our micro teaching topic. Here is our lesson plan:
Here is the thinking task questions that we are planning to use:
Here is my mathematical work and thoughts while solving the Cistern Filling problem:
I found this reading to be very insightful. I have been teaching math for 2 years now and I have seen my students being stuck on a problem at least once a week. While I believe I did my best to convey the same ideas as mentioned in this chapter about "slowing down when in full flight" and "write what you know and want," I appreciate now the well phrased reasoning as to why it is important to do these things.
However, there were a couple of words in this chapter I did not quite understand in context, like RUBRIC writing and specialization. Perhaps it is because I have not read the previous chapters that I do not understand what Mason means by RUBRIC writing, but I would love to talk to my peers about it and know their thoughts. "Specialization" did not make sense to me because the word itself means having a mastery of something and the context was being stuck. Therefore, I had to remind myself of the context while reading this chapter.
What went well: People were engaging with the content, my materials were all prepared and ready to be used and I believe I organized the lesson appropriately.
What could be improved: I found myself in the middle of the guided practice time realizing that I forgot to mention that I encourage multilingual people to contribute words from their language. I also think I should have given members an outline of what were going to be doing before beginning the activity.
What I might do differently next time: I knew what I was going to say to introduce my lesson but I felt as though I was nervous until I got in the rhythm of teaching, so I would like to explore writing a script for my lesson that I can fall back on in such cases.
Here is my lesson plan that I will be following for our non-curricular micro-teaching activity in class on Monday!
I will be filling out the reflection section of this lesson plan after delivering the lesson.
Upon reading this article, I realized that we have been fighting for the same things in mathematics education for a century. I was surprised to read that John Dewey's movement came before the New Math movement and it made me stop and think about how Dewey's recommendations were never accepted in a wholesale fashion across North America but it did not take as much effort for people, not just in North America, but worldwide, adopted the New Math curricula in fear of being left behind. This was especially surprising to me as the article mentions that "Far too often, the jet-setting curriculum developers showed little regard for local conditions, cultures, or educational traditions".
My second stop while reading this article was when math phobia was brought up and learnt that not much effort was made to combat this in students', teachers' and parents, lives. Instead, parents and teachers continued on to pass that trauma on to the new generations in the name of advancement of science. As someone who grew up not having much understanding of the "why" of mathematics in her early years, I realized how important it is for our students to learn from teachers who are themselves passionate about mathematics and can recognize the beauty of it. This also reminds me of Lockhart's point that we must do math for the sake of simply doing math.
My third and final point of wonder and discovery was throughout this reading when I realized how much control one political party has over the education of millions of children. I do not believe it is fair for politics to have such a huge influence in education. Of course, education is and will always be political but as a future teacher, I hope that we can have more say than we do now in how we learn and teach in schools.
