Andrew Blackburn

Before coming to class, I didn't know quite what to expect. Mainly I wanted to come to learn how to teach to students math, and it sounded like this class would help me better understand how they think, and thus, how to best connect with them. When going through the material, there were multiple times I found concepts that would at least help me be able to manage a classroom and hopefully capture the attention of my students with something that they tend to struggle with.

When going over my first deliverable, I wanted to focus on the concept of Elaboration. Being seen as the superior learning method (especially compared to Repition), I wanted to make sure it's incorporated into my lessons. Before I came here, I wanted to see if I could incorporate an interesting strategy in my classes. One complaint I heard about sometimes from other students is the question of why they are being expected to solve problems certain ways when they've learnt other methods previously. Some of them are even valid methods! I understand, though, about the importance of understanding all of the methods, as each of them split off and work as part of the foundation for more advanced mathematics later on, so even if you already know one way of solving things, learning the new method works as an excellent foundation for future learning. And heck, knowing the old method can help you check yourself to self-validate your work on the new method! And the way I wanted to look about doing that is by allowing students extra credit if, on top of the standard method I am actively teaching, if they show work for another, valid, method, I'd award extra credit! So for this deliverable, I made sure to pick a lesson that emphasized the multiple-methods aspect of math, and how we want students to consider multiple ways of approaching problems.

For the second deliverable, I went with Sensory Register. This was an aspect that seemed interesting, since because I want students to actually remember what I teach them, I needed to find ways to breach into their short term memory, as it is then from there I can reach long term memory. And with the Sensory Register, I figured that if I presented multiple different ways to illustrating a concept (including with physical blocks), this would increase the chances of them actively thinking about the concept, which would then increase transfer, and thus, memory, of the ideas being taught.

When it came to make my third deliverable, instead of focusing on a concept, I decided to focus on the strategy of providing opportunities to attach to real-world scenarios. Many students claim that they don't see a place for mathematics in their regular day-to-day lives, or in their future jobs beyond basic arithemetic. So I found a math concept that could have a larger, physical, activity that they could immediately apply their math learning to a real world scenario. By mixing things up, this could help make sure the math classes don't end up monotonous, and thus boring, through repeated lectures, group work, and worksheets. I'm sure I'll learn other interesting techniques later on, but having an outdoors math activity could help the students find more connections, and hopefully more excited to learn more concepts moving forward (including those that may be more foudnational than actually applicable).

When it comes to the fourth deliverable, the one that we as a class worked on together, I'm going to be honest and say I was really out of it that day. But looking over the concepts used for focus in that lesson, I am interested in the idea of schema. These are the predispositions that students walk in with, and continue to build upon, as they continue to learn and grow. As a math teacher, I am definitely concerned with what their current schema are when it comes to mathematical problem solving techniques, as they could have incorrectly categorized certain ideas (like the distributive property - not all functions allow you to transfer multiplication like that!). This can also apply towards their attitude towards math itself, as I don't want them to think of math as boring.

The last deliverable that I participated in creating was the Team Project, the lesson we taught on Motivation. The strategy we, and many other teams, used was prompt discussion, which had the various groups of students ponder over a scenario and discuss either how to solve it, or how you could apply the principle in future teaching settings. The key reason why many of us used this is to help us figure out ways to apply what we've learned, which helps with future transfer when we start heading out to officially teach ourselves.

Overall, while it may have been tough to figure some things out, working on these deliverables helped me to think through different ways I can tap into how students learn to help them better understand, appreciate, and be motivated to learn math. And ultimately, that's the ultimate goal I hope to achieve as a math teacher. They don't need to care about achieving higher levels of mathematics, I just need them to know that they can.