Exit Portfolio
Autobiography
Throughout my school life, I was surrounded by great teachers. My grandmother was my calligraphy teacher, the grade 6 teacher taught me the excitement of learning, and the choir teacher inspired me to teach a class more inclusively. Amongst the teachers that have taught me, the one that most critically influenced my teaching style was the teacher whom I helped in the peer tutoring class. When I was in grade 10, I decided to take a peer tutoring class and was assigned to a grade 8 math class as a peer tutor. My duty was to run errands, mark quizzes and tests, and help out students who were behind. In my own grade 8 math class, I was only focused on doing well on my own and haven’t paid much attention to my classmates. However, when I started helping as a peer tutor I learned how different demographics behave in a class. There were students who were working hard alone, who were more outgoing and talkative, who were staying quiet and distracted most of the time, and who were trying to learn but not able to process their thinking effectively and efficiently. This moment was when I learned that teacher’s role is not only to deliver the lesson but also to incorporate all students and provide a differentiated learning experience for each student. The teacher I helped did just that. The teacher created a space where different students could all thrive and provided learning in various formats so each student could learn in their best way. Also, there was an item in the class that shaped my ultimate goal as a teacher, that said “You make a difference in the lives you touch.” I believe that students have experienced differences in the way they perceive math.
Philosophy
I teach students through inquiry and conceptual understanding while focusing on collaboration and differentiation. The students are able to utilize their understanding for projects of their choice where they can extend the mathematical knowledge to real-life context applications. I ensure that students build the skills they need to live in a global society so that students can excel in my class and apply the skills to other aspects of their life. These skills include thinking, communication, and self-management as well as necessary life skills such as financial literacy. My goal as a teacher is to encourage my students to lessen their math anxiety and appreciate the beauty and joy of mathematics. In return, the students would be able to positively influence their peers on how they view mathematics with optimism and natural curiosity.
Pedagogy into Practice
Inquiry-based learning: To ensure that students are learning inquiry-based, I provide a structural lesson design where I introduce questions that lead off from prior knowledge, previous lesson or questions. For example, when teaching trigonometry I start with prior knowledge of triangles, ratios, and angles, and connect these ideas to introduce the trigonometric ratios. In the next lesson, I connect the trigonometric ratios to the question “what do you use these for?” Answering these questions students are able to naturally connect the content knowledge and problem-solving skills. For extending students, I have two options: introduce higher-level topics or provide more difficult problem-solving questions. An example for the former would be to talk about trigonometric functions and the cyclic nature of ratios, and an example for the latter would be to ask “What if there are two triangles connected to each other?”
Concept-based learning: To ensure that students have a strong conceptual understanding of the course material, I specify one or two main concepts for each unit and verbally speak out the words repeatedly throughout the unit. For example, for the unit of trigonometry, the main concepts would be relationship and space. During the weeks of teaching, I will remind the students of the main concepts they should be connecting to in order to facilitate conceptual understanding. At the end of the unit, I bring all of the vocabularies from the unit and other topics in math to ask students to draw a mindmap. Through this review activity students can solidify their learning and connect the concepts they have built from other topics and notice the connections.
Project-based learning: I implement the projects as one of the key assessment formats in mathematics, in order to encourage students to connect their mathematical learning in the classroom to real-life contexts. Through the autonomous and self-driven project students can freely explore their ideas and practice necessary skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and self-management. For specific units, I ask the students to involve financial literacy as part of the project to prepare students to practice financial skills such as distribution, tax calculation, income reports, and money management.
Professional Growth
My current interest in professional development is the introduction of a flipped classroom or blended learning. Throughout my practicum, I made various video resources from lessons to tutorials to give students a blended learning environment. Students had a choice of video or textbook to learn the concept and basic knowledge on the topic before the class, so students could focus on developing problem-solving skills, collaboration skills, and application to a real-life context.
The biggest challenge that I faced in implementing video learning was student engagement. I researched various resources to find ways to engage students with video learning and encourage them to watch the video before the class. The strategies that I found were "check your understanding" questions and a shorter running time. To account for these strategies, I finished each video with a challenging question to encourage students to solidify and personalize the content they have learned in the video. Also, I attempted to minimize the video length to less than 8 minutes.
After students have watched the video or read the textbook, it was my job again to provide engaging and interesting problems in class. Once the students had basic knowledge and facts, I could ask them the questions "Why?" and "What now?" for inquiry-based learning and problem-solving skills.
The "Why?" questions were such as
Why does this work?
Why do we learn this?
Why math?
The "What now? questions were such as
What can we use this knowledge for?
What problems can we solve?
What other areas in math can we connect this knowledge to?
These connections allowed the students to build conceptual understanding and prepare for exam-like questions.
The improvements that I want to make in blended learning are a better presentation of information and more organic connections between videos and lessons.
In my videos, I have only used limited tools such as OneNote, graphic display calculator and online websites. I want to incorporate more visuals such as diagrams, interactive tools, spreadsheets, camera footage of real-life demonstrations, etc. I plan to research effective and efficient methods of delivering the message and at the same time reduce the running time of the videos.
Connections that I built between videos and lessons still have rooms to grow. For organic connections, I want to be able to incorporate the in-video questions into the classroom and organize the structure of the classroom into the video so that students can experience a better connection between videos and lessons. I plan to observe other teachers who uses blended learning in their classroom to learn from their experience on how to maximize the learning style.
https://www.modernclassrooms.org/
Tayebinik, M., & Puteh, M. (2013). Blended Learning or E-learning?. arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.4085.
Graham, C. R. (2006). Blended learning systems. The handbook of blended learning: Global perspectives, local designs, 1, 3-21.
Professional Learning Community
The PLC research and discussion allowed me to open up to a new teaching style that I have not been introduced to. IT was a great experience of professional development with fellow teacher candidates. The topic we researched was play-based learning, and during this research, I had multiple sparks of ideas that I could implement in my math class in order to facilitate more effective learning.
The nature of play-based learning is closely tied with the game-based learning other groups have presented. I was especially inspired by the stock market simulator game, as it was directly related to financial literacy that I want to focus on in my education. PLC presentations by other groups also helped me grow as a professional and bring interesting ideas to my classroom.
Self Evaluation.docx