Week 12 Reflection

Hard to believe it but it's already been 12 weeks since I began this course, so its time to reflect on everything I've learned over the last few months.  When I first began this course, the last time I had done any form of math was 5 years ago in my first year of university when I managed to scrape together a 70 and never took another math course after.  Naturally, coming into this course I was anxious to be teaching math in any form as I did not have the best relationship with it and I was worried about a situation resulting in me being unable to help students because I did not understand the material I was supposed to be teaching.

As I came to find out, I had very little to be concerned about in this area of teaching, as a component of the course involved me regaining my math confidence using practice.  This was present in the form of both the creation of my 3-part lesson plan, and leading a portion of the class during my learning activity presentation through a sample activity I had created to teach probability.  I found I was able to quickly apply these skills, as my associate teacher allowed me to teach her math lessons each week I came into the school.  This allowed me to take what I had learned in class and apply it to a real situation, and as I found out, the more I practiced, the easier each subsequent lesson became.  The experience helped me become less anxious around the planning of math lessons as I saw more examples of lesson templates being put into action and how the curriculum could be integrated.  

A couple of important concepts that were reinforced throughout the course were growth mindset, and the importance of using relevant examples to help students understand the importance of math in real life.  In a theory heavy course like math it is very important to have a growth mindset approach to learning.  Integrated throughout our course was the mantra of "mistakes are expected, respected, and corrected" and our lessons always involved ways that we could help instill this mindset into students and ourselves, as many people had the same thoughts about math as I did when this course began.  I found our lessons used the method of problem solving as a common base for this concept.  Our math questions would always be inquiry based in nature and we would take time to determine multiple methods that could be used to solve the same problem, emphasizing the fact that there is never one "correct" method to get a solution.

Butkus, Heidi. (2016). Growth Mindset Posters. [Digital Image]. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/heidibutkus/growth-mindset-posters  

 Another concept pushed through the course was relating math to real life scenarios, as students are frequently disengaged from math for this reason, they are unable to see this being "useful" in real life.  Our classes, and my associate teacher as well, tried in every lesson to work common examples of the learning into the lesson to make it less likely students will disengage due to "usefulness".  This was evident through our use of the digital word problem forum that some of my colleagues posted to.  I was surprised how some of the math strands we examined were so interconnected with real life, and it made me much more effective at picturing why each strand of the math curriculum is taught to students.


Overall, this course has allowed me to gain back my confidence with math in ways that will allow me to more effectively plan my lessons.  It has also allowed me to more effectively deliver lessons that can help me maintain student interest and curiosity in math, through both the curation of a growth mindset, and seeing the everyday value of math (even if indirect).

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