margaretleak.weebly.commargaretleak.weebly.com/.../leak_margaret_finalportfolio_…  · Web viewMy cooperating teacher, Mr. Pritchett, is a tall, broad, white man who hugged me when

Margaret Leak

Fieldwork PortfolioAthens Drive High

SchoolMargaret LeakEMS 472/572

Dr. Cyndi Edgington

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Table of Contents

First Impressions Assignment ………………………………………………… Page 3-4

Every Five Minutes Assignment ……………………………………………..... Page 5-8

Focus on Teaching: Focus on Reviewing Homework ………………… Page

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First Impressions Assignment

1. My cooperating teacher, Mr. Pritchett, is a tall, broad, white man who hugged me when we

first met and said, “we are going to have a lot of fun this semester.” He is excited about

teaching, innovative when he teaches, and proud of his students. He made me feel

comfortable from the beginning, even when he asked me to teach warm-ups in my very

first day in the classroom. His teaching style is rather traditional, with students answering

questions prompted from the teacher in the front of the room. However, he approaches

each lesson with the history behind it and uses his body often to describe mathematics.

Also, he is a huge proponent of hands-on equations and learning materials as well as

engaging students in their own learning by coming up to the board and solving problems,

for instance. Thus, by traditional, I simply mean that students are seated in rows facing the

board and the teacher leads discussion and leads questioning. The learning is rather

creative.

2. The classroom is set up with all desks facing the front. They are in the formation of four

rows with two aisles, so three desks in each row on the side and five desks in each row in

the middle. Students are assigned seats beside each other so that they can work together

on problems. There is a projector and a document camera in the front of the room, with a

screen in the middle of the board that is pulled up and down throughout class, depending

on where the problem is being worked out. There are some inspirational posters on the

walls, but no student work. The bookshelf by the door holds the student workbooks that

students work on during class.

3. The students in the class are about 50-50 male and female and incredibly diverse racially.

There are African American, white, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese, African, and Arab/Middle

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Eastern students. There are about ten ELL students, two American Sign Language students,

whose interpreter sits up front by the board, and a few other IEP students of different

varieties. There are some students who are highly engaged and shouting out answers,

others who will only answer when called on, and some who sleep through class. There are

happy and excited students as well as bored students. There are students who spend the

entire class on their phones, unless Mr. Pritchett says something, and students who want

desperately to answer every question. From what I saw, every student, besides the sleeping

students, had a grasp on the material being discussed, which is an attribute to Mr.

Pritchett’s teaching.

4. I observed Math 3 and Foundations of Math. The Math 3 objective was for students to learn

how to write a geometric proof, which was introduced as a word puzzle (changing CAT to

DOG by only changing one letter at a time) in order to make the rules and justifications

obviously important. Then he spent time on what different geometric symbols meant,

which was part review and part teaching, and then he went through properties, and then

worked through a proof. The Foundations of Math objective was for students to solve two

and three step equations, and this was done using hands-on equations and problems in the

workbook. I am really excited to work with students who want to learn and to incorporate

hands-on strategies into the curriculum. I am also excited to incorporate my own ideas into

Mr. Pritchett’s classroom, and I am excited to know he is willing to help me do that. I am

most concerned about the sleeping students and how to engage them in the learning.

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Every Five Minutes Assignment Margaret Leak

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From this observation, I learned that pacing a class can be really difficult when students are

interested in discussing certain aspects of their lives (like during the ACT discussion) that the

teacher does not want to necessarily shut down but also does not necessarily have time for in the

course of the lesson. Also, I learned that my teacher doesn’t spend a lot of time during full class

discussions getting input from students. Rather, he gauges how well they understand and are

paying attention to the material from the work they do during independent work time. This

concerns me a bit because it somewhat lends itself to students tuning out of the discussion and it

puts all of the work on the teacher when the students are the ones who are expected to be learning

the material. I do like how he addresses discipline in class because it is just part of his

conversation with the class that doesn’t stick anyone out per sé but does address the issue at hand

and attempts to stop it before it becomes too distracting to people.

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Observation Assignment: Focus on Teaching

Teachers are responsible for the growth and learning that students experience, which the

educational psychology research shows only effectively occurs through connections or creations

of a schema that exists in the student’s brain. In other words, the student must attribute meaning

to a piece of information and fit it in with the other information they already have in order to truly

learn something. In the “Selecting Quality Tasks” reading, it showed how this could be done

through selecting specific tasks that provide struggle for the students in understanding meaning

through exploration. However, probably the most important thing it shared was how to use tasks

that build on each other so that students see the connections of each mathematical concept being

built through similar contexts, or schemas as educational psychology would like to call it. This

ability allows the teacher to ensure that the students are learning mathematics that “actively

builds new knowledge from experience and previous knowledge,” as stated in the NCTM learning

principle. These tasks that promote productive struggle also serve the teacher in challenging the

students to learn something well, which is what the NCTM teaching principle suggests is the

teacher’s duty in the classroom.

In my own learning experience, I was pushed to find connections between my Calculus

learning and my physics learning. This was a really interesting experience because as I learned

about distance, velocity, and acceleration in physics, I was simultaneously learning about first and

second derivatives in Calculus that my teacher started with as distance derived to velocity, which

derived to acceleration. This was a concrete connection that I never forgot, and made learning in

each class a lot more interesting and understandable. The other connection I made very strongly

was the concept of rise over run for slope because my teacher had us stand up and then run

outside multiple times to talk about how we moved on the graph. The important piece that this

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exercise hammered home for me was that the directions for slope have change in y over change in

x rather than the other way around. I suspect I would have forever mixed that up if we had not

done that exercise because I always view x as coming first in every other concept and procedure

regarding equations with x and y. Otherwise, I remember having to make a lot of connections on

my own, and spending many hours making study webs with those connections explicitly drawn

and the justification written beside them because I did not feel that I was getting that connection

piece while I was in class.

In college, my math education professors have done a great job connecting everything,

from connecting algebra to geometry to connecting the development of math to the current math

mindsets. It is hard now not to think about how factoring connects area through algebra tiles to

the box method, which is connected to the grouping method, which is connected to the traditional

method that I learned where most of the work is done in my head. I never knew all of these

different connections until I experienced them in my math education classes and realized that

there were many more than just one method for factoring and every other concept we teach. This

is why it is so important to first understand the concept underlying a problem because there are

so many different procedures used to solve the problem at hand.

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Focus on Teaching: Focus on Reviewing Homework

The first strategy we tried was going through each different type of the problems seen in

the homework. During this strategy, I had students come up to the board and explain their work

and how they were thinking while they did the problem with the class. The nice thing about this

strategy was that it ensured every student would have access to check every different type of

problem that they had done that night. It was also nice because it gave the students a chance to

lead the class and practice elaborating and explaining the problems. The problem with this

strategy is that it was incredibly time consuming and there was a lot of re-voicing that had to

occur in order to ensure that the students in the class were following what the student at the front

was saying.

Mr. Pritchett told me after this session that I did a great job expressing my enthusiasm for

math and for each student understanding the problem. He said it is obvious that I am a “big ole

math nerd and don’t mind showing it,” which helps the students buy into the importance of what

we are doing in the class. He said I also did a good job of engaging students all around the room

and making sure each part of the room was engaged. However, he said that I need to work a lot on

my pacing because, in an effort to make sure they had time with every type of problem and really

understood every step taken in each problem, I ate into his time for his lesson a lot. I was also not

well prepared for what was meant to come after my portion of class, so that helped me adjust for

the second class’s homework review time.

Based on this feedback, I prepared for my second round of going over homework, this time

with the strategy of picking out a few that I think would be difficult for students and doing the

work at the front of the classroom with student-led instructions. As expected, this round, my

pacing was much better because I had strategically picked only a few homework questions to

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cover and the students only had one or two questions that they were concerned about, one of

which I had previously chosen as one to address. My enthusiasm for the math remained the same

and my students were very engaged in helping me solve the problems, so it was still a useful

strategy for student involvement. The other thing I did in this round that was not present in the

other was offering multiple strategies or methods for factoring polynomials. This turned out to be

a very useful technique, as would be expected, because there were multiple students who verbally

preferred one method and others that verbally preferred another.

If I could do it again, I would be more strategic about who I ask to engage with the problem.

There was a student that asked a question regarding one of the problems and I wanted to probe

him into guiding us through the answer. However, I forgot his name in the midst of it because he is

one of my less talkative students, and many of my other students jumped in to give me the next

steps. I love that my students want to be engaged and walk me through the steps, but I need to

practice helping them give a chance to other students so that it feels like a collaborative

atmosphere to build all student learning. Obviously, learning his name and all of their names will

assist me in this adjustment, but I also think I need to build that community in my class so my

students understand that I am not cutting them off but merely giving their peers some time to

articulate their thoughts. Additionally, in non-homework contexts, I need to provide more think-

pair-shares for students who are thinking through it a little slower so I can provide structured

time for students to think through the steps of a problem and get the chance to articulate it out

loud.

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