Year 2, Blog Post 4: EDBE 8P54 (Monday, 2 October 2017)

Good Day Bloggers!

Objective:

For this week, it is my objective for this blog post to present my responses to questions, ideas and information presented this week in the course EDBE 8P54 at Brock University! For our fourth week, our class focused on guidelines for producing rich mathematics tasks for students, continued our exploration of mathematics problems and student mindset, and through our forum posts identified the
importance of communicating our reasoning to our peers! In addition to this, my partner and I have created our webinar together. What a jam-packed week of learning!

Rich Task: A Necessity for Engaging Mathematics 

For the first activity of the week, we focused on a reading for rich tasks and mathematical process expectations! I would not have guessed that so many rich tasks would have so many different attributes that we could incorporate int he classroom. I realized that this portion was important to incorporate into my own classroom, as students need to be engaged, make meaningful connections to mathematics in a differentiated way to promote a growth mindset. One of the ways for differentiation was provided to us through means of an online game where the purpose of the game was to make a square out of the dots before our opponent. This game was both engaging to students, and helped some students learn about spacial awareness and producing shapes in a strategic manner. It also produced some frustration, as many students were not able to succeed in making a square before their counterpart, and I personally was only about to win one game of approximately twenty. Games like this hold an importance in our classes, as long as they are presented in a way that will promote mathematics growth. 

Exploring Problems: Engaging Students in Mathematics

To promote rich tasks in the classroom, we played games such as 'Which One', worked out the 'finger counting problem', and 'small number counts to 100'. I particularly enjoyed the Finger Counting Problem. In this mathematics problem, we as teacher candidates were assigned small groups to work out the problem on our hands, to count on our fingers from 1 to 100 and discuss which finger the number 100 landed on. We started on our pinky fingers, and moved one finger at a time to our thumbs (5) and then reversed our count (without counting the thumb twice), continuing this count to 100. As an educator, one thing I really liked about this problem was that students were drawing connections from something as simple as their hands, and performing a thought process that would have never been connected before this problem. As a class, we found that the answer to this problem was the pointer finger (finger beside the thumb) would equal 100. 

Reasoning, Communication, Oh My!

This problem was directly linked to my forum post this week, and this is why I chose to elaborate on it here in my blog post! In this short video shown below, number flexibility, mathematical reasoning, and the importance of learning and collaborating in mathematics was outlined. Professor Uri Treisman of Berkley performed a study on the high failure rate in mathematics class, finding that those students who were unsuccessful chose to work on math on their own, while those who were regularly engaged in mathematics discussion in and out of the classroom were able to surpass the majority of the students. In response to his research, students that had difficulty in mathematics were given the opportunity to join mathematics groups, and in a year, their performance dramatically improved. As educators, we can initiate these discussions, as well as incorporate an atmosphere in which students feel comfortable about the subject through the promotion of a growth mindset and differentiation in instruction.

Talking About Math

Final Thoughts:

In this week of mathematics study, I have learned the importance of communicating with others about mathematics to achieve better results for ourselves. As was outlined in last weeks blog, through this repetition (in this case talking about mathematics problems in every day discussion), students can drastically improve their knowledge and become more comfortable in the subject. We as educators have a huge role to play in this, as we are the ones who are initiating rich tasks with the objective to provide positive process expectations for our students. Without engaging thought, that ties into meaningful mathematic process grounded in problem solving and opportunities for connections through differentiation, students can hardly be expected to have a positive attitude and look at the tasks at hand in a multi-representational manner. Students must have these experiences for them to continue connection outside of the classroom.

Thats all for now Fellow Bloggers! Until next week :)