Week 13 - Grade 11 Functions

Each lesson presented this week for the grade 11 functions class used visual aids to implement understanding for students. My particular favourite was the matching games used for trig identities. Saying 'trig identities' is usually enough to make a room full of people groan, however the matching games used in this lesson plan motivated us to dive into proving the identities given. Below is a photo of each matching game that was used.

The matching square has a higher difficulty level since each side of each small square has to be equal to it's adjacent square, however it would be a good 'exit card' activity, depending on your class. It could also be used as an extra activity for the students who are ahead of the class. The essence of matching activities can be used for more than just trig identities and I feel that they would be an asset to the math learning environment. Students are more likely to be motivated to finish a matching activity than they would be to finish the exact same work on a worksheet. Plus, the students would still be working their way through the curriculum requirements. Class doesn't have to be boring, just because it's math; I think that the best learning happens when students are having fun with the learning because the learning is more memorable and is more likely to stick with them even after exams are done.

Week 12 - Efficacy

Student and teacher efficacy is a term that I didn't really understand before watching Professor Cathy Bruce's video. While watching this video I found that it is greatly linked with the growth mindset that we talked about earlier in the year. Students and teachers with a growth mindset would have high student and teacher efficacy and would be more willing to take on new tasks without the fear of failure. On the opposite side, students and teachers with a fixed mindset would have low student and teacher efficacy.

As the video said, teachers with high efficacy are more willing to try new activities with their students and will also try harder to help their students learn because they have higher success standards for themselves as well as their students. I believe that having high teacher efficacy is essential in modern classrooms. Students will raise their own learning standards if their teacher's standards for them are raised, compared to when their teacher's standards for them are lower. When there is high teacher efficacy in the classroom there is a better chance that students with low efficacy can raise their efficacy levels and improve their learning habits. Similarly to teachers with growth mindsets being able to change their students' fixed mindsets to growth mindsets. Trying different methods and different tools to teach math concepts will help reach more of the students' learning abilities. Teachers with high efficacy would be more willing to use these differentiated learning techniques, which would help them to have a higher student success level.

I hope that when I become a teacher I would have a growth mindset and a high enough teacher efficacy level to help my students improve their student efficacy levels and to not only learn what is being taught, but understand it as well.

Week 11 - Grade 9

This week in class we had two lessons geared towards a grade 9 classroom; one for academic and one for applied. Even though they were two different lessons for two different streams, they both used visual aids to make the math more concrete. I really liked the visual representation of the math concept for the academic class; representing the pattern between polygons and the sum of the interior angles. Starting the lesson off, we were instructed to divide the polygons into triangles, where each line had to start from the same point. Using previous knowledge the students can then tell us the sum of the interior angles by adding up the sum of all the angles of each triangle in the polygon.

 

 

I didn't know this relationship between the number of triangles that fit into the polygons and the sum of the interior angles of regular polygons before this class and the lesson made this relationship apparent. I was able to see, first hand, how the use of visual representations can make math concepts easier to understand as well as more memorable later on and I am now even more intent on creating opportunities while teaching for visual representations for every stream.