Juices flowing

This week in math class definitely had the 'juices flowing' for many aspects starting from the opening activity to the webinar conference had with my group. The Minds on game played in class, ‘I have…Who has’ related well with one of the videos from math mindset talking about speed and mathematics. I found myself struggling to participate in the game because it required us to think very fast to solve the problem our peer was asking to see if we had the number required to solve the question. When I am able to take my time to solve a question I am able to deeply think about the question being asked and understand it better. When we slowed down and repeated the question I was able to visualize/write down the question and work to solve it. All students are different and learn differently and this was a key learning tip to take away, that we all learn at different a pace and need more time than others to understand. Allowing students to think deeply and critically not only for math problems but in other subject areas will help benefit them as learners.

We further explored and thought critically with the number of parallel tasks covered in class. Parallel tasks certainly provide autonomy for students and is an example of differentiated learning that educators can implement in the classroom. Parallel tasks focus on a specific key concept but is delivered differently for variety of levels of ‘mathematical sophistication.’ This specific strategy also brings forth discussion with peers or even classroom discuss to see how students came up with the answers they did for each, then leads to the variety of different answers that can be found which then further asks more enrich questions, this process is known as scaffolding. At first when we were asked to pick between questions to answer I looked at them and picked the one that I understood best and worked on that, ensuring that the questions being asked are both balanced with difficulty just worded differently or providing different information to solve the question is important. Parallel tasks in a classroom can further enhance a classroom by; 

• Providing open ended questions and problems that will provide more rich and deeper exploration of problem solving 
• Vary the different questions depending on students need 
• Model and provide manipulatives and other tools to solve the task at hand 

Patricia Mermigas. September 2017. Guiding Questions

Creating questions for different parallel tasks also had us gather a deeper understand for open ended questions and allowed us to think in the view of the students and what they are curious about to help them solve the question. 

The first webinars explored the topic of Inquiry Based Learning and what it looks like in the classroom and how we as educators can apply it within our own classes. Overall it went great we had a great interactive group discussion. The presenters incorporated Math Daily 3 Framework with IBL and how we can create questions that are open ended and provide the opportunity for students to further build on the main topic. Discussing with the group how IBL makes us feel is a great self-reflection tool that will help us when developing our future lesson plans. They also included a great handout that has been added to my personal resource toolbox. 

My take away poster to be posted in my future classroom is the ‘6 Golden Rules of Student Engagement,’ I think it captures what exploration and a student-centered classroom is all about and will always provide everyone with that constant remind that student engagement involves 6 important things that make the classroom and safe, positive and engaging place to learn.

Nicolas Pino James. September 2017. 6 Golden Rules for Engaging Students