Step 4: Learning for Understanding

As individuals who, ourselves, have been through many years of schooling, we inevitably bring to the classroom a plethora of experiences that might affect the way we understand and subsequently teach academic material to our students. A big emphasis of this program, therefore, involves reflecting on and evaluating those prior experiences such that we might be able to share the useful ones with our future students, and perhaps re-configure the less valuable ones.  The latter is most true for me in math. I will admit that I have very high self-proclaimed math anxiety, the roots of which I can trace back to somewhere around 9^th grade. Around this time I began to consider myself “not a math person;” yet despite this sense, I did just fine in math courses through high school. In college, however, my math self-esteem plummeted when I realized that my former strategies of memorizing and replicating previous problems would no longer suffice. Suddenly I questioned whether I had every truly learned math, and entering this program, I feared I did not have the math knowledge to adequately and accurately teach even my elementary students.

How lucky I am, therefore, to have Dr. Caroline Ebby as my Math Methods professor. Through this course so far, she has not only led me to reflect on the limitations of my previous mathematical knowledge, but also provided scaffolded ways to develop a more comprehensive understanding of basic mathematical concepts. Never has this been so clear as in our recent exploration of the fundamental meaning of our base-ten number system and it’s integral role in not only understanding place value, but also multiplication and all the algorithms that we were taught in order to “simplify” complex procedures. As it turns out, I believe I skipped directly to the algorithm stage of many mathematical procedures, and thus did not fully grasp their meaning. Dr. Ebby has helped me find the holes in my knowledge, and begin to fill them!

Furthermore, Dr. Ebby teaches with an emphasis on strategy, rather than solution and promotes math activities such as “number talks” which do the same. These short mental math activities prompt students to articulate how they got to their answer, and show them that there are many correct ways to reach a solution. I can only say that I wish I had learned math this way initially, and am grateful both personally to be developing these understandings now, and excited to be able to pass them along to my students.

Step 3: Student Teaching

I recently went home to California for a (too short) weekend visit, and while I was there I found myself answering the question, “How’s your program going?” very frequently. In reflecting on this, I noticed that I spoke with the most excitement about my student teaching placement, yet I have not told you, my blog readers, much if at all about this wonderful part of my life right now. So here goes…

This fall I have the pleasure of student teaching in a Philadelphia public school first grade classroom. I get to be there two full days, as well as occasional half days, each week, and while at first I was afraid that this would not be enough time to feel as though I was really part of the class, the kids as well as my mentor teacher have really welcomed and included me such that when I’m there, I forget that I am only a part-time fixture in their classroom. My role so far has been primarily to provide support for my mentor’s instruction (floating around to answer questions during independent work, for example), however I am increasingly taking on a larger instructional role. For example, as our class contains 31 students, we try as frequently as possible to break up into small groups. When this happens, I often take my own reading or math group where we focus on the particular skills that those students need to focus on. For example, on Monday I worked with a group of students who appeared to show readiness to move from the mathematical strategy of modeling quantities and counting all of the objects in an additive equation on to a more advanced strategy of “counting on” from an original quantity to account for the addition of a new amount in order to reach the total more quickly (more on these math strategies in a later blog). I have also begun leading occasional “number talks,” a quick mental math routine, with the full class to help the students develop number fluency. In these small-group and full-class exercises I get to apply the concepts we discuss in class, and get a first-hand understanding of the ways in which teaching is much harder than it looks!

As mentioned in last week’s post, we are about to begin Term III, which will focus on pedagogy. This means my instructional work in class will ramp up to the next level, too, as we will be designing lessons to teach in each subject area. Throughout the past few months our instructors have had us start to play with designing lessons in class, and I am looking forward to developing one that I can actually try out with my kids! Remind me of this enthusiasm later when I am stressed about teaching or writing about my lesson…

Until then, I will continue to enjoy the way in which being the student teacher allows me more flexibility to spend time focusing on one student at a time, observing the teacher, and reflecting on all of our interactions.

My first bulletin board! So proud of my first grade writers!

Step 2: Term 2 Integrated Assignment

Fast forwarding quite a bit from my previous post about the summer term, here in the Elementary/Middle Level cohort we are actually about to enter our final week of Term II. Although Penn GSE operates on a semester system and our courses generally follow this schedule, TEP's program is divided into five terms, each with a different focus. This term we focused on "Learners and Learning," and our culminating assignment is an inquiry-based examination of a single child in our student-teaching placement. Through observations as well as subject-specific interviews and activities we are attempting to develop an understanding of how this child makes sense of the world and the subjects he or she learns in school. My paper is due to five of my professors (field seminar, as well four methods courses) this week, so forgive me for keeping this post brief!

TEP curriculum grid

Although this paper is a long one by page count, I will admit that I am having quite a good time writing it. It is no secret that I have become very fond of "my student," and so analyzing our interactions and writing about him is really fun and rewarding. Today, for example, I was re-watching a video of an activity I did with him in which he predicted whether objects would sink or float, then dropped the objects in water to test his guesses; I found it so fascinating to see how he developed and adapted frameworks for his understanding given his limited knowledge of the properties of solids that make them float or sink. This project really invites us to use the luxury of spending a year as a student teacher to gain the skills and habits of a teacher researcher such that we can continue close observation and inquiry practices in our future classrooms even with the increased pressures that we will face when we are on our own.