Final Reflection for Education 325

Karin Stefans December 4, 2009 Dr. Short

Introduction To fulfill the clinical requirement for Education 325: Effectively Teaching Mathematics in the Elementary/Middle School, I worked with a bilingual second grade class of seventeen students with varying math and English language skills. I spent nine hours tutoring three students from the class who the classroom teacher had identified as needing extra support, and I taught four whole class lessons. This paper will show my increased knowledge and competency in teaching mathematics based on my reflections and analysis of my whole classes lessons in the areas of number sense, measurement, and geometry, and of my experience tutoring students in basic addition skills and facts. Summary of Lessons My first lesson was a lesson on both solving and writing number stories. I used different paper cutouts of objects as manipulatives and created a scenario by giving one or two students different numbers of the manipulatives and asking what would happen if one student were to give his or her manipulatives to the other student. I asked the class to explain to me what was going on in the situation I had created, then wrote what they told me as a number story, recorded the equation that matched the problem under the number story, and showed this to the class using the document camera. After multiple examples like this, the students worked on a worksheet of number stories that I had created. They were to read the number story and find the solution to the problem. Some of the students had trouble reading the number stories, and I had the students who finished the worksheet quickly help their neighbors who were struggling. I had created

another worksheet that included a picture about which the students were supposed to create a number story, but we did not have time for that in during the lesson. The second lesson that I created was a lesson on place value. The students used base ten blocks to represent both two-digit and three-digit numbers that I provided them. We did examples creating two-digit numbers with base ten blocks as a class, and then the students worked on a worksheet that I created. I had the students stop and we did classroom practice with three-digit numbers, and then the students continued on the worksheet. Most of the students did well on the worksheets, and the students who finished quickly assisted the students who needed a little extra help. The main thing that confused the students was expanded notation. I concluded the lesson by having the students build structures out of the base ten blocks with prescribed numbers of hundreds flats, tens rods, and individual units. All of the students really enjoyed this activity and participated gladly. After the students were finished they had to tell me the total number of individual blocks in their structure, although some of the students had trouble with this because I had not modeled how they were to do this. Telling time to the hour, half-hour, quarter-hour, and three-quarters hour was the topic of my third lesson. In order to get the students interest at the start of the lesson, I asked the class what times they did things like wake up, get home from school, and have dinner. The students really enjoyed telling me the times they did these different things, and there was no shortage of volunteers. After this introduction, I showed different on-the-hour times on the large practice clock that the classroom teacher let me use. The students used their whiteboards to record what time they thought the clock said in digital form. The students then showed me their boards so I could check their answers, and I would call one student up to the clock to open the doors to see if

the class was right about the time on the clock, and to say the time out loud. I repeated this process for time to the half-hour, quarter-hour, and three quarters hour, and had multiple examples for each. The students did quite well on hour, half-hour, and quarter-hour time, but had some difficulties with three-quarter hour time. For quarter-hour and three-quarters hour time I explained that time can also be said as quarter after or quarter until, and had the students practice saying these times. We then practiced telling what time it was after a certain number of minutes had passed the original time. At the end of the lesson, half the class played a memory game where they had to match the clock to its correct time. I stayed with the other half of the class and the students practiced telling what time it was after a given number of minutes had passed. I had planned to have the groups switch, but we ran out of time so the classroom teacher said that she would have the group that did not get to play the memory game do that activity the next day. My fourth lesson was an exploration of the two-dimensional shapes circle, square, rectangle, triangle, rhombus, trapezoid, and hexagon. I began the lesson by placing one of the key shapes into a paper bag, and creating five stations with two or three bags, each with a different shape inside, at each station. The students rotated stations so they could explore multiple shapes by feeling the objects in the bags without looking at them. The students liked guessing what the shapes were and moving around the room. After this activity, I showed the students each shape, described and named the shape, and then had the student find examples of the shape around the classroom. The students were excited to label the examples with sticky notes. The students then worked in groups to sort a bag of paper cutout shapes into categories for the shapes that they had learned. After the students completed the sorting, I divided the class into boys and girls. Each group got a loop of yarn, and I told the students that they would have to

work as a group to shape the yarn into whatever shape I requested. The boys team was very successful because the classroom teacher worked with them and designated a student helper to give directions to the group, but I did not do this with the girls group, and they became frustrated and had much more trouble creating their shapes. Observations About Learning The main thing that struck me when I was teaching my first lesson was how interconnected all content areas are. The biggest issue in my lesson on number stories was not that the students did not know their math facts or understand the concept of a number story, it was that they did not have the language skills necessary to read a number story so that they could successfully complete it. The students success in math was extremely limited by their low reading level. It is important to create a lesson that finds ways around these weaknesses so that students can continue to progress in different areas. If I had realized before the lesson that reading skills would be such a large barrier to the lesson, I would not have created a worksheet that relied so heavily on reading. I would have read more number stories to the students so that they could still have practice with the math concept. Because I did not know or think about the fact that I was teaching a class of English language learners, what I thought were simple sentences with simple vocabulary were actually quite a challenge for the students. Once I realized this, I was able to create future lessons that did not have a heavy emphasis on individual worksheet work and that did require that the students do very much reading to be successful at the math. Another important observation I made in lesson one that played a large part in my future lessons and lesson planning was the students ability to help each other. I was not sure if I could

trust second graders to assist their classmates without getting distracted as I did something else, but the students who finished early were very good at helping others, and the situation benefitted everyone; the students who were helpers were not bored, and the students who were confused got extra individual instruction so they were not frustrated. I used the knowledge that the students would and could help each other in both planning other lessons and in the classroom management during these lessons. Every time I had the students help each other, they convinced me more that peer helping is an essential part of the lesson and classroom environment, and should be utilized whenever necessary. Something that I learned in my math methods class was that students need to understand math concepts and their manipulatives well. It is not enough that students simply know how to solve a math problem; they must understand why a given method for solving a problem works. Algorithms alone are not enough. If the students do not understand the algorithm, they will not be able to use critical thinking to solve a problem that does not follow the format that they are used to. Because I knew that the students must understand the concepts before they could solve the problems I made sure that the students understood the base ten blocks before launching into the content and development of my place value lesson. As a class, we explored how many single blocks would fit into a rod of ten, and how many rods of ten would fit into a flat of one hundred. It was important that the student understood how many individual block we were counting, and that we were not just counting different sizes of blocks. The idea of stepping away from algorithms in favor of a more concrete understanding was something that I also applied to the individual student tutoring that I did. All three of the students that I tutored had trouble with their sums of ten. They did not understand that they

always needed to find ten as their answer. In order to help them solve these problems, I had the students use a ten frame and unifix cubes. The use of manipulatives made it much easier to solve the problems. Once the students were proficient at using the ten frame, I showed them how to use a hundreds chart to start on one number and count how many jumps it took to get to the ten. The students were good at this, but I was worried that they had learned the method that I wanted to use but that they did not truly understand why they were drawing circles and squares on a hundreds chart. To ensure that the students did understand a sums of ten problem, I had the students solve a problem using a hundreds chart and then show me how to do the same problem using the ten frame. Furthermore, the students were required to explain out loud what they were doing and why they were doing it as they worked through the problem. It was only when I was satisfied that the students understood how to solve a sum of ten equation and why each of the steps in the techniques they were taught worked that I moved the students on to something besides sums of ten. My experience teaching a lesson on telling time was very useful because I learned many things on how to approach teaching time. I had forgotten how confusing it is to tell what time it is when the hours hand is in between numbers. The students told me that their classroom teacher always reminded them that when the little hand was between the numbers, it goes with the smaller number. It will be a good memory trick to tell students that the little hand likes the littlest number it can reach. However, even knowing this trick, the students still had trouble reading quarter to the hour times because the hour hand is so close to the next number that it looks like it is touching the number. The students kept reading 1:45 as 2:45. Knowing that this is a problem will be beneficial to me in the future because I will know when I am planning my lesson that I

need to spend extra time on quarter to the hour times, paying special attention to demonstrating how the hour hand moves with the minutes hand. The final aspect that I will remember about time how helpful it was for the students to have the number of minutes that corresponded to each clock-face number posted on the outside of the clock. The students knew where to look to find the information that was provided by the minutes hand, and were reminded that the big hand does not tell them the numbers on the clock-face. The Bigger Picture In my math methods class we discussed a lot about the importance of manipulatives, so I made sure to have plenty of manipulatives to create scaffolding in my first lesson. The students enjoyed the variety of the manipulatives that I chose, so the manipulatives helped me engage the students and made them more willing to pay attention. Having manipulatives in a class where not all of the students speak English well or at all is very important, because all of the students can see the essential information shown with manipulatives, and can then figure out the situation even if they could not understand the verbal explanation very well. After I saw the good effects of the manipulatives in my first lesson, I quickly realized that they would be essential to all of my lessons. I used manipulatives in all of my lessons; they helped the students understand the content, and motivated the students more than I had expected. Because of my success with manipulatives in these lessons, I will always try to incorporate some sort of manipulatives in my math lessons, or even lessons for other content areas. My lesson design has improved greatly over the course of this clinical assignment. I now add many more details to my lesson plans, and I make sure to include plenty of examples so I do

not have to make up examples as I go along. Even though I cannot read my lesson directly off of the lesson plan, and sometimes have to improvise based on the classroom response, having spent the extra time thinking about and creating the lesson plan makes it much easier to teach the lesson and to adjust it if need be without losing my train of thought or students attention. Finally, my biggest improvement in my general teaching over these nine weeks has been my classroom management skills. This was the first class of young students I have ever taught, and I learned just how important clear, simple, and very specific step by step instructions are for them. In my first few lessons, I would give a direction and expect the students to follow it, but they did not because I assumed that the would be able to perform a task without instructions on how to complete it. This caused a lot of frustration in the students; they were not sure what they were supposed to be doing or how they were supposed to be doing it, so they would either ignore my instructions or walk around the classroom and ask the classroom teacher for help. By my last lesson, however, I became very competent at giving simple and direct instructions. When I wanted the students in my fourth lesson to move to the different stations one group at a time, I knew that if I told them to rotate, there would be chaos. Therefore I told each group exactly where I wanted it to move, and the activity ran very smoothly. The students were able to enjoy the activity because they were not confused and frustrated. Goals I want to be a teacher who helps her students to embrace math instead of developing a math phobia. Too many students lack basic math skills just because they stay as far away from math as possible. I believe that by using manipulatives to capture student interest and clarify concepts and by making sure that students understand concepts instead of checking that they can

complete an algorithm, I will help students develop logic and critical thinking skills that will help them for the rest of their educational careers.