E-Portfolio Piece

Céline Karkaby

260624894

McGill University

February 13, 2019

EDES 453 – Dr. Limin Jao

Question being responded to: Tell me about a lesson that you taught that you felt

was successful. Why was it successful?

Rationale

The lesson I have chosen is represented through the form of a lesson plan introducing

the Cartesian plane to a group of Sec I students. The reason I felt this lesson was

successful was because it included discovery learning and discussion, and therefore

allowed me to use the practices of high quality teaching, specifically: teaching toward

an instructional goal, eliciting and responding to student thinking, pressing on student

thinking, revoicing student thinking, orienting students to each other’s ideas and

positioning students competently. This lesson also included a creative activity linked

to the lesson that kept students engaged until the very end. This lesson represents one

of the first steps I’ve taken as a pre-service teacher in my development towards

creating a discussion, inquiry based classroom environment, and demonstrates one of

my efforts towards motivating my students through the use of activities. Furthermore,

this lesson demonstrates how collaboration with other colleagues helped enhance my

lessons, since the activity at the end of class was one that another member of the math

department shared with me.

Personal Experience

When reflecting upon my experience as a math student in high school, the

lessons that were the most memorable were the ones that deviated from the norm. For

example, in grade 8 my teacher assigned a task asking students to peer teach a lesson

on squaring binomials, and I remember thinking it would be so difficult. However, the

satisfaction and sense of accomplishment I felt from learning the material on my own

and teaching it to the class gave me more confidence in the math classroom. It was a

really cool thing for me to break away from the habit of taking notes from the teacher,
and instead learn about a topic with my group and be able to communicate it to the

rest of the class. My experiences in the B.Ed program broadened my view of what

kind of inquiry learning and discussions are possible in the math classroom. Thinking

back to how I felt as a student discovering math concepts on my own, and how that

affected my self-efficacy, I decided that as a teacher I would work take it a step

further towards creating communities of mathematical inquiry. These kinds of

communities are described as “classrooms where students learn to talk and work

mathematically by participating in mathematical discussions, proposing and

defending arguments, and responding to the ideas and conjectures of their peers”

(Mueller, Yankelewitz, & Maher, 2014, pg. 4).

Teaching Practices

My goal as a math teacher is to make math engaging and relevant to my

students. Students have a pre-conception of math as monotonous and void of

meaning, mainly due to how it is traditionally taught (Boaler, 2000). One of the ways

to break this monotony is through creating a classroom community conducive to

discussion and inquiry (Boaler, 2000). I found this particular lesson to be successful

because at the start of the class, I was able to get my students involved and thinking.

As Boaler mentions in her article, “Students do not just learn methods and processes

in mathematics classrooms, they learn to be mathematics learners and their learning of

content knowledge cannot be separated from their interactional engagement in the

classroom, as the two mutually constitute one another at the time of learning” (Boaler,

2000, pg. 380). I feel that on a somewhat small scale, the “fly on the window” prompt

allowed me to engage students in this kind of interactional learning, which then gave

them a foundation for the rest of the lesson.

Moreso than simply a means to discussion, the fly activity presented

mathematics as a way of solving a real, every day problem; how can direct someone

to where we want them to go? “It seemed that the act of using mathematical

procedures within authentic activities allowed the students to view the procedures as

tools that they could use and adapt” (Boaler, 1998, pg. 59). There was not one single

process that would get me to locate the fly, but depending on the students instructions

either I found it or I didn’t. Of course, this is where my job as the math teacher was to

force students to be as precise as possible by demonstrating how some of their

solutions may not lead me to exactly where they wanted me to look. The idea here

was that many solutions were viable, but through pressing on student thinking, I was

able to get students to understand that certain methods were more efficient (Fraivillig,

Murphy, & Fuson, 1999).

My role in this discussion was to advance the students’ thinking through the

practices of high quality teaching. Both Fraivillig et. al. and Stein & Smith go into

detail about the importance of these practices in the classroom. Essentially, the idea is

that effective classroom discussions don’t come out of thin air. It is the role of the

teacher to plan these discussions, with the instructional goal in mind, through what

questions they will ask, anticipating student responses, and monitoring the discussion

while using their discretion as to which ideas to press on, and how they can guide

student thinking (Stein & Smith, 2011). With the fly activity, I had to anticipate how

students would initially direct me towards the fly, and prepare questions that would

press on student thinking towards achieving my instructional goal. In this specific

example, it took a bit of acting on my part, namely, pretending that I couldn’t find the

fly. This pushed the students to think about how they could be more precise so that

there were no loopholes in their directions. Equally important was my ability to step

back during parts of the discussion where students started building off of each other’s
ideas without my intervention. By minimizing my role at times in the discussion, it

allowed students to take an even more active role in their learning (Mueller,

Yankelewitz, & Maher, 2014).

As for the witch activity, what I found successful about it was how students

felt motivated to do the activity to find the secret figure. The goal is to create intrinsic

motivation in students, where students are engaged in the learning for their own self-

satisfaction (Middleton & Spanias, 1999). The colleague that had provided me with

this plotting activity had told me about the success she had with it and her students,

and how excited they got about it, that I felt students would genuinely enjoy doing

this activity for the sake of it, as opposed to thinking about the grade. Based off of the

results of many of the witches, it was clear that students took their time at home to get

creative with the decorating. Some students even came to me the next day asking for a

new sheet because they noticed they were a bit off and wanted their witches to be

perfect. The increased time students spent on this task outside of class time, along

with their persistence and creativity clearly exhibited their intrinsic motivation

(Middleton & Spanias, 1999), which, as the teacher, indicates a successful lesson.
References

Boaler, J. (2000). Mathematics from Another World: traditional Communities and the

Alienation of Learners. Journal of Mathematical Behaviour, 18(4), 379-397.

Boaler, J. (1998). Open and closed mathematics: Student experiences and

understandings. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 29(1), 41-

62.

Fravillig, J. L., Murphy, L. A., & Fuson, K. C. (1999). Advancing Children's

Mathematical Thinking in Everyday Mathematics Classrooms. Journal for

Research in Mathematics Education, 30(2), 148-170.

Middleton, J. A., & Spanias, P. A. (1999). Motivation for Achievement in

Mathematics: Findings, Generalizations, and Criticisms of the Research.

Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 30(1), 65- 88.

Mueller, M., Yankelewitz, D., & Maher, C. (2014). Teachers Promoting Student

Mathematical Reasoning. Investigations in Mathematics Learning, 7(2), 1-20.

Stein, M. K., & Smith, M. (2011). 5 practices for orchestrating productive

mathematics discussions. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of

Mathematics – Chapter 6.