Micro Teaching Feedback

Thanks to Peter, Jing, Niloo and Brianna for their feedback on my microteaching!

If I were to do this activity again either I would need more time, or I would need to make adjustments. To make it shorter to fit in the 10 minutes I could take out the background information on origami, or start with paper that already had the first four basic folds done. I think people really enjoyed the origami though, and it is a fun skill to learn, so overall I was quite happy with my microteaching. I just need to work on being better at estimating how long things take!

Comments

The Three Curricula that All Schools Teach

As I was reading Eisner's article about the three curricula that all schools teach, the first thing that struck me was the significance of the Implicit Curriculum. Specifically the line: "After all, the westward movement is studied for only a few weeks in the fall of the fifth grade, but the impact of school structure does not cease until one leaves graduate school" (95). It seems crucial to think about how the places we teach in and the way we structure our teaching might affect students learning as much as the content and skills we are teaching. This implicit curriculum is often somewhat unintentional in schools. It's easy to accept the structure of the classroom and the school as something that has always existed, without interrogating what effect it is having on our students and our curriculum. However, it seems that if attention is paid to these implicit structures, they could become a useful tool. If we are explicit about what are school systems structure is tea...

Unit Plan: Inductive and Deducting Reasoning

Unit Plan Erika Thompson Hugh Boyd Secondary, Foundations of Math 11 Inductive and Deductive Reasoning Textbook: Foundations of Math 11 Pre-planning questions: (1) Why do we teach this unit to secondary school students? This unit seems very important to teach to secondary students, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it is included in the Foundations of Math 11 course (as I never had a unit like this going through high school in Alberta). This unit focuses on some of the most widely applicable skills that we learn through mathematics: logic and reasoning. Teaching students the skills to look at information or data, make conjectures, and then investigate those conjectures to prove or disprove their validity is an important skill not just in math, but in many aspects of life. The skills learned in this unit are the same kinds of skills that help people make sense of politics, economics and world events, as well as the skills that help people make important ...

Skemp Article

Overall I really liked this article, and found a lot in it that resonated with my own experience learning mathematics. In high school I had an incredible math teacher that definitely subscribed the the "relational understanding" view of mathematics. However, in grade 12 AP calculus he was gone for a semester and our replacement teacher taught in a much more "instrumental understanding" way. I struggled more in that semester than ever before in math, much like the anecdote in the article about the seven-year-old who had extreme difficulty with an "instrumental understanding" approach to mathematics. As I was reading the article, several pieces stood out to me. I really enjoyed the metaphor of faux amis and the idea that there are not just two different approaches to math, but in fact two different mathematics. While I'm not sure I agree completely with Skemp on this, I think it's a valuable way to think about the two different ways that math is ta...

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