Before realizing my
want to be teacher, I spend a great amount of time in the College of Engineering
here at UIC. Throughout my high school career friends, family, and respected
teachers all pushed for continuing my education in engineering. My skills in
mathematics and natural curiosity for science all seemed to coincide for an
engineering career. I find no qualms with the time I spent in engineering
because I believe participating in the labs and constant operational work
developed a very important skill that I take for granted, predicting answers. Helping
students learn to predict solutions can help strengthen conceptual
understanding and is just another part of the metacognitive approach we all
wish to stress to our students.
This train
of thought continues as we think about the connection to the new common core
standards. Regardless of your views on the newly accepted standards, we can all
agree that the new practices were implemented with high hopes of increasing
student achievement; set up in a way, to scaffold, on a yearly basis, the tools
they will need to continue succeeding. The curricula aims to builds upon prior
knowledge; thus, we must urge students to see themselves as the source of
knowledge in a subject area and have been given the tools necessary to solve
the problems we put in front of them
Hello Matthew,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your blog post. I think the personal connection you made was very helpful. I have a similar experience to yours. I came to UIC with a major declared in Kinesiology. Everyone thought that this was the destined path for me, but when I took the required Calculus class and did fantastic, I knew math was where I wanted to be. In biology and chemistry class, we constantly were predicting answers in our labs and class. Showing students how to predict solutions is crucial, but it is also important to stress how much they already predict solutions in their daily lives. This could be as simple as asking them if they guessed who was going to win a game based on the team's statistics. We need to have our students question the things they write, solve, etc. This will help them evaluate their understanding of the concept at hand. Common core standards were designed to increase student achievement and ties to build on prior knowledge. I agree that it is very important to have students see themselves as a source of knowledge in the different disciplines they are interacting with. This will hopefully increase the student's self efficacy.
Great post!
Hello Matthew,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your blog post. I think the personal connection you made was very helpful. I have a similar experience to yours. I came to UIC with a major declared in Kinesiology. Everyone thought that this was the destined path for me, but when I took the required Calculus class and did fantastic, I knew math was where I wanted to be. In biology and chemistry class, we constantly were predicting answers in our labs and class. Showing students how to predict solutions is crucial, but it is also important to stress how much they already predict solutions in their daily lives. This could be as simple as asking them if they guessed who was going to win a game based on the team's statistics. We need to have our students question the things they write, solve, etc. This will help them evaluate their understanding of the concept at hand. Common core standards were designed to increase student achievement and ties to build on prior knowledge. I agree that it is very important to have students see themselves as a source of knowledge in the different disciplines they are interacting with. This will hopefully increase the student's self efficacy.
Great post!
Hello Matt,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your opinions on thinking about mathematics. I agree with your points that we should think about the validity of each step to the answer of the problem, which reflects how the students' thinking process is. When I tutored my friends before, I saw that she just tried to make an answer to just copied the formula shown in the book to get the answer, which is, I think, kind of a waste of time and meaningless. If she gets away from the book, she could not solve the problems, that's why I agree to think how each step comes, which is important in math. From this perspective, I am for the Common Core Standards which focus on the thinking process. Different with you, I have been told that I am suitable to be a teacher when I was a secondary student. And compared to study literature classes, I think symbols and equations are more making sense to me. It's not meaning that literature classes are not important; instead, fewer-words texts can more attract my interests.
Hello Matt, thank you for your blog post and ideas. I feel like you really hit the nail on the head when disscussing Buehls quote by Baker and Beall. Especially since this is what CCSS is attempting to do. Although i am not that big of a fan of CCSS i think it is a good system to help students really question their reasoning for an answer or response. By having students question more and more about their own response they would be able to understand more on their own in their own way. Which should help the students look upon their own prior knowledge to build even more on their ideas. I am not a math major but thinking about in this perspective is really helpful and helps me understand more and how to think about it in my own discipline.
ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteI really like the connection you made about your experience. for, me what really pushed me into Teaching of Mathematics, was being able to help my peers understand the steps in solving a problem. How we can connect our prior knowledge to solve something new that we just learned. It then becomes important to look upon our own knowledge. I do think students should be able to question their reasoning and push themselves to be open to any thinking. Especially in Mathematics, we have to always student be able to question themselves on how to approach a problem, solve, steps. The CCSS does that and it helps in Mathematics, in my opinion.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI think you bring up a great point regarding metacognition that Buehl makes on pg 226-227 about how a good reader constantly questions what they are reading and what the author is trying to communicate to the reader. This is an important skill for students to have whether they are reading a passage from a textbook or analyzing a chart. As a future science teacher I think it is extremely important for me to instill the idea in my students that they should never stop asking questions. Science is all about exploring new ideas as well as challenging, predicting and questioning theories and hypotheses. Students must question content in order to come up with their own original ideas. Buehl brings up a good point on pg 227 about strategic actions that can aid in helping a student understand and question what they read. Providing students with secondary strategic actions like a set of questions really can help students understand text and show provide students with points that they must focus on.
Great post, Matt! I'm glad that you bring up the CCES, as they are something that many of us continue to ponder. As such, I believe that the emphasis on the reasoning behind each step of solving a problem is beneficial to most students, and as so many mathematical concepts build on those that precede them, the focus on building on prior knowledge is totally fitting. With that, I think that the difference in terms of what students will get out of their attempts to solve problems of various difficulties will be comparable to night and day if they go through these problems, as you suggest, using the metacognitive strategies that Buehl presents, as opposed to working without them. And so, I'll definitely be working to help my future students understand these sorts of strategies in my classroom!
ReplyDelete